It was still an emotional roller coaster as we learned to iterate and be creative together. The families and experiences from home were the transfer for learning rather than just covering the curriculum. The connections grew deeper that they became the foundation of the transferable learning experiences. Wellbeing and social-emotional learning were most important, and I placed them prior to academics through the development of skills and cross-disciplinary contextual thinking. Throughout the year we implemented social-emotional learning and the understanding of self-awareness and self-management (Blog post explaining SEL). For emergency remote learning we unpacked that transfer of SEL to understanding self success during the remote distance learning.
During our Google Meets, acknowledging the feeling which was most important than just focusing on tasks no matter how long it took us. As I started focusing on acknowledging how they are feeling and to share their feelings the time went by. Less time was focused on tasks that altered my thinking and my learning. The students began building their own brain routines to develop new skills from home and from the community. They were already familiar with Ontario's Ministry Well Being guide and it was referenced for creating strategies of positive choices and belonging with the distance remote learning.
Also, CASEL competencies were an integral part of the process (https://casel.org/core-competencies/). Prior to and after every task, reflections on social-emotional feelings were gathered to critically analyze their feelings and competencies for the next steps. Prior to and after every Google Meets, we had emotional check-ins and explicitly expressed based on Marc Brackett the color of emotions and the feeling wheels (Feeling Wheel Mood Meter).
The students kept a written or oral records, or a sequence of images for a journal that was shared with classmates for feedback. Some students also organized teams for motivational workouts on their own. The outcome of emergency remote learning was to elevate students' cultural assets, their voices, and their agency from home. Learning is social and creating a safe space is important for their autonomy by being co-creators for their learning.
Opportunities that were developed by the students were:
- Identifying ways to stay active at home indoors and outdoors with the family.
- Organization of their schedule based on ministry allocated hours for learning.
- Focusing on the four domains of the Well Being and the four key components for well-being strategies.
- Aligning with the Indigenous medicine wheel of the interconnectivity of all aspects of one’s being. The circle of awareness of the individual self; the circle of knowledge that provides the power of how we each have over our own lives.
- Connecting the occupational from the wellness wheel that was the fulfillment of chores that became the balance in their own lives. Focusing on contributions for new skills in the home environment and the community. https://www.theottoolbox.com/wellness-wheel-for-families/
- Designing their learning the way they see it. The autonomy of connecting their environment to their learning and finding ways to metacognitively share their thinking by applying many thinking tools.
- Sharing reflections of their perspectives of who they are designing with and for, to develop a sense of empathy.
- Learning to identify how they are solving problems from designing in the home or for the community.
- Researching and connecting these opportunities to practical understandings of life learning skills. (In relation to the curriculum from Science (Structures, biodiversity, substances, heat...) to history by honoring traditions.
- Leading their own learning by applying learning to and from the world around them.
- Knowledge building and sharing by making connections to what they have learned and new learning that became cross-disciplinary for explorations.
- Continuing to collaborate with family members or community members to communicate and share: What was surprising? What were they still curious about?
- Applying thinking tools to problem solve that they were familiar with from the classroom applications. Rotman I-Think integrative thinking tools for collecting data, causal models for causes and factors, Pro Pro the benefits of opposing ideas through the point of view of all perspectives, and developing a sense of empathy.
- Continuing with the Sustainable Development Goals that were developed in September for our action-taking.
- Implemented through SDGs to cross-curricular connections by continuing what we started of pitching their ideas in teams for local and global actions.
- continuing with responsible citizenship and connecting the take Action project to the home and the community. Are all people treated fairly and equally?
- Aspiring ideas for hope from the home, from the community from nature on what kind of a world would they like to create.
- Co-creating the plans of the week by taking turns sharing motivational quotes, videos, inspirational images, and of course humor and laughter.
- Wellness became the most important integral of our Google Meets by taking time to practice consciousness through breathing exercises that the students adapted on their own as well.
- Provoking small group discussions based on real-world events.
- Technology with remote distance learning was not just for posting resources, it was for engaging with each others' learning.
- Collaborating, reflecting, consolidating on Padlet, Fligrid, Screencastify, Google Suites (forms, slides, Google drawing), Jamboard, Google slides with Slido Q&A, Wakelet, and Mentimeter.
- Technology added accountability for the students to reflect share their thinking and give feedback to each other. The accountability for me was to collect data and to reflect in order to iterate the process of learning.
- Short instructions with reflective points and breaks. Emotional responsiveness to take breaks by playing their motivational music, or breathing exercises.
- Applying active online discussions based on experts' insights and individuals perspectives and interactive reading books.
- The greatest feedback was from passive self-paced interactive content like games, Kahoot, and Pear Deck. Digital citizenship that was developed earlier contributed to positive learning.
- Creating impactful experiences beyond the curriculum that empowered students' learning from the pandemic to social unrest.
I began connecting experts to our learning from breathing exercises, to the learning of the designing of protective gears to the understanding of the past for History that has shaped the present unrests. This presentation summarizes some of our learning evidence of all remote emergency learning experiences.
An episode from Voiced Radio Ontario Learning From Home, I shared the reframing of my learning:
John Dewey (1938) quote: "We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future."
Learning is communal and social to co-construct meaning, for students to project their personal characteristics and for students to interact and be cohort learners sharing their cognitive presence. Learning from our students and shifting our practices to meet their needs, it is not a deficit base it is an asset base that the students are telling us what we need to do.
What educational experiences will we be designing for our students? Education continues to evolve and changes, please no more normalizing!
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