Despite my best efforts to the contrary, I have 22 students in danger of failing the second term. I suspect most of them will make a last-minute push over the next couple of weeks to end the term and move at least into “D” territory, but this is the greatest number of students I’ve ever had in this position in seven years of teaching. This term I have 118 students, so the fact that nearly 20% of them are in this position is troubling. What does it mean to be failing remote learning? Why are students in this position? What have I done?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As much as I try, it challenges me to understand my failing students right now. School came easy to me, and although I certainly didn’t get all As and had plenty of lazy habits, I always submitted my work. Then I recall that I also never had to do remote learning during a pandemic while also dealing with significant levels of anxiety and depression.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
However, to fail remote learning basically means to not engage at all. To be clear, I don’t like grades or grading. If I could snap my fingers and move to a system based on narrative evaluation where I didn’t have to grade 118 students’ work, but instead could give feedback and assess skills and understandings and have students reflect on their learning, I’d do it in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, that’s not the world or school system we live in. Although my school hasn’t fully transitioned to a skills-based proficiency grading system, students who demonstrate basic and limited understanding of content and skills still score at the lowest a D. That seems fair since that what a D traditionally represents. So, to fail, students basically just have to not engage or complete work. They would fail in a narrative system as well, although perhaps they would have some interesting reflections on why, which might help teachers like myself understand.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nearly all of my students in danger of failing have missed incredible amounts of class this term. Four have only joined virtual class once or twice, and about 10 more have missed anywhere from 10-20 days of class since mid-April, which comes out to about 2-3 days a week of class missed over the last six weeks alone. This is unusual for the school I work at, and for me, and despite multiple calls home for each of these students, these bad habits have shown no sign of going away. Remote learning hasn’t been great for many other students, and many are pretty disengaged right now, including a lot of students who are still logging on to class every day and responsive to small group and individual check-in conversations. When it comes to completing schoolwork, they just can’t do it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This term has been significantly more rough than the previous one (when only two students failed), and the challenge of maintaining energy for remote learning has diminished over time. Most of my students who are failing remote right now were already the most “at-risk” in the school in person. These tend to be students who are less academically engaged, and many do not have post-secondary ambitions. They express lacking academic confidence and tend to have negative feelings about school. In person, it is a lot easier to build students’ confidence and make school fun, to build on the social dynamics that engage them, but many of these students still struggle to do their best and live up to their great potential. Online, those who I’ve been able to talk to about it, say it all starts to feel the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It’s possible to make a lot of quite reasonable excuses for these students struggling to pass from internet issues to at-home responsibilities – but ultimately we have to face a particular reality that remote learning hasn’t worked for these students, and that in-person learning as it is constructed wasn’t working for them that well to begin with. Some students are choosing not to log in (or are logging in and not participating) because the prospect of logging into seven 50 minute periods of academic work sounds a lot less pleasant than playing video games or scrolling through their phones, and their adolescent brains are not yet at a place where they fully understand the long-term consequences of their choices. And there’s often not somebody in their home during the school day to help those students make good choices, or even if there is, the setting simply isn’t conducive for deep learning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So, what is to be done? I have done my best to be endlessly understanding of the known and unknown challenges students are facing. My students have appreciated this, but I do wonder if I have achieved the correct balance. Is it more important to encourage students to engage at some point, or to hold them accountable for not engaging? The reality is that I am going to receive a lot of late work over the next couple of weeks, and it will likely be so voluminous towards the end that I simply won’t have the time to give the sort of feedback I think is important to give students. So in some sense, by encouraging students to do something rather than nothing, I am setting up a ‘feedback loop’ that lets students know they can wait until the end (and not get feedback for growth). However, I also know that students will demonstrate an acceptable – or in some cases deep – level of understanding such that they will not fail. Those students will not fail, because they have attempted to meet the standard. Even if remote learning hasn’t worked for everyone, I am hopeful that only a handful will end up truly failing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Despite my best efforts to the contrary, I have 22 students in danger of failing the second term. I suspect most of them will make a last-minute push over the next couple of weeks to end the term and move at least into “D” territory, but this is the greatest number of students I’ve ever…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,18],"tags":[52,53,20,21],"class_list":["post-169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections","category-teaching","tag-failing","tag-failure","tag-remote-learning","tag-remote-teaching"],"yoast_head":"\n