Six months ago, who knew that teachers and parents together would need to devise a “Covid Classroom”?  We lived a different life, then.   Now, the new classrooms comprise a great deal of what we are talking about as we navigate the 2020 – 2021 school year.  Some schools have closed for good; some are re-opening in person; some are open for online schooling only; some are using hybrids.  Some parents are forming their own learning pods.  Humanity is adapting to crisis as it always does.

The Gurian Institute is honored to be adapting and helping schools, districts, parents, and stakeholders with the new schooling issues.  We’ve been busy training and consulting via phone and Zoom as we join in the adaptations.  Boys and girls learn differently whether in person or online.  Our blog this week gives you additional essential strategies and frameworks for educating children this year. If you would like to utilize our Covid-Classroom Training and Support Program, please check out the Program page of www.gurianinstitute.com.

Ten Strategies for Setting Up Your Healthy Home (Online) Classroom

We’ll look at Strategies for Parents and Educators.  For Parent setting up healthy home classrooms, here are ten essential strategies.

1. Create a Sense of Place.  Decide where your child’s “learning base” will be and use it as the secure base for learning.  Perhaps it’s in the bedroom.  If so, make sure natural light gets in, if possible, encourage quiet there but keep the door open unless there are distractions elsewhere in the house, and help your child notice what will be in the background online so that there are no embarrassing features behind the child.
2. Create a Sense of “School.”  Stick to good breakfasts (less carbs and sugars and more protein) like you would anyway, and stick to routines of bathing, clothing, etc., so that the morning is “like going to school.”  During the day, think about “Recess” as a necessary transition and play period.
3. Protect Your Child’s Neck.  Watch out for “text neck” by setting up the learning space so that the screen can be at eye level (perhaps stack up books under the screen to raise up the screen).
4. Protect Your Child’s Eyes.  The 20-20-20 rule is a good one. Every 20 minutes, your child ought to look away from screen and look at something 20 feet away for 20 seconds.
5. Use Movement Strategies Generously.  The 10 – 20 minute rule for movement is crucial, especially for boys, as we’ll explore further below.  Perhaps your child can go into different rooms and outside to do projects or just take movement/brain breaks every 10 – 20 minutes.  .
6. Use Healthy Seating.  If you have them, let your child use a standing desk.  Otherwise, try for desk chairs with arms and lumbar support.  Overall, teach your child to seek comfortable seating on the floor, too, for some lessons, and in alternate, body-supportive seating.
7. Use Ergonomic Keyboards.  If you can, look at inexpensive ergonomic keyboards that will connect to your child’s laptop or PC easily and protect hands and wrists from strain.  Teach your child to keep elbows on arms of chair when sitting in the chair and footstools so feet are supported under desks for smaller kids.
8. Use Headphones, When Possible.  Headphones all day might be cumbersome, but for some lessons, headphones keep distracting noise out.  The WHO advises we set headphones for under 85 decibels to be safe.
9. Advocate for Healthy Screen Time.  If a ten-year-old is in online school for 6 hours, consider forming a parent group to let school know you know this is unhealthy and you need it to stop.  Try to convince the school and teachers to add homework time into school time so there is little or no “after hours” homework to add to the screen time issue.
10. Alter Our expectations Toward Healthy Learning.   Much of what children experience in online learning is not retained, unfortunately, as it is not dynamically taught.  This is no one’s fault.  It is simply the limitation of the medium.  Altering our parental expectations of learning can go a long way to decreasing stress in ourselves, our kids, and the teachers.

If you are a person of means or part of a corporation with a public service budget, anything you can do to help the millions of kids who don’t have online access at all and/or don’t have strong enough broadband will be very welcome as a public service.  While it is natural for us to work to ensure our own child’s education first and foremost, an under-educated generation across the board has consequences socially in which we will all share in the long run.  Everything we can do for everyone in our community we should try to do.

Ten Strategies for Helping Boys Learn in the Covid Classroom

As we have noted in previous blogs, the major casualties of online learning in the spring were boys.  This does not mean girls did not struggle, but statistically there were more failing boys.

The following strategies grow from research on boys’ development and education, but can work well with girls, as well.  For boys, however, and any at risk learner, these strategies may be urgently needed, especially where all or part of school is online.

Five Essential Relational Strategies

The first five strategies are relational ones that involve keeping children and schools connected in a structured, concerted way with organic relationships and attachment that provide the foundation for successful online learning.

1. Teachers/Staff as Student/Family Mentors. Make sure every appropriate staff member at a hybrid or online school becomes a mentor/coach/advisor to multiple students and their families.  This strategy requires a school leader to assign students to advisors to students/families or for teachers, students, and families to form these relationships organically.  This advisor/mentor calls, texts, and otherwise contact his/her mentees as much as needed, including to check in on homework completion.
2. Physical Coaches as Life Coaches. Phys ed and athletics coaches who are underemployed in a shut-down or online schooling semester can now expand the “coach” role to take on multiple advisees both for physical health maintenance in the children, and for academic/social learning.  Depending on expertise both athletically and academically, the coach can pick students to fit the academic strength (e.g. a coach who also teaches science can mentor science students and athletes) or, again, the students, families, and the coach can choose organically.
3. On-Leave Teachers as Advisors. If some of your teachers are not going to return to buildings but the buildings will re-open with a hybrid model, those teachers can take on 20 + mentees from home. In this On Leave Advisor model, the teacher is not isolated from the school but has a “class” of students with whom s/he interacts digitally every day.  This strategy will likely allow the on-leave teacher to take on far more mentees than anyone else, and thus stay employed without Union or other hazardous workplace legal difficulty.
4. Same Sex Mentors, Especially with Children Who Are Under-Fathered. Especially for children who are under-fathered or under-parented at home, the mentor can be life-saving.  As you focus on mentoring, facilitate a man to mentor a boy when possible and a woman to mentor a girl.  This same-sex structure is easiest to facilitate for perceptions of safety (i.e. parents might not want a man mentoring their daughter) but also can become essential to adolescent health, wellness, and academic success.
5. Every Child is Apprenticed. All our ancestors raised our children in the apprenticeship model, whatever the age, and whatever the level of schooling.  Parents with skills apprenticed their children, and/or extended family and tribal members did so.  Even now, leading edge schools, including our Gurian Institute Model Schools, gravitate toward this model as the teachers and coaches teach skills to individual children.  Apprenticeship is a building block of healthy adolescence.

In light of these five strategies, you can strategically focus on making sure every child is apprenticed, mentored, and coached by reaching out to each household with a survey that assesses needs, skills, and interests in the child and mentors.  Mentors facilitate the apprenticeship remotely if needed, connecting with the child/family regarding the apprenticeship, and checking in frequently to see how the apprenticeship is going.

Overall, these first five strategies increase the amount of targeted relationship and attachment during shutdown, isolation, and online schooling.  Most learning, we know, occurs in trusted relationship, so a significant uptick in relationship attention can best ensure compensatory effectiveness in learning while schools are not meeting in person.

These five strategies also deal with a great deal of the parental/family trauma our Spring 2020 shutdown created among schoolchildren.  Under the model inherent in these five strategies, the child’s academic education will become much more the job of teacher/school than parent, so that the parent can focus on working, parenting, and other survival needs for the family.

Five Essential Academic Strategies for Boys’ (and Girls’) Learning

Boys traditionally do less well in school, on average, than girls, receiving lower grades and test scores in the aggregate, experiencing more learning and behavioral difficulties, and succumbing more frequently to the school-to-prison pipeline.  This situation was exacerbated by Spring online schooling: while some boys and girls did well online, millions under-performed, and more of those children, statistically, were boys.

The following strategies target specific problem or issue areas for boys but each strategy is useful for girls, as well.

1. Use an Organizational Chart for All Relevant Work.  Like the other strategies I will suggest here, this one is most effective when an educational mentor and/or teacher provides it instead of or along with parents.  The mentor sends the child a graphic organizer or other tool and checks in with the student on how it is going, assessing the organizational tool with the student every day or every other day.
2. Provide the Students and Parents with Kinesthetic Assets. Squeeze balls, fidgets, hands-on tools, and manipulatives are all generally required for children, especially boys, to learn well.  Hopefully, these things exist in a classroom already; if so, they can now be distributed to the students at home.  When there are no more left, parents can be guided to websites and organizations that provide them for a price or as donation.
3. Physical Movement, Nature Time, Exercise/Athletics. Because of the heavy reliance in the boy’s brain on the cerebellum (the movement and “doing” center of the brain near the brain stem), boys generally need more physical movement during learning than we realize. This means boys should be trained and supervised to move around every 10 – 20 minutes or so at home during learning time.  Advisors and mentors can also encourage the boy to do so (he will, often, naturally want to).  And both the parents and the mentors can help the boy structure at least two hours of exercise/nature time into his day, if not three to four.  Outdoor play, spontaneous and organized athletics, nature time…these are crucial for healthy brain development.
4. Curtail Non-Educational Digital Time. The use of digital assets to provide education is increasing during the pandemic but can potentially cause developmental trauma to the young child’s brain. I have heard some districts contemplating doing preschool online.  This is dangerous to the tender child’s brain, but it may become policy.  If a pre-k – third grade child is in digital school for two hours, it is likely that no more digital time is healthy during that day. If the child is older, school time will likely take 3 or more digital hours per day, then 4, then 5.  In each case, most other digital activity may need to be curtailed of disallowed by parents, with exceptions on the weekends.  Saving Our Sons and The Minds of Girls include gender-specific birth-to-25 templates for healthy screen use.
5. Provide Significant Visual Learning and Literacy Tools. One of the areas in which males traditionally under-perform females is word use and literacy.  In schooling during Covid-19 lock down, this literacy issue heightened.  To whatever extent your school goes online in the fall, make sure to use visual cues and tools as much as possible with boys especially.  If, for instance, boys need to write a book report or essay or story, have them draw out the sequence, critical ideas, or plot ahead of time on a storyboard or large piece of paper.  Once they have drawn the assignment, they are more likely to use more detail and better organize their paper, because they have a visual prompt and visual array to follow.

These ten strategies will help online schooling work most effectively.  In each of them and many more, the Gurian Institute is available to provide training, professional development, parent education, and all other services via Zoom and online.  If you, your school or district, or your parents and community need help adapting to hybrid, online schooling, pods, or traditional schooling, please reach out to us at www.gurianinstitute.com and info@gurianinstitute.com.