( Ed Reed / Mayoral Photo Office )
Jessica Gould, WNYC reporter, talks about the latest on school reopening and whether teachers are prepared for remote learning while attention is on in-school logistics, plus plans for some outside instruction announced today.
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Voice-over: Listener-supported WNYC Studios.
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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WYNC and no matter where you are in our area, remote learning will still be at least part of the mix. With all the attention on what's going to be happening in the classrooms and whether to have anything happening in the classrooms, there are things happening with the other part of the equation, which for some students will be their full mode of learning this fall. WNYC's education reporter, Jessica Gould has been looking into this and she joins me now along with some breaking news this morning about in-person school. Hi, Jess.
Jessica Gould: Hi. How are you?
Brian: Good. First, I asked Mayor de Blasio about remote learning and whether they're really prepared or whether as some people say they wasted the summer, and here's some of his response.
Mayor Bill de Blasio: The efforts to continue to train teachers and improve remote learning continue. They have continued throughout the summer, but I also want to be honest about there's only so far you can go with remote learning. The problem we are seeing is remote learning skews according to dynamics of disparity. Children who are already advantaged, children at wealthier families, children who have parents who are working remotely, and professional jobs and can be home to support their kids as opposed to parents who are working-class jobs who have to be on job site. The rich get richer when it comes to remote learning. I believe this profoundly, I've talked this through our educators. You can continue to make it better, but you can't make it as fair as it needs to be--
Brian: Jess, I was really struck with that answer because the answer replicated the premise of the question. The premise of the question is, are we looking enough at the quality of remote learning which all students will have at least some of while everybody debates whether to go back in-person? His response was to debate whether to go back in-person and advocate in-person learning without addressing at all the quality of the remote learning and whether they've been able to get ready to improve that over the summer. What are you hearing?
Jessica: Yes, I think that's a good observation. I have been hearing from teachers for weeks now that they wanted to hear from the DOE about what to be doing better and how to do it better and haven't. I asked the DOE about this and they said that there have been numerous opportunities listed for trainings for teachers and administrators. They gave me a list of some of things that they're training on like how to teach to read remotely, but the teachers I've talked to haven't gotten that information. They just say they have been looking in their inboxes and they haven't seen it.
I was actually talking at length to a teacher who won an award last year for his teaching with an emphasis on his remote teaching. He's a funny guy. He realized he wasn't able to use the same charismatic approach that he had in the classroom online. He started doing YouTube videos as an alter ego. He's got a side gig as a pro wrestler. He was showing up as the pro wrestler-
Brian: Clever.
Jessica: -the big action to teach math on YouTube videos. This actually worked really well to engage kids. He's been waiting by the phone to hear if the DOE wants him since they gave him an award to teach other teachers how to do better. He hasn't gotten that call yet.
Brian: Will he have to teach them his wrestling moves? No, [unintelligible 00:04:06].
Jessica: [laughs] It was interesting because it wasn't just about the persona, but he invested in a stronger camera for his computer and lights to make him look more alive and about presentation. A lot of teachers I've talked to said, this is like being a first-year teacher again. They don't know how to do this and they tried the best that they could, but they're hungry for input.
Brian: Teachers help us report this story. Whether you're in the New York City public school system, or any in our listening area, have you been offered training in remote instruction this summer? If so, was it the training you needed? 646-435-7280 or have you banded together on your own to share best practices for the remote learning part of school this fall? How prepared are you? Are you any better prepared than you were in the spring when it all came unexpectedly and all of a sudden? How's your school system doing at improving remote learning processes? 646-435-7280. 646-435-7280. Teachers and parents and students, what worked and what didn't work for you last spring with remote instruction? How good do you think it could be for whatever part of your term or your kid's term is going to be remote? 646-435-7280.
Jessica, while we're waiting for some calls, what have you heard from the teachers you spoke with, other than that one who's the wrestler who won the award, about what works best? Are there a few best practices that seem to rise to the top of a list?
Jessica: Yes. I think it's hard because just like with teaching, you can't give a three bullet answer of what makes a good teacher, but first I talked to a researcher at the Center for Public Research at Columbia. Her name is Elizabeth Chu and she looked at what worked in Connecticut and outlined a few things that she thinks would work more broadly. She's also a New York City public school parent. She had some insight from that perspective.
What she said is a couple of things. Streamline the platforms. Last spring people were all over the place with Google Classroom, Microsoft Teams, Zoom. Consistent schedules, live learning every day. There's been concern about the fact that there wasn't enough instruction happening live from teachers to students. In some cases, there was none. Community building. I heard from some teachers about this amazing Juneteenth celebration they did or weekly yoga. Preschoolers who had dance parties and costume days, and then constantly getting feedback. Those were the big picture things.
On a more specific level, I heard shorter lessons and this year the DOE says 15 to 20 minutes for video lessons, and then going up as kids get older, but I'm hearing the kids prefer smaller chunks for their attention spans. I've heard about teachers using technology to their advantage, having kids make music videos or podcasts, or little movies about the issues that they're studying or applying the lessons in their lives like the protests around the killing of George Floyd to what they're studying in the history. There's some good elements with that. Also, for younger kids, like scavenger hunts of materials in your house.
I heard about an art teacher who was working with collages from found materials or a science teacher who had kids making experiments out of what was in their fridge. These are just some of the things I've been hearing so far.
Brian: Let's take a phone call. Dan in Bergen County. You're on WNYC. Hi, Dan.
Dan: Hi, how are you doing?
Brian: Good.
Dan: It's been interesting. I'm a physics teacher in Chicago. I actually went to summer camp with Jessica a long time ago.
Jessica: Hi, Dan from Bergen County.
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Dan: For me, it's been interesting because Chicago Public Schools has been offering trainings over the summer. A lot of the stuff that I've been seeing has been for people that really have no idea what they're doing online, which is great for a certain subset of teachers, but there hasn't really been, I think, a focus or an approach on like, what about people that actually understand how to use these tools, how they work? What's the best way to promote them and to use them to actually teach remotely and change the paradigm as opposed to like, "These are some cool extensions you can use."
It's been a challenging thing. I do know that there are a bunch of other teacher groups that as a science teacher, there are a lot of teachers talking about like, "What's a box of things that are cheap that we can send home so that students can actually do experiment and things at home and have some basic [unintelligible 00:09:45] tools and that kind of thing."
Brian: As a physics teacher, do you do a lot of hands-on stuff in your class normally?
Dan: I do a lot of stuff very hands-on and there's been some interesting things that you can do with smartphones, and just taking video and utilizing some really basic tools. If you just have a smartphone and not a computer, which in the spring in Chicago, the majority of my students were just on smartphones that they can still do, talking about figuring out motion and that kind of thing.
Brian: Interesting story.
Dan: Interesting summer.
Brian: Thank you very much. As far as you and Jess knowing and giving each other those knowing remarks from the summer camp-- Summer camp is amazing in how you can be with somebody for three weeks, one July out of your whole life, and you feel like they're the best friend you've ever had. Anyway, thanks, Dan. Thanks for chiming in. Jess, what do you want to add?
Jessica: Dan, I didn't plant the call, but he and I know each other pretty well. It's nice to hear from you. One thing that he mentions is people working on their smartphones and I didn't mention this before. I was talking about the content of lessons you can do. Everyone mentioned to me across the board that the prerequisite for remote learning to work is having technology.
That didn't happen for everybody in the New York City public schools until-- Some people were still getting their iPads from the city, which the city did an amazing thing sending out hundreds of thousands of iPads that are Wi-Fi enabled to students, but some didn't get them until the end of June. Even iPads are hard to do your work on. It's good for maybe a video chat but not so much for typing up a paper.
Brian: In fact, I wanted to ask a follow-up question about that anyway, which is I see from some of the parents' communications that I get that one of the movements now is to get not just iPads where you have to type on screen and it's really not great, to get external keyboards with the iPads. The kids can actually type on a little keyboard which gives them more ability to do their work. Is there any thought of that from the DOE?
Jessica: Yes. I haven't heard from them about getting keyboards and I haven't asked them explicitly about that though. I did do a story last spring about a teenager who was struggling with her internet. She was standing outside of her neighbor's apartment borrowing her Wi-Fi and trying to type up papers on an iPad. Finally, the school gave her a laptop that it had. I think for older students specifically, that's hard. A lot of schools did raid their cabinets in March to give students what they had of laptops and I hear Chromebooks are better than iPad. I think a keyboard would be huge for a lot of students.
Brian: We're going to take a break. We'll come back. We'll continue with some callers who didn't go to summer camp with as well as that breaking news from the chancellor and the mayor this morning. Stay with us.
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Brian Lehrer on WNYC with our education reporter, Jessica Gould, as we're talking primarily about preparing for remote learning in New York City and elsewhere in our region. Let's take another call. Erica in Plainview. You're on WNYC. Hello, Erica.
Erica: Hi, Brian. Happy to be here. Big fan. Thank you for all of your reporting.
Brian: Thank you.
Erica: I was calling. I'm a public school teacher at a suburb out here, nearby. I teach high school special education. I will say that my district has invested a great deal of money and time into the teachers over the summer. We were able to opt in to multiple paid training hours to learn different pieces of technology that we'll be using in the fall. I personally did three of those. Other teachers did curriculum writing, paid curriculum writing so that there would be lessons on hand should we--
Brian: For remote.
Erica: Yes. That could go back and forth. A lot of the high schools are opening in a hybrid model. I'll see my students in-person on alternate days, and they're live-streaming us from the classroom. I'm not sure how that will go and they'll attend through Google Meet.
I think one of the pieces that you've spoken, I've listened to your show regularly, one of the things that keeps coming up with the mayor and with your guest is about the financial piece of it and inequities in education. The fact that the district has money to spend and they'll be buying us-- We have front one, all the students have one-to-one Chromebooks which is better than an iPad for distance learning. The teachers, we're all getting new laptops and new these ThinkPads and we have document cameras and they're paying the teachers to learn it over the summer. As always money matters.
Brian: Erica, thank you so much for that and thank you for being aware of the broader context as you teach in Plainview. They're a district that does have money relative to others. I think we're going to hear the contrast a little bit from our next caller, Abby in Brooklyn. Abby, you're on WNYC. Hi, there.
Abby: Hi. Can you hear me?
Brian: Yes. Hi.
Abby: Hi. I teach in a New York City public school in Manhattan. I teach fifth grade and over the summer we received and actually in March, we received absolutely no training for remote learning which is hugely problematic because with the hybrid model, kids are going to be learning remotely for most of the time, whether or not they opted into fully remote learning or not.
Brian: Very little training, even over the summer.
Abby: Not very little, none like zero. Even in March, when teachers were asked to do emergency training and had to come into schools, there wasn't actually any training. My school, I think [unintelligible 00:16:54]. The school I work at has a really active PTA, which we're very lucky for. Most schools don't. We're in the best position, but I think that that's a huge issue with this plan is that schools in areas that don't have those same opportunities, those kids are going to suffer more. In teaching, we do something called differentiate. We treat each kid differently and the mayor's plan doesn't do that at all, which is why it's not going to work.
Brian: Abby, thank you very much. Wow. Jessica, what a contrast between Plainview and New York City anecdotally and also really structurally when you look at the differences in money that is available to be spent and of course we hear that budget cuts are possible as well.
Jessica: Yes, I'm hearing a lot of concern about very severe additional budget cuts from the state coming that the chancellor, as you may have heard said last week, if they come through this 20% across the board cuts then there will be no in-person learning, Chancellor Carranza said that. Then we're all back at remote learning which is why it's such a concern that many teachers say they haven't received the training that they need. Even as the DOE says, there's been professional development available to them. They somehow that message has not gotten across.
Brian: The governor is talking about a potential 20% cut, at least in the state portion of education funding if federal relief doesn't come through. That, of course, is all still being negotiated. Let's touch on the news this morning from the mayor and the chancellor's news conference, which had to do with outdoor learning at least for the first month of the semester before it gets too cold. It looks to me like they're leaving it up to each principal of each individual school.
Jessica: The principals have a lot on their plates right now. This is something that a lot of people, parents, and educators have been calling for the opportunity to outdoor learning as much as possible, set-up tents when you can. Today the mayor and chancellor said that schools that have space to do that should go ahead and try to set-up to do that and schools that don't, should apply and they're going to expedite permitting so that they can use public parks or streets that are nearby for outdoor learning.
The application deadline though for this is August 28th, that's four days from now and then they said they're going to get back to them next week. It's just such a tight turnaround and timeline for principals who have already been saying one after another district of full of principals saying that they're not ready and they don't see how they can get ready. Here's the thing that a lot of people want to do and think will be much safer and also have some great educational opportunities being outdoors, but there's just little time to do it and you mentioned the funding. There's an equity issue because there are PTAs across the city who have already been fundraising to pretense to make outdoor learning work. That's not possible in other areas.
Brian: We're going to keep covering day by day, the ramp-up to the beginning of school. Everybody is going to be doing at least some remote learning. Some people are going to be doing full-time remote learning and our education reporter, Jessica Gould, indicating and our callers certainly indicating that teachers do not feel that they've improved the system at least in New York City over the summer. Jess, thanks. We'll keep talking obviously.
Jessica: Thank you.
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