Back to School with Remote Learning – What I’m Planning Now

It’s official. My school district will start the year with remote learning for at least nine weeks.

I absolutely support getting kids and teachers back in schools, but we have to do that SAFELY.

I am so tired of this pandemic, so tired of wearing a mask, so tired of not being able to do my usual activities, and so tired of not being in my classroom.

Raise your hand if you’re overwhelmed. I’m overwhelmed too.

I even created a course for teachers about planning for back to school called “Calm the Overwhelm.” So I am going to take my own advice from that course and start calming my overwhelm by making some lists.

In the course, I talk about the importance of developing your class procedures before you even set up your classroom. This is important because your procedures will dictate the way you design the classroom set-up.

What are the “procedures” that I need to have in place for remote learning?

Here’s my list of 10 procedures that I want to implement:

1 – re-creating our PLC’s back to school plans to make them work for remote learning

2 – re-creating our PLC’s first reading, writing, math, science, & social studies units to make them work for remote learning

3 – setting up a schedule for synchronous learning time

4 – setting up a schedule for office hours, for small group times, and for whole group time (this goes along with the synchronous learning time above)

5 – hold one-to-one conferences with students (probably with Google Meet so we can see each other)

6 – have very brief conferences with all families (by phone or Google Meet)

7 – in addition to that daily schedule to be shared with parents and students, I am creating a daily schedule for myself so that I can be sure I am maintaining boundaries between “work” and “home”

8 – create/continue a daily self-care routine (and make sure that I include it on that daily schedule for me)

9 – incorporate what I’ve read and learned this summer (from books and online PD)

10 – focus on creating and building our class community from the very beginning.

And yes — I’m tired already!

I am listing each of these procedures on a separate page in a notebook. Then, as I think of ways to implement that procedure, I will add them to my lists.

In my next posts, I’ll share more details about how I plan to implement these procedures.

What am I missing? What procedures do you think will be most important to implement at the beginning of the year?