take steps to inform, reassure and maintain contact with students and parents,

they must also ramp up their ability to teach remotely.

Asynchronous working gives teachers flexibility in preparing learning

materials and enables students to juggle the demands of home and study.
Asynchronous learning works best in digital formats. Teachers do not need to
deliver material at a fixed time: it can be posted online for on-demand access
and students can engage with it using wikis, blogs, and e-mail to suit their
schedules. Teachers can check on student participation periodically and make
online appointments for students with particular needs or questions. Creating
an asynchronous digital classroom gives teachers and students more room to
breathe.

 Video lessons are usually more effective—as well as easier to prepare—if they
are short (5‒10 minutes). Organizations offering large-enrolment online
courses, such as FutureLearn, have optimized approaches to remote learning
that balance accessibility and effectiveness.

General advice is for teachers to keep two objectives in mind. While it is

important to continue to orient students’ learning to the classroom curriculum
and the assessments/examinations for which they were preparing, it is also
vital to maintain students’ interest in learning by giving them varied
assignments—not least, perhaps, by work that sets the present COVID-19
crisis in a wider global and historical context. Some schools are encouraging
students to engage with the crisis by preparing hampers of food and supplies
for vulnerable families or writing letters to elderly residents in care homes.

For such enrichment, teachers can draw on the abundance of high-quality

learning material now available as freely usable Open Educational Resources.
The OpenLearn website, for example, contains over 1,000 courses at both
school and tertiary levels. There is no dishonour in teaching through good
materials prepared by others.
Institutions versed in distance learning often start the process of course
construction by designing the student assessments that will be part of it. This
is a way of clarifying learning objectives and content that teachers making a
sudden transition to remote operation should consider adopting. It will help
them determine the parts of the standard curriculum on which they will focus
as well as their aims in including other topics.
 The Commonwealth of Learning is an intergovernmental agency of the
Commonwealth tasked with helping developing countries use
technology effectively in education and training at all levels. It focuses
particularly on technology that is appropriate for resource-poor
situations.

Commonwealth of Learning. (Skills training [TVET] for men and

women): https://www.col.org/programmes/technical-and-vocational-skills-
development

Commonwealth of Learning. (Open

Schooling): https://www.col.org/programmes/open-schooling

 These references from David Gaertner and the Sacred Heart Schools
bracket a range of responses to COVID-19, from “work with what you
know” to carefully organised and gradual processes.

David Gaertner,
#COVIDCAMPUS: https://novelalliances.com/2020/03/16/covidcampus/

Sacred Heart Schools: Flexible Plan for Instructional

Continuity: https://tinyurl.com/rrqfae7

 UNESCO has much experience in advising Member States how to adapt

their educational systems to crises of various kinds.

UNESCO—Distance learning
solutions: https://en.unesco.org/covid19/educationresponse/solutions

 The YTL Foundation is an example of national provision of online

resources to teachers, parents, and students.

YTL Foundation, Malaysia: https://ytlfoundation.org/learnfromhome/

  FutureLearn and OpenLearn are important collections of online courses
and course resources under the aegis of the UK Open University.

FutureLearn (free mass enrolment courses on many

topics): https://www.futurelearn.com/

OpenLearn: Free learning from the Open

University: https://www.open.edu/openlearn/

finding alternative scientific activity to remain productive, despite limited access to their facilities.

 forced lecturers and students to adapt to the online environment with immediate effect. Enhanced
and blended learning-strategies, as well as transdisciplinary knowledge production, have been
identified as possible benefits. But there are challenges. Unequal access to the internet and
affordable data, along with inefficient broadband services and an increasing financial crisis, prevent
equal online education opportunities for post-school youth.

Talk About Building Resilience in

Students
By Sarah D. Sparks on May 29, 2020 9:46 AM

Students who believe they can learn and grow from challenges may be better able to
weather this spring's health concerns and academic disruptions, but encouraging
students to build that kind of growth mindset in the middle of the pandemic can be a
heavy lift for even the most committed teachers.

For a teacher who prides himself on building connections to students, Jose Clemente, a
math teacher at Westbury High School in Houston, found the first few weeks of
lockdown a scramble just to find students and convince them to tackle new technology
and deal with disconnection from classmates—on top of the typical high school
intimidation of calculus.

"For me, it was very shaky," Clemente said. "There are moments of, 'I didn't sign up for
this.' But you fall back on what you believe in. ... When you get students into the virtual
conferences, it's all about acknowledging where we are right now and promoting
resiliency, and I'm seeing a lot of students stepping up in this situation."

At the start of this school year, Clemente and other Texas educators—including physics
teacher Sergio Estrada of Riverside High School in El Paso; Melody Smiley, algebra
teacher at Eagle Mountain Saginaw High School near Fort Worth; and Shelley Steele, a
computer science, graphics and game design, and finance teacher at Ponder High
School—joined OnRamps, a growth mindset program at the University of Texas-Austin
that included online networks of teachers and support. That virtual training has allowed
the teachers to stay in touch during the closures, and to share an unintended crash
course on how to apply what they were learning during a time of frustration and
uncertainty for themselves and their students.

The educators are already seeing that students who took a more growth-oriented
approach before the pandemic have "adapted faster" to the move to distance learning,
Estrada said. Clemente noted they are also more likely to be, "trying to build a broader
sense of what is happening right now and to find ways to help."

Next month the teachers will be among 20 teacher-fellows to come together as part of
the Texas Mindset Initiative to develop research-based interventions to encourage a
growth mindset in the disparate live and remote high school classrooms evolving in the
wake of the ongoing pandemic. Mindset researchers led by David Yaeger at UT-Austin
in the National Study of Learning Mindsets will pilot the interventions in short
experimental trials with more than 1,000 teachers and 36,000 students across the state
this fall, with an eye to quickly provide free tools and professional development for
teachers nationwide.  

The teachers explained a bit about what they are learning so far and how they are
helping their students learn to adapt to their rapidly shifting school world.

The school closures and the broader pandemic have made even some high-
achieving students uncertain of their future. How do you reinforce a growth
mindset in the middle of a crisis?