Remote Learning: A Parent’s Survival Guide
Remote Learning is a relentless barrage of tasks for parents with inconsistent benefits to kids. Here’s what to do to make it easier and more effective.
Whether parents are working from home, traveling to work or not working at all, keeping up with their children’s school is a daunting prospect that can exacerbate the difficulties families are already facing during this crisis. As of today, 37 states have announced that schools will remain closed for the duration of the 2019–20 school year due to the threat of COVID-19, with the remaining states likely to follow suit in the coming days — but six weeks into the closures, participation is flagging as families and teachers are suffering serious burnout from the demands of remote learning.
What can parents do to alleviate some of the stress of learning from home? How can remote learning be made more effective and more tolerable for students, regardless of the resources their families can access?
Set Goals
First and foremost, your goal is not to replicate your child’s learning experiences in school. Even if your district is requiring students to sign in for virtual school days with Zoom or Google Hangout, there is nothing you can do that will provide the continuity, structure and social interaction kids get from being in a classroom with their peers and a certified teacher, so let yourself off the hook. Instead, briefly review the assignments your child’s teacher has sent before you sit down to work, and set small, general goals for each day, like “practice sight words,” “read a grade level text” or “complete three tasks on [learning app or website].” Depending on how much work your child is assigned on a daily basis, you may have three or four of these goals. Create a quick checklist for your child, using either words or pictures, so that you can check off each goal as you meet it during the course of your “lesson.” This really helps them to see that they are accomplishing what they set out to do and keeps them motivated to continue working — and it may do the same for you!
Dedicate a Learning Space
If you don’t have room in your home to dedicate to a long-term classroom setup, you can help your child to get into a learning mindset by returning to the same space each day with all the tools you need for a lesson on hand. Keep pencils, paper, crayons and math tools in a box or basket specifically for school work. Any kind of display board — a child’s easel, a lap-sized chalkboard, a refrigerator memo board, even a Magnadoodle toy— can be used to display your goal list, draw pictures or diagrams, or to display words or sentences from assignments. Returning to this space and using these tools each day will help your child automatically associate the learning environment with a learning mindset and ease the transition between rest or play and schoolwork.
If you do have space that can be repurposed for remote learning, some things to consider including are: a larger display board, separate containers for writing, art, math and science supplies, and desk space for you and your child. If you are working from home, gather your own supplies in this space as well and orient your desk space so that you and your child are facing each other — this way, you can supervise their progress and redirect them when they get distracted while you at least attempt to complete some of your own work.
Create a Routine
If part of the dread and difficulty of remote learning in your home results from your child’s reaction to the words “It’s time to do schoolwork,” creating a routine that ceremonializes the beginning and end of the lesson is key. Over the last few weeks, you’ve no doubt learned whether your child is better behaved and focused in the morning or in the afternoon — for younger children, the morning is usually the most productive time, while older students may be better able to concentrate after lunch. If possible, initiate remote learning at the same time each day, using the same words, gestures and actions. Return to your dedicated learning space and take out your supplies. Automate a procedure for getting ready for the lesson that helps your child feel prepared for the task at hand. For grade school students, this might look like deep breathing, singing a song, or “getting their sillies out” by jumping around or dancing before taking a seat, putting their name on their paper (or signing into their app or website) and listening quietly for directions. Bigger kids might just need to take an (upright) seat and begin with the work that is easiest or most interesting to them. If your child is particularly resistant, enlist their help in designing this routine so that it includes something they look forward to and will exchange for a promise to cooperate, like watching a short video, playing one game or eating a snack.
Regardless of the actual steps in your routine, the purpose is to automate their actions and help them to know what to expect so that interruptions and transitions are minimized, saving time and aggravation for both of you. If you are struggling to figure out exactly how much time to dedicate to each subject or activity, ask your child’s teacher or contact your district — some have created suggested daily schedules with timeslots that correspond to the curriculum. Whether you use this or create your own, you can adjust the procedure as you figure out what works and what doesn’t, but make sure to change only one element at a time so that your child continues feeling ownership and a sense of accomplishment in fulfilling each step.
Incentivize Tasks
One contributing factor to remote learning burnout may be that the incentives offered earlier in the closure to get kids to sit down and do their work are no longer practical or effective. Nobody wants to feel like they have to continually coerce their kids to do their schoolwork, even when an ongoing global crisis is not necessitating it, and now that you can’t promise to take them out for ice cream or to the movies, there is little recourse in the bribery department.
Incentivizing schoolwork in the age of coronavirus means using rewards to elicit cooperation, participation, accuracy and completion in that order. The first thing you need to do is get your child into the habit of cooperating with the routine when it’s time for remote learning. Next, you have to get him to participate in the lesson, followed by accurately (correctly) working through the task. At the end, you ideally want to have all of the schoolwork completed.
To make this happen, you need tiered or sliding scale rewards, and because you can’t be running out to buy toys or junk food to bribe your kid every step of the way, those rewards can’t always be material things. For little kids, use bedtime, screen time and special one-on-one time with you in increments of 5 minutes. With older kids, use things like alone time (especially if they share a bedroom), TV time (when they can choose what to watch) and first dibs on choosing what to eat for dinner. Let them know how they’re doing frequently throughout the lesson — “You’re really earning your screen time for this afternoon!” — to help them gague their own performance. Let them know exactly what they’re doing that’s helping them to meet their goals, and what they may be doing that’s dragging the lesson on or making it difficult. Behavioral incentives, and discipline during schoolwork in general, is a collaborative process whether kids are in a classroom or outside of it. Like their teacher, you need your child’s buy-in to get them to cooperate, and they need to be reminded of what they’re working towards to keep them on track.
Modify Lessons and Assignments
This is where your child’s teachers (and your own teacher friends, if you have any) can be really helpful. If your child is experiencing particular challenges with schoolwork, ask a teacher what you can do to change or adjust the work to resolve the issue. Sometimes, it can be as simple as breaking a text or an assignment up in to smaller tasks, rewording questions or directions or adding visuals to a text or audio lesson.
Other times it may require a more extensive intervention, in which case, don’t be afraid to post your question or ask for resources on social media. Lots of parents have been struggling to support their kids in learning Common Core strategies, especially for math, so ask your friends and followers if they have any videos, tools or websites to share. If you’re a not inclined to reach out, try searching YouTube for videos on the lesson topic yourself — elementary topics like grammar, sight words and reading strategies are particular favorites of educational content creators on that platform. If you want a professional opinion, ask educators you know if they’d be willing to chat with your child briefly to explain a concept or answer a question. Many of us posted a pledge earlier in the closure promising to help anyone who reached out with remote learning questions, and we’re still here to do just that!
Keep in mind that modified grading policies are being introduced each day, and for the most part, they focus on holistic evaluation rather than letter and number grades due to the extensive educational access issues posed by remote learning. Some districts are making this semester “Pass/Fail” while others are using language like “Meets Standards/Does Not Meet Standards.” As long as your child is learning (or reviewing) concepts and developing skills of the appropriate level and rigor for their grade level and proficiency, adapting assignments should not be an issue for their grades — working consistently and avoiding burnout and discouragement takes priority, especially if your child will not be returning to a classroom this school year. Just remember that all districts will need to see evidence that your child has at least attempted assigned work, so make sure to observe submission guidelines and communicate any issues with teachers and administrators to avoid confusion when grades are issued.
Take Frequent Breaks
Kids need breaks more frequently than you think. Kindergarten students generally need some type of rest period after about fifteen minutes of sustained instruction, while studies show that older students benefit from a break every forty five minutes. If your child is able to handle the transition, it sometimes helps to have these breaks include physical activity to refocus them, so maybe walk around, do some stretches or dance to a song. Given that teachers are providing an average of four hours of online instruction per day, you should plan breaks between tasks or subjects, or whenever your child seems to be reaching a limit with patience or concentration. Again, sustaining energy and motivation to continue remote learning is important for both you and your child. If you’ve really reached the end of your rope, skip a day. Just plan to make up that work little by little later in the week and submit when it’s complete, the same way your child would if they missed a day of regular school.
Focus on Emotional Support
When you get frustrated, please remember that this is a crisis for all of us. Whether your district’s tone is empathetic or militaristic, whether your child’s teacher is calling you every ten minutes or only communicates once a week, whether your child is sailing through remote learning or struggling every single day, your number one job as a parent is to help them navigate this crisis. Your job is not to be a Nobel Prize-winning educator who ensures that this semester is the one when your child becomes a National Merit Scholar. Children react to adversity in so many different ways, and their responses to this crisis will be many and varied as well. You know your child best, so if you feel that what they need is a hug and a movie or some coloring pages, abandon ship and focus on providing the support they need to feel secure. At those times when you can’t do another math problem or read another vocabulary word, it’s okay to just be Mom or Dad (or whoever you are). Go ahead — you have the teacher’s permission.
