On the Record

‘A Time of Innovation’: Santa Barbara-area Schools Wade into the Uncharted Territory of ‘Remote Learning’ Nicholas Schou is an award-winning investigative journalist and author of several books, including Orange Sunshine and Kill the

Messenger. If you have tips or stories about Montecito, please email him at newseditor@montecitojournal.net

Checking in for school

MONTECITO JOURNAL10 O n Friday, March 13, yes Friday the 13th, all schools in California, public and private, closed their doors for the foreseeable future. Then Santa Barbara, like much of the rest of the state, had at most a single week to switch to an entirely new, online model of education, by now known to most as “remote learning.”

In deference to COVID, schools must now find ways to pay for more technological resources, as well as enhanced on-campus anti-viral and public health measures. A problem that will no doubt be compounded by the fact that, due to the pandemic, California is potentially facing a $54 billion deficit. Which will mean cuts to public education, which as of March 13, received about 40 percent of the state’s budget.

While the question about future school funding can’t be overemphasized, it is by no means the only question about remote learning demanding to be answered. Such as: • Does remote learning really work? • Can it actually replace in-person classroom instruction? • What does research say about the efficacy of remote learning and its impact on students?

Harvard University’s 52-year-old education research program, Project Zero, which works with schools, museums, businesses, and organizations across the world, aims to answer these questions by exploring issues of understanding, thinking, creativity, and the development of human potential.

“We have reached a point in the

learning sciences where we recognize that learning is very much a social endeavor in which our interactions, discussions, questions, and explorations occur in the context of others,” said Ron Ritchhart, a Project Zero professor. “This is true of all age groups. Good teachers recognize this and seek to foster it whether in class or at a distance. The challenge is in our current circumstances how to do that.”

According to Ritchhart, a group of physics and statistics professors at Harvard have developed a free online platform called Perusall that helps students more easily interact with content such as textbooks, articles or papers, as well as communicate with other students, so they can more actively discuss material online.

“Some online platforms, apps, and services do this better than others,” he says. “But simple delivery of content is not what produces learning. It is the interaction with the content that matters.”

However it is still too early to know how remote learning will impact education in a post-coronavirus world, Ritchhart explained.

“Just as we don’t know how COVID19 will affect the economy, our politics, or our long-term health, it is too early to know the effects it will have on students’ learning,” he said.

Because students have only been out of the classroom for several weeks this spring, and because the semester is less academically heavy than other semesters, Ritchhart doesn’t think the consequences of COVID-19 thus far pose a long-term risk to a child’s education.

However, if remote learning continues into next year, Ritchhart predicts much more profound and potentially negative implications for students, regardless of age.

“Can people learn online?” he asks. “Yes, certainly. The challenge for schools is how to keep children connected to each other and to their teachers. This is especially important for young learners, but it’s important to all.”

After nearly two months of full-time remote learning in place of face-toface classroom education, local educators and others are in a position to answer some of the inevitable questions that arise from this unexpected teaching experiment. • Are our children falling behind academically as a result of remote learning? • Is the COVID-19 crisis simply exacerbating problems that already existed in our public education system? • What are both public and private educators doing to make remote learning as positive an experience as possible for every student, regardless of socio-economic status or learning abilities? • Does remote learning really work?

And if so, what long-term changes can we expect for our children’s educational future?

Here is how our local educators are attempting to answer these critical questions, while also readying themselves for the “new normal.” The eyes have it

Change is Now

In 2005, Rob Hereford was the head of upper school at a private campus in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit.

“We evacuated to Houston,” he recalls. “We didn’t have Zoom or anything like that back then. Even texting was a new thing, and there was just no online platform for learning whatsoever.”

It took Hereford and his colleagues three weeks to come up with a solution.

“Until then, the kids had nothing,” he said.

On March 11, 2020, Hereford, now head of school of Montecito’s Laguna Blanca School, held a meeting with Laguna Blanca’s advisory board. He told its members that, while all schools were likely to shut down any day, he hoped that because of the prestigious private school’s relatively small student population – just 350 kids – Laguna Blanca might at least remain open until the following Friday.

“I thought we could get through seven days of school,” Hereford recalls. “But everything changed so much over the weekend. Suddenly, we were closing on Monday.”

Because Laguna Blanca teaches students from early kindergarten all the way to 12th grade on two separate campuses, the school faced some unique challenges.

“Developmentally, it hit us in different ways,” Hereford says. “Kids at the youngest level up to fourth grade really require so much more of a family commitment to this remote-learning exercise.”

As the parent of a fourth-grader, Hereford has learned firsthand how challenging it is for parents of young children to pivot essentially overnight to remote, computer-assisted learning.

“It’s a huge learning curve for both parents and teachers,” he said. “Now, several weeks in, we’ve gotten a decent routine, and while it’s still demanding of parents, our students and teachers have figured out how to make this work as well as we can.”

For middle school students attending Laguna Blanca, Hereford continued, teachers and administrators quickly realized that the daily schedule of classes was simply too long to