ATLANTA — Science teacher Daniel Thompson circulated among his sixth graders at Ron Clark Academy on a recent spring morning, spot checking their work and leading them into discussions about the day’s lessons on weather and water. He had a helper: As Thompson paced around the class, peppering them with questions, he frequently turned to a voice-activated AI to summon apps and educational videos onto large-screen smartboards.

When a student asked, “Are there any animals that don’t need water?” Thompson put the question to the AI. Within seconds, an illustrated blurb about kangaroo rats appeared before the class.

Thompson’s voice-activated assistant is the brainchild of computer scientist Satya Nitta, who founded a company called Merlyn Mind after many years at IBM where he had tried, and failed, to create an AI tool that could teach students directly. The foundation of that earlier, ill-fated project was IBM Watson, the AI that famously crushed several “Jeopardy!” champions. Despite Watson’s gameshow success, however, it wasn’t much good at teaching students. After plowing five years and $100 million into the effort, the IBM team admitted defeat in 2017.

“We realized the technology wasn’t there,” said Nitta, “and it’s still not there.”

Since the November 2022 launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, an expanding cast of AI tutors and helpers have entered the learning landscape. Most of these tools are chatbots that tap large language models — or LLMs — trained on troves of data to understand student inquiries and respond conversationally with a range of flexible and targeted learning assistance. These bots can generate quizzes, summarize key points in a complex reading, offer step-by-step graphing of algebraic equations, or provide feedback on the first draft of an essay, among other tasks. Some tools are subject-specific, such as Writable and Photomath, while others offer more all-purpose tutoring, such as Socratic (created by Google) and Khanmigo, a collaboration of OpenAI and Khan Academy, a nonprofit provider of online lessons covering an array of academic subjects.

As AI tools proliferate and their capabilities keep improving, relatively few observers believe education can remain AI free. At the same time, even the staunchest techno optimists hesitate to say that teaching is best left to the bots. The debate is about the best mix — what are AI’s most effective roles in helping students learn, and what aspects of teaching should remain indelibly human no matter how powerful AI becomes?

Skepticism about AI’s place in the classroom often centers on students using the technology to cut corners or on AI’s tendency to hallucinate, i.e. make stuff up, in an eagerness to answer every query. The latter concern can be mitigated (albeit not eliminated) by programming bots to base responses on vetted curricular materials, among other steps. Less attention, however, is paid to an even thornier challenge for AI at the heart of effective teaching: engaging and motivating students.

Nitta said there’s something “deeply profound” about human communication that allows flesh-and-blood teachers to quickly spot and address things like confusion and flagging interest in real time.

He joins other experts in technology and education who believe AI’s best use is to augment and extend the reach of human teachers, a vision that takes different forms. For example, the goal of Merlyn Mind’s voice assistant is to make it easier for teachers to engage with students while also navigating apps and other digital teaching materials. Instead of      being stationed by the computer, they can move around the class and interact with students, even the ones hoping to disappear in the back.

Others in education are trying to achieve this vision by using AI to help train human tutors to have more productive student interactions, or by multiplying the number of students a human instructor can engage with by delegating specific tasks to AI that play to the technology’s strengths. Ultimately, these experts envision a partnership in which AI is not called on to be a teacher but to supercharge the power of humans already doing the job.

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Merlyn Mind’s AI assistant, Origin, was piloted by thousands of teachers nationwide this past school year, including Thompson and three other teachers at the Ron Clark Academy. The South Atlanta private school, where tuition is heavily subsidized for a majority low-income student body, is in a brick warehouse renovated to look like a low-slung Hogwarts, replete with an elaborate clocktower and a winged dragon perched above the main entrance.

As Thompson moved among his students, he wielded a slim remote control with a button-activated microphone he uses to command the AI software. At first, Thompson told the AI to start a three-minute timer that popped up on the smartboard, then he began asking rapid-fire review questions from a previous lesson, such as what causes wind. When students couldn’t remember the details, Thompson asked the AI to display an illustration of airflow caused by uneven heating of the Earth’s surface.

At one point, he clambered up on a student worktable while discussing the stratosphere, claiming (inaccurately) that it was the atmospheric layer where most weather happens, just to see if any students caught his mistake (several students reminded him that weather happens in the troposphere). Then he conjured a new timer and launched into a lesson on water by asking the AI assistant to find a short educational movie about fresh and saltwater ecosystems. As Thompson moved through the class, he occasionally paused the video and quizzed students about the new content.

Study after study has shown the importance of student engagement for academic success. A strong connection between teachers and students is especially important when learners feel challenged or discouraged, according to Nitta. While AI has many strengths, he said, “it’s not very good at motivating you to keep doing something you’re not very interested in doing.”

“The elephant in the room with all these chatbots is how long will anyone engage with them?” he said.

The answer for Watson was not long at all, Nitta recalled. In trial runs, some students just ignored Watson’s attempts to probe their understanding of a topic, and the engagement level of those who initially did respond to the bot dropped off precipitously. Despite all Watson’s knowledge and facility with natural language, students just weren’t interested in chatting with it.

Related: PROOF POINTS: AI essay grading is ‘already as good as an overburdened’ teacher, but researchers say it needs more work

At a spring 2023 TED talk shortly after launching Khanmigo, Sal Khan, founder and CEO of Khan Academy, pointed out that tutoring has provided some of the biggest jolts to student performance among studied education interventions. But, there aren’t enough human tutors available nor enough money to pay for them, especially in the wake of pandemic-induced learning loss.

Khan envisioned a world where AI tutors filled that gap. “We’re at the cusp of using AI for probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen,” he declared. “And the way we’re going to do that is by giving every student on the planet an artificially intelligent but amazing personal tutor.”

One of Khanmigo’s architects, Khan Academy’s chief learning officer, Kristen DiCerbo, was the vice president of learning research and design for education publisher Pearson in 2016 when it partnered with IBM on the Watson tutor project.

“It was a different technology,” said DiCerbo, recalling the laborious task of scripting Watson’s responses to students.

Since Watson’s heyday, AI has become a lot more engaging. One of the breakthroughs of generative AI powered by LLMs is its ability to give unscripted, human-like responses to user prompts.

To spur engagement, Khanmigo doesn’t answer student questions directly, but starts with questions of its own, such as asking if the student has any ideas about how to find an answer. Then it guides them to a solution, step by step, with hints and encouragement (a positive tone is assured by its programmers). Another feature for stoking engagement allows students to ask the bot to assume the identity of historical or literary figures for chats about their life and times. Teachers, meanwhile, can tap the bot for help planning lessons and formulating assessments. 

Notwithstanding Khan’s expansive vision of “amazing” personal tutors for every student on the planet, DiCerbo assigns Khanmigo a more limited teaching role. When students are working independently on a skill or concept but get hung up or caught in a cognitive rut, she said, “we want to help students get unstuck.”

Some 100,000 students and teachers piloted Khanmigo this past academic year in schools nationwide, helping to flag any hallucinations the bot makes and providing tons of student-bot conversations for DiCerbo and her team to analyze.

“We look for things like summarizing, providing hints and encouraging,” she explained. “Does [Khanmigo] do the motivational things that human tutors do?”

The degree to which Khanmigo has closed AI’s engagement gap is not yet known. Khan Academy plans to release some summary data on student-bot interactions later this summer, according to DiCerbo. Plans for third-party researchers to assess the tutor’s impact on learning will take longer.

Nevertheless, many tutoring experts stress the importance of building a strong relationship between tutors and students to achieve significant learning boosts. “If a student is not motivated, or if they don’t see themselves as a math person, then they’re not going to have a deep conversation with an AI bot,” said Brent Milne, the vice president of product research and development at Saga Education, a nonprofit provider of in-person tutoring.

Since 2021, Saga has been a partner in the Personalized Learning Initiative (PLI), run by the University of Chicago’s Education Lab, to help scale high-dosage tutoring — generally defined as one-on-one or small group sessions for at least 30 minutes every day. The PLI team sees a big and growing role for AI in tutoring, one that augments but doesn’t replicate human efforts.

For instance, Saga has been experimenting with AI feedback to help tutors better engage and motivate students. Working with researchers from the University of Memphis and the University of Colorado, the Saga team fed transcripts of their math tutoring sessions into an AI model trained to recognize when the tutor was prompting students to explain their reasoning, refine their answers or initiate a deeper discussion. The AI analyzed how often each tutor took these steps.  

When Saga piloted this AI tool in 2023, the nonprofit provided the feedback to their tutor coaches, who worked with four to eight tutors each. Tracking some 2,300 tutoring sessions over several weeks, they found that tutors whose coaches used the AI feedback peppered their sessions with significantly more of these prompts to encourage student engagement.

While Saga is looking into having AI deliver some feedback directly to tutors, it’s doing so cautiously, because, according to Milne, “having a human coach in the loop is really valuable to us.”

Related: How AI could transform the way schools test kids

In addition to using AI to help train tutors, the Saga team wondered if they could offload certain tutor tasks to a machine without compromising the strong relationship between tutors and students. Specifically, they understood that tutoring sessions were typically a mix of teaching concepts and practicing them, according to Milne. A tutor might spend some time explaining the why and how of factoring algebraic equations, for example, and then guide a student through practice problems. But what if the tutor could delegate the latter task to AI, which excels at providing precisely targeted adaptive practice problems and hints?

The Saga team tested the idea in their algebra tutoring sessions during the 2023-24 school year. They found that students who were tutored daily in a group of two had about the same gains in math scores as students who were tutored in a group of four with assistance from ALEKS, an AI-powered learning software by McGraw Hill. In the group of four, two students worked directly with the tutor and two with the AI, switching each day. In other words, the AI assistance effectively doubled the reach of the tutor.

Experts expect that AI’s role in education is bound to grow, and its interactions will continue to seem more and more human. Earlier this year, OpenAI and the startup Hume AI separately launched “emotionally intelligent” AI that analyzes tone of voice and facial expressions to infer a user’s mood and respond with calibrated “empathy.” Nevertheless, even emotionally intelligent AI will likely fall short on the student engagement front, according to Brown University computer science professor Michael Littman, who is also the National Science Foundation’s division director for information and intelligent systems.

No matter how human-like the conversation, he said, students understand at a fundamental level that AI doesn’t really care about them, what they have to say in their writing or whether they pass or fail algebra. In turn, students will never really care about the bot and what it thinks. A June study in the journal “Learning and Instruction” found that AI can already provide decent feedback on student essays. What is not clear is whether student writers will put in care and effort — rather than offloading the task to a bot — if AI becomes the primary audience for their work. 

“There’s incredible value in the human relationship component of learning,” Littman said, “and when you just take humans out of the equation, something is lost.”

This story about AI tutors was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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Music education advocates have been fighting back against school budget cuts by  claiming that that learning music makes kids better at learning other things.

Numerous studies have found that students who play an instrument tend to do better in school across a wide range of subjects, but not everyone agrees that music instruction is the reason why they do better.  It’s not clear whether music training sharpens the learning mind or if smarter and self-motivated kids are more likely to start (and stick with) music training in the first place—the classic causation versus correlation conundrum.  

In a September 2021 book Of Sound Mind (MIT Press), auditory neuroscientist Nina Kraus makes the case that budding musicians enjoy real brain gains that help them achieve beyond the school orchestra. The book covers a broad sweep of Kraus’s decades-long investigation into the hearing brain at her Brainvolts lab at Northwestern University, including two longitudinal studies of students in real-world music classes who showed improved language and reading skills that tracked with changes in their brain functioning compared to control group students.  

While much of Kraus’s focus is on reading and language skills, she says learning to play an instrument provides a workout for the whole brain.

“The hearing brain is vast,” she said. “It engages your sensory, cognitive, motor and reward systems so it affects how you understand, how you think, how you move and how information from all your senses comes together. That’s all involved in making sense of sound, and music is the jackpot.”

Her team’s first study followed a few dozen second-graders from lower-income families in Los Angeles who were new to playing music and were signed up for extracurricular instrumental lessons through the nonprofit Harmony Project. Because the program was oversubscribed, about half the kids were waitlisted for the first year of the two-year study and became the control group.  

At the study’s outset, the two groups were equivalent in IQ, reading proficiency and tests of hearing and sound processing (such as recalling and repeating a series of consonant and vowel sounds). But kids who spent two years learning instruments gained significant advantages in reading and sound processing scores, compared to control-group peers no matter what instruments they played.  

The benefits also registered in the brains of kids who learned music for two years. Scalp electrodes tapping mid-brain signals showed they differentiated between the sounds “ga” and “ba” with more speed and fidelity. 

According to Kraus, this measure of the brain’s ability to follow changes in pitch and timing is key “for learning to read and communicating through language,” including the ability to follow speech in noise, a crucial skill for learning any subject in crowded classrooms.

The Brainvolts team also found advantages for music learners—in both verbal tests and brain measures—in a second study that followed high-school students in Chicago public schools for three years. In this study, the students who didn’t learn instruments were enrolled in three years of Junior Reserve Officer Training (JROTC) programs, forming what’s known as an “active control group” to further distinguish the effects of music training compared to any other activity requiring the development of self-discipline, focused attention and determination. 

Other  research into musical training’s impact on non-music skills continues to yield mixed results. And studies that attempt to corral these findings and weigh their varying results, known as metaanalyses, come to disparate conclusions about whether the evidence largely supports broader cognitive benefits from learning an instrument, along with frequent tussles over the analysis done by other researchers.

Kraus contends that metaanalyses work well for drug studies but she questions their robustness for testing musical interventions that vary so widely—from the instruments and intensity of practice to the length of the study and the measured outcomes. 

As Kraus wrote in a 2020 American Scientist commentary, “One can’t condense music instruction into pill form. We were never enthusiastic about relying on simulacra of music instruction, such as two weeks of basic recorder training in a lab.”

She stands by her own lab’s approach, which combines lab work with well-controlled longitudinal studies that test both behavioral and brain responses to musical training.

“People always want a yes or no answer. But it depends,” she said. “It depends on context and how you interpret the data. It’s really about looking at the converging evidence, and from my point of view as a biologist, the converging evidence is extremely strong.”

This story about music education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletters.

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On one recent morning, the advanced biology class at the Utah County Academy of Sciences faced a grim assignment. Seated at folding tables and speaking through face masks, students at this STEM-focused charter high school tallied Covid-19 infection and death rates from one winter week — comparing national and statewide data with the virus’s toll at their school.

Fortunately, the school’s disease numbers weren’t real. Led by Micah Ross, a biology teacher, the academy was piloting an app-based pandemic simulation, part of  Operation Outbreak, a platform of lessons on infectious diseases and the public health response to their spread.

After learning about virus biology, immune response and past pandemics, more than 100 students and staff downloaded an app that tracked a virtual virus. The “virus”spread by Blue-tooth when participants were in close proximity for an extended time, and was slowed by digital masks and vaccines that students could get after taking quizzes based on the in-class lessons.

Co-created by an enterprising educator in Florida and some infectious disease researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Operation Outbreak predates the pandemic, and its developers are keen to expand its use beyond the current crisis. For those who piloted the simulation in this extraordinary year, though, the meta-pandemic experience showed what data reveals and conceals about the global struggle with Covid-19.

“Remember,” Ross said to her class at one point, “all these numbers represent people.”

The partnership behind Operation Outbreak began with an international crisis and a star-struck 6-year-old.

From 2014 to 2016, Ebola ravaged several West African countries, killing thousands and spreading isolated cases to both Europe and the United States. As health authorities struggled to contain a virus spreading across borders, a middle school civics teacher in Florida named Todd Brown saw a teachable moment:  Fighting threats like Ebola, he believed, was as much about government decisions, media coverage, international cooperation and public trust as it was about good science and heroic medical personnel. 

“The student engagement was so strong. We were really amazed by that.”

Andrés Colubri, assistant professor of bioinformatics and integrative biology at UMass Medical School, who led the creation of the Operation Outbreak app

Brown crafted civics lessons about outbreak response for his eighth graders at Sarasota Military Academy Prep, a charter middle school. In the spring of 2016, Brown, with the help of a few other teachers,  capped off the unit with a day of experiential learning, in which a couple hundred students roamed over the school grounds pretending to be government officials, epidemiologists, medical teams, media and members of the public as they confronted an infectious disease spreading through their ranks.

There was no app that first year. Instead, kids “infected” one another with stickers at designated times. “It was basically a scripted-out version of exponential spread,” explained Brown, who is leaving the school this summer to work full time with Operation Outbreak. The students’ goal was to contain the disease and use the evidence of its symptoms and spread to discover what it was (Ebola, MERS, bubonic plague, etc.) before it wiped out the whole population.

Related: How students learn from super-green schools that use zero energy

The next year, Brown’s simulated outbreak had a distinguished audience — Dr. Pardis Sabeti, a Harvard computational geneticist whose lab, affiliated with the Broad Institute, partners with scientists worldwide on infectious disease research and response. Brown had first contacted Sabeti a couple years earlier, after reading her Time magazine profile to his science-loving daughter, then 6 years old.

“We both thought she sounded amazing,” Brown recalled. “I asked my daughter if she would like me to reach out and get an autograph, and she was super excited.”

The autograph request (fulfilled) led to more conversations, a Skype visit by Sabeti with Brown’s class, and then the in-person visit with other members of her lab, who were impressed by Operation Outbreak and eager to lend their expertise.

At the time, one of the Sabeti Lab projects was developing models of disease spread that better accounted for the X factor of real human behavior. The researchers had hit on the idea of observing real people spreading a digital virus via Bluetooth around the same time that they observed Brown’s students scrambling to contain their sticker-based outbreak.

In the months that followed, one of Sabeti’s postdocs, Andrés Colubri, led the creation of  Operation Outbreak’s mobile app, in which a virtual virus can be customized for how infectious it is, how virulent and whether it spreads asymptomatically. On-screen emojis differentiated the healthy, the sick and the deceased. Participants could earn digital “masks” by taking in-app quizzes on topics such as epidemiology, historical pandemics and the role of the World Health Organization. Sabeti’s team returned to the Florida middle school in 2018 to help pilot the app.

“The student engagement was so strong. We were really amazed by that,” said Colubri, now an assistant professor of bioinformatics and integrative biology at UMass Medical School.

“Remember, all these numbers represent people.”

Micah Ross, biology teacher, Utah County Academy of Sciences

Meanwhile, the simulations grew increasingly elaborate. For instance, when Brown randomly allotted participants differing amounts of virtual money to buy personal protective equipment or the food they needed, one enterprising student with extra cash bought up all the PPE and resold it at a premium.

At one point, Brown’s students playing government officials fed false information to the “media” to convince the “public” to quarantine. Then the media found out the truth, and the public no longer trusted or complied with any public health restrictions, accelerating contagion. Some students tried to fake their infection status by displaying screenshots of the happy, healthy emoji. And in one incident, a student playing the role of a police officer panicked while confronting a classmate who refused to reveal his health status and “shot” him with a Nerf gun.

Related: Learning to teach from naughty avatars

In late 2019, reality caught up with Operation Outbreak. That year’s pandemic simulation coincidentally used a SARS-like virus with asymptomatic spread. As the real virus became a global pandemic in early 2020, the parallels were unmistakable. Both the simulated and the real pandemics were characterized by panic, hoarding and medical teams overwhelmed by the carnage, while superspreaders and misinformation hobbled containment efforts. Much as Covid-19 disproportionately affected  disadvantaged communities, the students randomly given fewer virtual dollars at the start of simulations got sick and died at higher rates than their “wealthier” classmates.

“The sociobehavioral parallels between our past simulations and the current pandemic are striking,” the Outbreak team wrote in a 2020 commentary for the journal “Cell.” “Simulations have repeatedly foreshadowed the political distrust and altercations that have increased alongside Covid-19 in the U.S.”

The value of pandemic education was suddenly evident. Plus, the data generated by simulations could serve as a guide for Covid-19 mitigation measures. In theory, for instance, a pandemic simulation could help school administrators show students and families the danger of superspreader events, or it could reveal the times and places where students had trouble staying socially distant.

Backed by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, the Outbreak team began crafting standards-aligned lesson plans in two broad categories — science and governance — that could be tailored to different levels of complexity.

They also partnered with Fathom Information Design, a  Boston firm  that helps organizations make use of their data, to create a dashboard that displayed time-lapse renderings of the simulation — participants were shown as numbered dots, color-coded according to infection status, that moved in and out of contact with one another, spreading the virtual virus, getting sick, and then recovering, or not.

But, there was a major catch.  While the real pandemic made Operation Outbreak extremely topical, it also made it far more challenging to implement. In the spring of 2020, most schools and colleges went remote and faced tremendous uncertainty about the next academic year.

“So many schools were going online, and then back in person, and then bouncing around,” Brown said. “We weren’t going to run a full-scale, totally immersive simulation like we ran in the past. It wouldn’t make sense to kind of force congregation in the middle of a pandemic.”

Instead, the team opted for what Brown called “a light-touch approach.”  In addition to piloting the draft lesson plans, both K-12 and university partners could run a scaled-back simulation stretched over several days, with participants going about their routines, with no role-playing or scientific mysteries to solve, but with optional quiz-earned digital masks and other protections.

And remote schooling wasn’t the only challenge. Some schools welcomed the experiential learning, but worried about the mental health ramifications for students acting out a pretend disaster in the midst of a devastatingly real one.

“You had to be sensitive that some of the people in your community may have lost loved ones,” said Karen Bruker, a science teacher at The Cambridge School of Weston, a private high school outside Boston. In the simulation Bruker led last November with about 100 students, participants could get very sick, but nobody died. School staff also stressed that the simulated virus was similar to the one causing Covid-19, but it was not meant to be a precise digital imitation of the real pathogen.

“We weren’t going to run a full-scale, totally immersive simulation like we ran in the past. It wouldn’t make sense to kind of force congregation in the middle of a pandemic.”

Todd Brown, Florida middle school civics teacher who led a pilot virus simulation

During a Zoom interview, Bruker shared the time-lapse display of a two-day simulated outbreak at her school. Starting at 8 a.m. on Day One, a few red dots of seeded “infections” moved through a constantly shifting web of gray dots, turning several more red before Bruker paused the playback at 10:30 a.m.

“We already had eight secondary infections at this point,” said Bruker, who had promptly emailed an update to students about the simulated surge, reminding them of social distancing and that a quiz for digital masks would soon be available. Participants, taking the hint, used the quiz to earn their masks, and secondary infections plummeted.

Related: A 17-year-old wants to spice up science classes and, eventually, democratize education

As usual, the simulated outbreaks revealed insights about human behavior along with lessons on viral contagion. At Brigham Young University, for instance, about 400 students in a nine-day pandemic simulation were offered a digital vaccine, obtained by scanning a QR code available in the university’s Life Sciences Building.  The vaccines were promoted via daily emails, but only 15 percent of the students bothered to scan the code.

The simulation’s lead organizer, Curtis Hoffmann, a senior microbiology major, noted that most participants in a pre-simulation survey said they had no hesitancy about getting the actual vaccine. He blamed the low digital follow-through partly on the inconvenience of its being offered  at just one location during a busy week that coincided with midterms.

“One of the takeaways we shared to the university’s Covid-19 committee was to suggest they offer the vaccine at multiple sites on campus,” said Hoffmann.

The real pandemic didn’t just make the simulation hyper-relevant, it also prompted discussions about the purpose and limitations of computer models for predicting disease. Back at the Utah County Academy of Sciences, for instance, Ross’s class discussed why 14 percent of their simulation participants had died, far outpacing the state and national death rates.

They noted how tenuous results are in a simulated pandemic spreading among just 111 people. They mentioned technical glitches with the app on some of their Chromebooks that disrupted some of the quizzes needed to earn a digital mask, and the fact that people who had been digitally “infected” in the simulation carpooled and came to school as they normally would, while in real life, truly ill students would stay home once they knew they were sick.  

Ross and her students talked about revisiting the simulation next year, involving more students, and they pondered how results might differ without a real pandemic lurking in the background.  

“If the pandemic isn’t currently raging, how would it change how you interact with your friends at school and outside school?” she asked.

Near the end of class, Ross asked her students what changes they would want in future pandemic simulations, and their answers revealed the real pandemic’s lessons. One suggested that the virus could mutate midsimulation. Another ventured that participants should be randomly sorted into different groups based on population vulnerabilities and preexisting medical conditions.

“Our data doesn’t personalize risk and variability,” he said. “You just see a bunch of dots.”

This story about a pandemic simulation was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.

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In some cities, school buses now deliver daily paper packets of schoolwork, along with bagged breakfasts and lunches. In others, schools use PBS’s “Nova” program to help teach science. Elsewhere, teachers hold daily virtual office hours to check on the academic and emotional well-being of students they can no longer meet face to face.

Faced with the unprecedented challenge of lengthy school closures because of coronavirus, the nation’s roughly 13,000 public school districts are scrambling to cope. Almost no district was truly ready to plunge into remote learning full time and with no end in sight. There is no one-size-fits-all remedy and no must-have suite of digital learning tools. Leaders have largely had to find their own way, spurring a hodgepodge of local innovations. As the struggle continues, a few overarching lessons learned — about equity, expectations and communication — are now helping schools navigate this crisis on the fly.

“Nobody knows the right path forward,” said Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a nonpartisan education research center in Seattle that has compiled an online database of coronavirus response plans provided by scores of districts across the country as a resource for other educators. “We’re all going to have to try things and give each other grace.”

Inequity looms large

After dealing with the first priority — making sure students were safe and fed — schools had to figure out how to keep the learning alive. But America’s persistent digital divide has greatly hampered efforts toward this goal. While most school buildings are fairly well stocked with computers and high-speed internet, millions of students’ homes are not, particularly in lower-income and rural areas.

This disparity in home computer and internet access, dubbed the “homework gap,” was a slow-burning problem for most districts in the days when schools were in session and students could get online at libraries, after-school programs, coffee shops and other community gathering spots.

With everything shut down, the chronic issue of home internet access became an immense and acute challenge. Indeed, because there was unequal access to learning, many districts initially shied away from offering anything educational at all online, sending only links to optional, self-directed activities, such as math games.

“We’re creating a [parent-teacher-district] feedback loop so we make sure that we’re seeing our situation clearly. We said, ‘Let’s do this in baby steps.’”

Mackey Pendergrast. Superintendent, Morris (N.J.) School District

Now, in an effort to narrow the digital access gap, school leaders and community partners have devised a bevy of creative, albeit short-term, solutions. In addition to the schoolwork packet deliveries and the PBS broadcasts, many districts have organized the distribution of Wi-Fi hot spots, computers and smartphones, including refurbished devices donated by local businesses (more than 80 percent of the districts in the reinvention center’s database say they are providing technology assistance to families).

Related: Teachers need lots of training to do online learning well. Coronavirus gave many just days.

Miami-Dade County Public Schools, for instance, sent home about 80,000 tablets and other mobile devices, and more than 11,000 smartphones that double as Wi-Fi hot spots. Many broadband providers are also adding capacity, lifting caps on data and offering extended free trial periods. In South Carolina, many of the same buses that take breakfasts and lunches to families stick around to beam out Wi-Fi from routers on board. (By mid-April, state officials said they had about 700 Wi-Fi buses on the move, in dozens of districts.)

By contrast, some districts had been bolstering their use of online learning for several years, including Lindsay Unified in California’s Central Valley, known as a pioneer in digital-learning circles. In Lindsay, a low-income, rural district, all students have home internet thanks to a community Wi-Fi network, and they can access lessons and track their progress via an online portal. Having that digital backbone made the switch to distance learning nearly seamless — academically, at least.

“We’re still concerned about the health and welfare of our learners, now that we don’t get to greet them every day,” said Barry Sommer, Lindsay Unified’s director of advancement. “We can’t see what they look like, if they’re getting enough sleep and enough to eat.”

Adjusting Expectations

The center’s database is filled with examples of how districts are trying to keep learning going from a distance. Many teachers use “synchronous” classes, where they and students meet simultaneously on platforms like Google Hangouts or Microsoft Teams. Some also record those lessons for students who can’t meet at the appointed hour. The Richmond (Va.) Public Schools offer on-demand online tutoring sessions. To boost parent participation, many districts offer webinars and other online instruction to help adults gain fluency in the schools’ digital tools and guide them through available resources. Some districts, such as Philadelphia and Miami-Dade, have set up phone hotlines in addition to email and web-based communication, in several languages, so families can reach out for help with distance learning or other needs.

“Even in a district that’s able to send every kid home with a laptop, you’re still trying to adapt a model that’s been designed for a classroom situation.” 

Steve Kossakoski, CEO, Virtual Learning Academy in New Hampshire

But experts emphasize that schools should not expect to replicate what they could achieve in the classroom, and should pursue an approach suited for their own students and teachers and their distance-learning capabilities. What works for a high school in a major urban area may not fit the needs of a rural elementary school. When it comes to technology, the best options for teachers during this crisis are usually the simplest.

Related: Has New Hampshire found the secret to online education that works?

Online education and remote education are two very different things, said Steve Kossakoski, CEO of the New Hampshire-based Virtual Learning Academy Charter School, or VLACS, which has been hosting free webinars for educators seeking digital-learning guidance.

“Even in a district that’s able to send every kid home with a laptop,” he said, “you’re still trying to adapt a model that’s been designed for a classroom situation.” Content aside, teachers in a classroom can walk among their students and provide immediate feedback, spot frustration or flagging attention, and assign students to work for a time in small groups — all of which is extremely difficult to manage online.

Kossakoski’s advice: “Keep it simple and be consistent.” Some of his webinar attendees have noticed that teachers in their schools are using different tools to reach the same students. “One teacher uses Zoom, another uses Google Hangouts and a third uses something else,” he said. “It’s not anybody’s fault, but for the student it’s very confusing.”

Nevertheless, teachers should use whatever level of technology they’re comfortable with, said Michael Barbour, associate professor of instructional design at the College of Education and Health Services at California’s Touro University: “Let’s not get too clever. When it comes to distance learning, you don’t have to be high-tech to be effective.”

He suggested, for example, that teachers could email students a video link to a news report of a controversial issue, or a historical documentary, along with a few key questions and a post-viewing writing prompt.

“For a lot of parents, students and teachers, remote learning will be completely new, and where it’s new, it’s important to set realistic goals every day,” said Susan Patrick, C.E.O. of the Aurora Institute, formerly known as iNACOL, an advocacy organization promoting competency-based education. These goals could include creating a schedule that sets aside time for reading a book or pursuing other projects that pry students away from the computer, including arts and crafts projects or learning a new skill, such as cooking.

In the first weeks of shutdowns, many districts followed state guidelines and offered only optional learning resources — things like practice sheets, educational videos and recommended reading — without teacher-led instruction or feedback or the expectation that the work would “count” in any way. They hesitated partly out of digital-equity concerns and partly for fear of transgressing federal laws on things like tracking of student progress and accommodations for students with disabilities (such as accepting student work in a variety of formats and providing tutors and speech therapy sessions).

The government has since relaxed many of those regulations, offering waivers for educators scrambling to serve their communities. At the same time, many districts have raised the bar for teaching and learning as it became clear that closures would stretch deep into the spring, and potentially for the rest of the academic year, as has now happened in 35 states.

Related: Coronavirus becomes unprecedented test for teacher-student relationships

By early April, some large school districts, such as those in Chicago and Minneapolis, had begun phasing out their optional-only approach in favor of standards-based lessons, with teachers taking attendance and providing feedback, tests and grades. Many of these same districts are using only review material, switching to pass/fail grading, or giving tests that gauge progress but no final exams.

Some tried a more rigorous approach early on, despite the shortcomings.

“When we first went out, and we were distributing all these Chromebooks on the fly, we thought about just having it be optional, extended learning,” said Pamela Swanson, superintendent of Westminster Public Schools outside Denver. But then “we agreed that kids need to be in class, so to speak.” The district already had an internal learning-management system that housed lesson plans, organized assignments and tracked student progress online, she said. Now, with students logging into it from home, “this is school until further notice.”

Rhode Island began planning for distance learning in late February — a week or two before most places — after the state’s first known coronavirus case was traced to a school trip to Italy. The state’s department of education immediately asked school districts to start planning for possible closures, and soon moved up spring break to give schools time to intensify preparations, including all-out efforts to get devices and Wi-Fi into students’ homes.

“This wasn’t about whether we’ll do it or not,” said the state’s commissioner of education, Angélica Infante-Green. “That never crossed our minds. It was about, ‘How will we do it?’ ”

Districts need to try things before they’re fully worked out, said Chelsea Waite, a research fellow at the Christensen Institute who focuses on blended and personalized learning. That demands a fluid, iterative approach, one that seeks and adjusts to feedback.

For example, in New Jersey, the Morris School District’s “virtual learning hub” includes surveys, divided by grade level, that ask parents how things are going (how much help children need from them or older siblings, for example, and whether the resources are easily accessible and the workload seems appropriate). And when teachers try out digital techniques learned from the district’s online professional development offerings, they can share their problems and successes during daily virtual meetings with their principals, who themselves have regular check-ins with the district’s central office.

“We’re creating a feedback loop so we make sure that we’re seeing our situation clearly,” said the Morris superintendent, Mackey Pendergrast. “We said, ‘Let’s do this in baby steps.’”

Communication Is Key

In some districts, teachers and staff spend hours every day reaching out to students and their families, many of whom are stretched thin by job losses, child care stress, overdue rent and health worries that can take precedence over learning.

Indeed, on the front lines of remote learning, the watchword is communication — and not just to keep families informed about lunch drop-offs, volunteer needs, hotlines or links to digital resources. Personal communication is also needed to maintain the critical connections that support learning, especially the strong bonds teachers have developed with students over months spent working side by side.

The most important thing, said Barbour of Touro University, “is to reassure these kids that there’s someone out there — whether it’s on the other end of an email, a phone call or an online learning tool — who cares about them and wants them to learn and succeed.”

“We flipped this switch almost literally overnight. We need to continually talk to our teachers about giving them grace.” 

Pamela Swanson, superintendent of Westminster Public Schools, near Denver

As Kossakoski of VLACS attests, “the number-one thing to do for success in an online environment is to build relationships. It takes a lot of work and a lot of time.”

It’s not just teacher-student relationships that need bolstering. By default, parents and guardians are now being called on to help students stay on task or deal with real-time learning difficulties, despite the challenges they themselves face. Some students are caring for younger siblings; some parents need school messages translated into other languages. All parents need guidance from education professionals, said Kossakoski, “to help them understand how they can help.”

The communication is even more important for special education students. “We asked all our special educators to make contact with families at the same frequency they would a kid in school,” said Traci Hogan, assistant superintendent of Greenville County Schools, the largest district in South Carolina.

Finally, teachers and administrators need to check in with each other, too, as they confront this crisis while siloed at home, often with their own stir-crazy children and the overarching stress and worry of a deadly pandemic.

“We flipped this switch almost literally overnight,” Swanson said. “We need to continually talk to our teachers about giving them grace. We don’t expect you to be experts in this right away.”

She added: “That’s a tough message for teachers, because they want to be perfect. But that’s not possible.”

This story about distance learning was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.

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 A lot has been written about the “homework gap” in recent years, meaning the disadvantage placed on students in low-income and rural areas where they can’t get speedy internet service to keep up with the expectations schools increasingly have for student online access. Some rural districts have started building their own broadband networks, and many others had hoped to follow their lead using a chunk of bandwidth long ago set aside by the federal government for educational purposes.

Those hopes were dashed last week, when the FCC revised its rules and decided to sell licenses to that bandwidth at open auction. At issue is a small slice of electromagnetic spectrum—the frequencies that carry wireless signals for everything from remote controls to radio—that the government carved out more than 50 years ago for instructional television, and later designated Educational Broadband Service, or EBS, for the internet age. Now, on the cusp of issuing a bunch of new EBS licenses that will cover huge swaths of rural America, the FCC decided to turn EBS over to the free market.

The minimal educational-use requirements for EBS spectrum are no more. Even more disappointing to rural education advocates was the FCC’s decision to axe a proposal that schools and education nonprofits get first dibs on new spectrum licenses before a competitive bidding process opens (a pre-auction window for Native American tribes was kept).

Related: Will a new push for free wireless internet help rural students get online?

“We are heartbroken,” said Tom Rolfes, education IT manager for the Nebraska Information Technology Commission. Rolfes’s group is part of a Nebraska initiative to wirelessly extend school broadband into rural communities where more than a third of the students have no broadband access at home, according to a state study. The Nebraskans already have the wired backbone of their network in place, connecting all their schools. They also have towers ready to blast high-speed internet into surrounding communities. What they don’t have is legal access to spectrum to carry the signal.

In June, the Department of Education urged the FCC commissioner to “maintain and modernize the current educational priority of EBS,” which meant keeping pre-auction access to spectrum licenses for schools and their partner organizations. The Western Governors’ Association made a similar written appeal to FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, but to no avail.

“It’s surprising to me that the Commission says to the Department of Education and to the representatives of rural America, ‘We don’t care about your perspective,’ ” said Reg Leichty, a legal and policy consultant for CoSN (the Consortium for School Networking).

Backers of the FCC’s decision, however, call it an overdue fix for an antiquated program that tied up a valuable resource with red tape and never lived up to its educational mission. Many schools and nonprofits previously granted spectrum didn’t have the wherewithal to use it themselves and instead leased it to commercial telecoms.

“Overall, it’s the right move,” said Joe Kane, a technology policy fellow at the R Street Institute, a free-market think tank. “We’ve kind of realized that schools aren’t necessarily the best at operating broadband networks, so we should let people specialize.”

Few would argue that EBS worked as intended. The program had grown into a tangle of outdated government directives and shadowy lease deals hidden behind non-disclosure agreements. But, rural education advocates argue that rapid changes in technology and public-private partnerships now make DIY broadband networks feasible for rural districts that, a decade ago, would never have dared such projects (we wrote about a few of these efforts here).

“The equipment is now off-the-shelf, and there are several school districts that have already deployed EBS networks,” said John Windhausen Jr. executive director of the Schools, Health, and Libraries Broadband Coalition, a nonprofit that advocates for affordable broadband for public institutions. “This is not a field of dreams scenario. We have evidence out there that schools can make good use of this spectrum.”

Related: A school district is building a DIY broadband network

Of course, districts and their nonprofit allies can still bid for the spectrum licenses, but these groups suspect they’ll have little chance against national telecoms, which see the EBS frequencies as perfect for the latest 5G networking technologies.

The FCC doesn’t consider that a problem. Quite the contrary. According to an FCC “fact sheet” on their EBS decisions, a free-market approach to issuing the new licenses is “far more likely to deliver value to educational institutions and to help close the digital divide than the status quo.”

Indeed, the FCC’s ruling stipulates that new license holders build a broadband network rather than sit on their spectrum rights or resell them. Specifically, they’ll have eight years to cover 80 percent of the population in their licensed area.

But education advocates like Windhausen say the profit motive will keep putting the most sparsely populated areas last, just as it has done with existing commercial broadband networks. For districts in such areas, by contrast, “there’s much more urgency for schools to address the needs of all their students right away,” he said.

Jason Eyre, technology department coordinator for Utah’s Murray City School district and a leader in his state’s rural broadband effort, said “We were devastated by the FCC’s decision.” But with EBS off the table, he added, “we’ll look at other parts of the spectrum that could help us achieve our goal and get our kids connected.”

This story about educational broadband service was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our newsletters.

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PORTOLA VALLEY, Calif. – Frame by frame, the simple round face sketched by seventh grader Annabelle Bechtel erupted into laughter in stop-motion animation, as she and her classmate Audrey Chung wove the face into a video they were making to explain satire. Other students were making their own videos, about foreshadowing, metaphor and other literary devices.

The kids worked at tables surrounded by craft supplies, 3-D printers and woodworking tools in the maker space of Corte Madera School, a public school for grades 4 to 8 nestled in the San Mateo County hills. Bechtel could readily recite the definition of satire. But what else was she learning in this maker space? With scarcely a month left in the school year, why was it worth spending time making videos rather than covering the next academic standard?

Backers of project-based learning, and its hands-on relative, maker education, would argue that activities like these not only deepen understanding of academic content but also bolster creativity, persistence, problem-solving and related skills that are critical for success in a rapidly changing world.

But assessing these skills has been a weak link in these efforts, according to the education researchers at the MIT Playful Journey Lab, which hopes to remedy that with “playful assessment” tools. The term describes game-like measures of knowledge and abilities, but also the tracking of skill development in playful learning activities, which was piloted over the past year by middle school teachers at Corte Madera and at Community Public Charter School in Charlottesville, Va., also known as Community Middle, part of the Albemarle County district. The goal is to blend mini-evaluations into learning activities, collecting evidence about student choices and behaviors throughout the process, rather than focusing on just the final result.

“We want to support teachers who are fighting for these types of activities and future-ready skills and [who] still get lots of questions about why we should care about this,” said YJ Kim, the Lab’s executive director.

Maker-education advocates have a lot of student success stories to share but, so far, not a lot of data. Measurable results could help convince cautious administrators and skeptical parents that kids should spend more time on open-ended, creative pursuits rather than reading more books or memorizing the formulas and facts that burnish grade-point averages and standardized test scores. Plus, evidence-based assessments could improve the overall quality of project-based learning by helping educators tailor projects to specific skills and vet a lesson’s overall effectiveness.

It’s a daunting task, as evidenced by this past year’s pilot, which was a tale of two schools. MIT’s assessment tools were a great fit at Community Middle, which is an experimental “lab school” for its district and already steeped in interdisciplinary, project-based learning. But most schools are more like Corte Madera – governed by schedules, academic standards, report cards and other ties to traditional measures of student achievement – and there, the pilot was a mix of triumph and struggle.

During a break from her stop-motion work, Bechtel rattled off the “maker elements” she had used while creating her video. The Playful Journey Lab team identified seven of these elements, ranging from iterating designs through multiple drafts to trying new ideas and learning from failure (dubbed “productive risk-taking”), as skills to be practiced during maker projects.

“Definitely social scaffolding,” said Bechtel, using the pilot’s jargon for collaboration, “because I have a partner, and we’re working together all the time.”

She then pointed to the stapled papers of her video’s detailed storyboard. “There’s the whole design process, too, because there were so many drafts of this,” she said, adding that she and Chung did lots of trouble-shooting  – another element – to fix technical glitches with the video editing software.

Related: A rural Montana district goes all in for maker spaces

Individually, none of these elements are new to the world of maker education. But the MIT team; its collaborators, including the Berkeley nonprofit Maker Ed, and the pilot teachers all put considerable time into assembling, debating and refining the final list. (The pilot is backed by the National Science Foundation.)

Throughout 2018, members of the Playful Journey Lab met three times with three Corte Madera teachers – Sarrie Paguirigan, the maker-space coach, ELA teacher Donna Kasprowicz, and Teresa Richard, who teaches science and math — looking for places in their lesson plans that could accommodate hands-on collaboration.

The researchers also created activities to help the teachers and students better understand what the maker elements meant, and what they might look like in action.

For example, first, the students read true stories about inventors, engineers and scientists that featured a number of these same skills. They were then asked to imagine each of the elements they’d identified in the biographies as super powers, and to design a cape that the profiled person might wear as a superhero showing off his or her particular powers.

“I said to the kids, we’re going to think differently and try this,” said Kasprowicz. “We spent a long time defining and talking about the maker elements. I said, ‘There will be no grades on this, but you will be assessed as best I can with the maker elements, and then you will use them, as well.”

The seven maker elements were prominently featured on a poster in the maker space, where Kasprowicz moved from table to table, answering questions and helping students get unstuck. At one point, she showed off the wooden puppet stage that another class had built and skeletal puppet prototypes made of dry ziti and wires, which the students would use to perform the “fractured fairy tale” scripts they wrote in class.

The writing had been priority number one, she explained, and the kids had to get their scripts right before any making began. Indeed, “content knowledge” is the final maker element on the poster, and it was controversial among the Playful Journey team. Some researchers felt that schools already paid too much attention to learning facts, dates and formulas, and that existing tests and quizzes amply covered that knowledge.

The fact remains, however, that while teachers may care a lot about creativity, collaboration and problem-solving, they are primarily accountable for content.

“If you ignore content, then the assessment is never going get used in the classroom,” said Kim.

When Kasprowicz introduced the collaboration on a back-to-school night last fall, one parent accused her of abandoning reading and writing instruction. “She was appalled,” recalled Kasprowicz, who tried to reassure the parent that students would never set foot in the maker space until they had fully covered the academic concepts at a project’s core.

Kasprowicz collaborated with Paguirigan on several maker projects throughout the year, but Richard made only two maker-space forays. Her science classes are lab-focused, she explained, and lab work is sufficiently hands-on and full of maker elements. “The kids are definitely iterating and problem solving,” she said. “We do a lot of collaboration, too. That’s basic science.”

By contrast, at Community Middle, the other school in the pilot, classrooms aren’t divided into science or math or ELA, and neither are student schedules. Instead, the school day revolves around two large chunks of interdisciplinary project time.

“We’ve long had maker-infused learning, and the students loved that time,” said Stephanie Passman, the lead teacher. “They knew they were learning something,” she said, but before learning the maker elements, “they couldn’t put into words why it mattered.”

Over a lunch of vegetable pizza and iced tea served in her classroom at Corte Madera, Kasprowicz shared a little note that a student had dashed off about a classmate’s collaboration during a recent project. These notes, written by teachers or students whenever they see someone exhibit a maker element, are called “sparkle sleuths.”

Related: Project-based learning and standardized tests don’t mix

They were one of two assessment tools in the pilot. The other, called “maker moments,” is essentially a paper scorecard featuring two or three maker elements coded by color. Every time a student demonstrated one of the targeted skills, a teacher, a classmate or even the student in question would fill in a little circle with the corresponding color.

Both tools are meant to be used quickly and repeatedly throughout a project, Kim explained.

“As researchers, we didn’t know how much these tools could be embedded without disrupting the flow of making,” Kim said.

At Corte Madera, that was a challenge. Neither Richard nor Kasprowicz had much time to use the tools themselves in addition to answering questions from students and keeping them on task.

“I’m just one teacher trying to monitor a science lab with 20 or more kids,” Richard explained. “More important than filling out a slip saying you did a great job iterating your design is making sure the kids aren’t burning themselves.”

As a result, outside of her two maker-space collaborations, for which she had the help of other teachers and teacher aides, Richard did not use the playful assessment tools with her students.

And Kasprowicz found the huge stacks of paper designated for sparkle sleuths and maker moments overwhelming.

“I couldn’t teach,” she said. “I couldn’t get on my knees to see what my kids are doing, because I’m too busy trying to fill out all these things.”

So she delegated the playful assessment duties to students, at one point giving a student from each project group the sole task of sparkle sleuth writing, and she switched from paper to a digital format to make it easier to collect and distribute them.

Even then, the task was difficult. Sometimes students made incisive observations of maker elements in action, but often enough, Kasprowicz said, “when I looked at their comments, they were really boring.” One sparkle sleuth, for instance, described a fellow student’s troubleshooting episode simply as “working to fix a mistake by figuring out what to do next.”

At Community Middle, teachers and students had a much easier time adapting to this. They readily folded evidence from the playful assessments into existing weekly goal-setting meetings, advisory sessions and student self-reflections. “That reflection piece is really valuable,” Passman said.

Yet to be resolved is the final and most difficult piece of the puzzle: How should playful assessment data be interpreted?

Traditional testing is simple — a percentage of correct answers equals a letter grade. But how should teachers interpret a stack of sparkle sleuths and maker moments in order to guide instruction, communicate goals to students and parents and indicate a student’s progress? Separately from the pilot, the MIT researchers have proposed organizing the data into “field guides” that can show a student’s growth in the maker elements over time. But how to gauge that progress is still an open question for the researchers and their classroom collaborators.

Related: How to unlock students’ internal drive for learning

Before that question can be answered, they need to convince more educators, students and communities that there’s value in the kind of learning represented by the maker elements, and a need to track its progress.

Such a case seemed to be building in the Corte Madera maker space when another class – eighth graders this time – got to work on their literary device videos.

While assembling an irony video, Evan Demas and Connor Engel recalled a recent class discussion about what had and had not worked with the maker elements that year.

“For some of the projects, it seemed like maybe the only reason we did them was for the maker elements, and they didn’t necessarily have anything to do with what we’d learned in class,” said Engel. “They seemed a little bit far-fetched.”

But this video project was different, Demas offered. Not only did he and his classmates have to collaborate a bunch, and trouble shoot, and bridge their knowledge – another maker element – from previous experience with the video software, he said, “but we’re weaving these maker elements into an actual English project.”

Meanwhile, all three of the pilot teachers at Corte Madera agreed with the importance of the maker elements. And Paguirigan, who also leads maker projects at the district’s K-3 school, intentionally uses the same language to talk about the skills she wants the children there to learn and practice. 

“These aren’t just for the maker space. I look at these as life skills,” said Paguirigan. “I want them to be intuitive.”

This story about maker education testing was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter. 

The post Can “playful assessments” tell us whether maker education works? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

A few years ago, Amy Lopes, a veteran fifth-grade teacher in Providence, Rhode Island, learned that teachers at her school could try a mindfulness and yoga training along with their students. Her immediate reaction: “What a bunch of baloney!”

“I said, ‘OK, I’ll try it, but it’s not going to work,’ ” recalled Lopes, who teaches at the William D’Abate Elementary School. “But, within a couple weeks, I just let go and became a learner along with my students, and my whole world has changed.”

That training was given by a nearby nonprofit that had recently changed its name — from Resilient Kids to the Center for Resilience — because, said founder and executive director Vanessa Weiner, whenever trainers visited a school to work with students, “we kept hearing from teachers who said, ‘We need this, too.’ ”

Teacher stress is growing, experts say, pushing educators out of classrooms and hurting learning. On top of chronic underfunding for education and the continued pressure of standardized tests, there’s also the unrelenting pace of newer education reforms.

The mounting stress levels have sparked a trend of “resilience” trainings and workshops, which typically include yoga, mindfulness and meditation. Some educators worry that the push for resilience lets a broken system off the hook, arguing that more energy should go toward fixing what causes stress, not just helping teachers endure it.

“As we can see from the abysmal teacher attrition rates still going on, we need to do something more than just ask teachers to buck up and meditate,” said Jason Margolis, a Duquesne University professor of education.

But backers of these programs say that frazzled, emotionally exhausted teachers need coping strategies now, and that need isn’t likely to disappear anytime soon.

Teaching ranks among the most stressful professions, according to Gallup research from 2014, in which about half of teachers reported high daily stress at work, tying medical professionals for the most-stressful jobs.

While it’s hard to say precisely how much stress educators face, experts say the sources of stress have multiplied in recent years, including a constant stream of new reform efforts, ranging from technology platforms to personalized learning initiatives.

“Too often in school transformation efforts, nobody acknowledges up front that it’s going to be a slog, even when everybody in these schools wants to do something different,” said Deborah Delisle, president of the nonprofit Alliance for Excellent Education, and a former assistant secretary of elementary and secondary education in the Obama administration. “You have to recognize that before you get to the other side of that transformation, your stress is going to skyrocket.”

Teacher stress fuels turnover, and staff shortages are hitting districts nationwide. About 8 percent of teachers leave the profession annually, and only half of those leaving retire, according to a 2017 report by the Learning Policy Institute, an education think tank. The biggest reason non-retiring teachers leave the classroom, the report noted, is dissatisfaction at work (55 percent).

Related: Can mental health training for teachers reduce preschool suspensions?

Among teachers who stay on the job, about 28 percent are “chronically absent” (more than 10 school days a year), according to the most recent Department of Education statistics, which cover the 2015-16 academic year. While teachers can miss work for any number of reasons, stress can trigger a slew of physical ailments, such as migraines, asthma, obesity and heart disease. Indeed, that’s why wellness — eating right, exercising and rest—features prominently in many teacher stress management plans, including the ones developed for the Atlanta schools working with Georgia State University’s Center for Research on School Safety, School Climate, and Classroom Management.

The center’s original mandate was to study a range of student mental health and safety issues, such as bullying. But the director, Kris Varjas, said that local school leaders kept telling researchers, “What we’re really concerned about is the stress level of teachers.”

When stressed teachers quit, it’s often called burnout, but Doris Santoro, a Bowdoin College education professor, dislikes that term. Burnout, she said, wrongly implies that the ex-teachers simply weren’t up to the challenge of their profession. According to Santoro, it isn’t workload that usually pushes teachers out of the profession but rather a disconnect between “deeply held values about what teaching is and what students need, and what school leaders expect them to do.”

Santoro, who published a book last year about why teachers quit, said school reform initiatives often rely on prepackaged curricula, for example, that rob teachers of the flexibility to adapt lessons to students and find creative ways to engage them. Frustration can build even when teachers agree with the premise of a reform.

“Maybe they think what they’re being asked to do is great, but they’re being pulled into a training once a week and can’t get any purchase in their classrooms,” she said. “If you look more deeply, teacher stress is often about teachers being frustrated with something that’s not succeeding with their students.”

The attention now being paid to teacher stress sprang from the recent and growing focus on student stress and its impact on learning. The Center for Resilience, for instance, offers teachers a two-part training — first, building their own practice of mindfulness and self-care; then, a second round to help bring mindfulness to their classrooms, with breathing techniques, glitter jars (which students shake and silently watch settle) and other practices such as body scans (closed-eyes focusing of attention on different regions of one’s body).

“Teachers are trying to manage classrooms just by saying, ‘Calm down and pay attention,’ but we need to give kids the tools to be able to do those things,” said Weiner, and teachers need to practice those skills before they can pass them on to students. “The analogy is that you can’t teach somebody to play piano if you don’t know how to play piano.”

Lopes, the fifth-grade teacher in Providence, credits mindfulness with a big drop in student behavior issues, and for helping de-stress her own hectic life, which includes two kids, elderly relatives she cares for and additional work hours at her after-school program.

“Mindfulness has allowed me to focus on what has to get done,” said Lopes, “and not to judge myself so harshly if I forget one or two things.”

Studies also suggest that lower teacher stress improves student learning. In 2017, for example, University of Missouri researchers compared students’ behavior problems and their math and reading scores with their teachers’ self-reported stress levels and coping abilities. Students with low-stress teachers had the highest test scores and the best behavior. What’s more, in classes led by highly stressed teachers, students’ behavior and math test scores got worse when those teachers reported less ability to cope with their stress (there was no significant change in reading scores).

Related: A cheaper, quicker approach to social-emotional learning?

Of course, these results show correlation, not causation. Does teacher stress contribute to student academic and behavior struggles, or is it the other way around?

“I suspect the relationship is reciprocal. They build off each other,” said the study’s lead author, Keith Herman, who wrote the book “Stress Management for Teachers” (2014) with study co-author and fellow education professor Wendy Reinke.

Patricia Jennings, a University of Virginia professor of education, agrees, calling it the “burnout cascade.”

“I spent many years observing classrooms, and what I saw blew my mind,” said Jennings, recalling a period earlier in her career when she helped young teachers improve their classroom management. “The teachers’ own stress levels and emotional reactivity were causing problems in their classrooms.” Emotionally exhausted teachers were more likely to overreact to minor student stumbles, and such reactions spiked student stress in turn, leading to more discipline issues, and so on, spiraling downward.

“You can’t learn when you’re stressed,” said Jennings. With adrenaline and cortisol coursing through your veins, you can’t think deeply about a problem, or immerse yourself in a book, which is partly why schools have been adding “social-emotional learning” lessons to help students cultivate empathy, resolve conflicts and manage their emotions. But, it’s hard to calm kids down with stressed-out teachers.

“I believe that teacher and student stress underlie a lot of our problems with learning,” said Jennings. “If we want to improve our test scores, then let’s all calm down.”

To that end, Jennings has spent more than a decade working with colleagues on a 30-hour mindfulness-based professional development program for teachers called CARE (Cultivating Awareness and Resilience in Education). As part of the training, stretched across several weeks, teachers explore the cognitive and physical links to their emotions in order to better regulate them, and they role-play stressful classroom situations to practice mindful responses.

CARE proved effective in a 2017 clinical trial, in which 224 elementary school teachers interested in the training were randomly assigned to a participant group or to a control group that was waitlisted until the research was complete. Using a combination of teacher questionnaires and classroom observations, Jennings and her team found that CARE increased teachers’ control of their emotions and reduced their stress, while also improving their sleep and making them feel less hurried overall.

But schools don’t often put time or resources into fighting teacher stress until it grows into a serious problem and teachers are eyeing the exits, said Jennings.

“There’s going to be a crisis coming soon, if there isn’t one already,” she said, noting teacher shortages and lower enrollment in teacher preparation programs. “Unfortunately, it may require a crisis for society to pay attention.”

Early on a recent Saturday, about 100 Boston-area educators filled a local high school cafeteria that had been cleared of tables to make space for yoga mats and was softly lit by a winter sun. The gathering was part of a 200-hour training in mindfulness, meditation, yoga instruction and community building offered in several cities by a company called Breathe for Change, based in Madison, Wisconsin.

That Saturday was the fourth of 18 sessions in the Breathe for Change program, and the lead trainer, Tui Roper, announced that the day’s theme was gratitude.

“As teachers, we have trouble accepting gratitude. We brush it off a lot: ‘This is our job.’ And so, we block that gift of gratitude,” Roper told the assembled, before instructing half of them to form an inward-facing circle and close their eyes.

The rest of the teachers paced silently around the circle’s perimeter, and every minute or so Roper prompted them to touch the shoulder of anyone who had inspired them, taught them something, brought them joy or whom they loved, et cetera. As the shoulder touches continued, a second trainer walked inside the circle with a box of tissues as, one by one, the teachers gave in and cried.

Related: Teacher shortages force districts to use online programs

Later, during a break, several of the teachers explained why they were there. Some said they were struggling to help students who were experiencing poverty or other trauma.

“We need to be not only teachers, but social workers, and nurses, and mommies, and daddies sometimes,” observed Danita Kelley-Brewster, assistant principal of Boston’s Charles H. Taylor Elementary School.

Other participants were simply worn out. “I love my students. I don’t want to leave teaching,” said Amy Martinez, an English teacher with the Central Massachusetts Collaborative, a multi-site special education partnership in Worcester.  “But I just felt really empty. Emotionally, I was at the end of my rope.”

Still, some education experts question the focus on teacher resilience.

Margolis has looked at ways schools can cultivate teacher-leaders to shepherd big new initiatives, “rather than bring in a lot of outside consultants to do top-down professional development.”

In one model, trained teacher-leaders spend about half their time in their own classrooms and half coaching their colleagues, including co-teaching classes. “And when they meet, they talk about how to roll a reform out in a teacher-centered way, which often includes dealing with the stress of it,” said Margolis. “If it’s done well, then you get open honest dialogue about what’s working and what’s not, and ‘How can we make this work at our school with our kids in a way that’s least stressful?’ ”

Backers of resilience training say it’s a matter of triage, and they need to help educators who are struggling right now.

Indeed, the large crowd of teachers at the Boston training was testament to the growing demand for coping skills. Not only did the participants give up several months of Saturdays, but most of them paid the $2,650 tuition themselves (Breathe for Change offers needs-based scholarships).

Proponents contend that more-resilient teachers make a stronger foundation to push for broader changes, both school and districtwide. According to Janet Baird, an associate with Bright Morning Consulting, which helps district leaders and teacher coaches add mindfulness to their usual focus on instruction and assessments, “If we boost the resilience of individual educators, then they’ll have more energy to address the organizational and systemic issues.”

Likewise, Kirsten Olson, founder of Old Sow Coaching and Consulting, which helps schools navigate transformation, argues that school leaders encouraging discussions about teacher stress can be a powerful first step toward an overall change in school culture. It’s not easy to make room for these tough conversations in a workplace where, traditionally, Olsen said, “all the professional development has to fit into 90 minutes, once a month, on a Wednesday afternoon.”

At Breathe for Change, the focus starts with the “transformation of self,” then broadens to a focus on “transformation of relationships” and the “transformation of community.” During a midday break at the Boston training, teachers sat on their yoga mats and ate packed lunches. Leaning against a wall, Martinez, the Worcester English teacher, looked forward to the outward-focused sessions, but was happy, for now, to give her own psyche some TLC. She recalled the first Saturday of training, when she walked in not knowing anyone.

“We started in a big circle, and just to know that there were 100 other educators here who understood what I’m dealing with, emotionally and academically, all the pieces of it,” she said. “There was already a sense of community and connectedness that was very uplifting.”

Martinez now starts her mornings with a brief guided meditation she found on YouTube. “I get to work with a much better spirit,” she said. “I always had a joy in my work, but my energy was down. Now. I feel my energy is coming back, and I feel like my old self a little bit.”

This story about resilience training exercises was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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PORTLAND, Maine — On a recent fall morning in the library of King Middle School here, four seventh-grade girls interviewed an immigrant from Peru named Luis Millones, now a Spanish professor at Colby College. One girl asked Millones what he missed about the country he left nearly three decades ago.

“I miss the sound of the language, because it kind of fades away,” he said. “I miss the sunset over the ocean. I miss the smell of earth in the highlands right after it rains. I miss also some tastes, like Peruvian chili and fruits like the lucuma, which I can never find anywhere else.”

The girls took turns asking Millones other questions. Why did he come to America? What were his first impressions? Did he ever feel mistreated as an immigrant? They split up other tasks, too, such as note taking, video recording, requesting photographs and emailing follow-up questions.

In the weeks ahead, the girls would weave the interview and their own research into four individual narratives about Millones, one of several immigrants telling their stories at King, where nearly a quarter of the students were born overseas. The writing and photos would be bound into a book and sold to parents and others, with proceeds donated to a local nonprofit helping new immigrants.

The project typifies the mix of personalized and social learning that’s been a mainstay for 25 years at King, a founding member of a school network called EL Education. It sets these schools apart from a more recent wave of personalized learning, which is often dominated by technology and dogged by  criticism that it isolates students from each other and from learning’s larger purpose.

“We’re at a very important moment, because personalized learning is everywhere right now, and it’s been taken up by big funders, so everybody wants to say they’re doing it,” said Ron Berger, EL’s chief academic officer. “But there’s no common definition yet for what personalized learning actually is.”

EL’s definition puts two elements at its core: “expeditionary learning” projects and small groups of students called Crews who stick together from grade to grade and meet daily along with a teacher adviser to support and challenge each other. The model won’t work everywhere, But it’s now used in about 150 schools in more than 30 states, and the nonprofit’s leaders have recently stepped up efforts to spread their approach.

Elsewhere at King, about a dozen seventh-graders sat in a circle of chairs, the desks pushed against the walls. For the next hour, they weren’t classmates, they were crewmates, aka “crewbies.”

In their daily gatherings, Crews sometimes brainstorm about personal goals and academic struggles, or they debate tough issues such as free speech and school shootings. On this day, in the wake of recent student fights, the Crew played a conflict-resolution game called “Is This Seat Taken?” and another called “Instigator,” in which two students tried to identify a “leader” surreptitiously chosen by the rest of the crewbies who milled around the classroom aping the leader’s gestures and gait.

Related: Is the new education reform hiding in plain sight?

After the games, one student, Elizabeth Martinez, explained what Crew meant to her: “It sets the example for us of how to work together and be cooperative. And how to listen to each other.”

According to Berger, Crew fosters a schoolwide “culture and spirit of being on a team and looking out for each other.” Put another way, Crew links individual success to collective success.

The EL motto, “We are crew, not passengers,” is a quote from Kurt Hahn, the German Jewish educator who fled the Nazis in the 1930s and went on to start Outward Bound, which co-founded the Expeditionary Learning network (later renamed EL Education) in partnership with Harvard’s Graduate School of Education in 1991. Ten schools began using the model in 1993.

“Kids in traditional schools sometimes act like they’re on a cruise ship, where they sit on deck and teachers bring them stuff to do,” Berger said. “We think of school more like a sailing schooner, where everybody, both kids and adults, are pitching in and swabbing the deck but also charting the course.”

Overall, the approach gets good academic marks. After three years in an expeditionary learning school, students outpaced traditional school peers by 7 months in reading achievement and 10 months in math, according to a 2013 study by Mathematica Policy Research that EL commissioned. A 2011 study by University of Massachusetts researchers had also found standardized test-score gains by students in two EL schools in Rochester, New York, compared with peers in other city schools.

Meanwhile, in 2005, the Gates Foundation helped EL open several high schools, including Portland’s Casco Bay High School, with a mission to get every student into college — a goal these schools have rarely missed.

EL partners with both existing and newly opened schools, nearly all of them public, that remain under district or charter control but fully invest in Crew and expeditionary learning. The network was purposefully capped at about 150 schools, because the partnerships rely on intensive, in-person training and coaching. Every year, about 10 new schools join EL and a similar number leave.

New EL schools must first go through several months of professional development, classroom observation and co-teaching — both at the schools and at three-day intensive “institutes” off-site. For a school to be eligible to join, at least 40 percent of its students must be from low-income families. Just as important is teacher buy-in. “If the teachers and staff are not truly on board,” said Berger, “then we say no.”

Some teachers balk at leading a Crew, for instance. “There are a lot of teachers who will say, ‘I was hired to teach math, not to be an adviser or a therapist to a bunch of kids,’ ” Berger said.

Among reasons a school might leave the network: the fee, which starts at about $50,000 a year for new schools that need a lot of support and drops to about $15,000 for more seasoned members; a new principal who wants to champion his or her own approach, or simply a poor fit.

This year, for example, Harvey Elementary School in Kenosha, Wisconsin, parted ways with EL after five years, because teachers struggled to align EL lessons and progress measures with the separate standards and reporting required by their district. Harvey’s principal, Ursula Hamilton-Perry, said she still “believes fully in EL,” and hopes to rejoin them, but had to step back when the extra time and other challenges of making everything fit “started to get in the way of students making progress.”

Occasionally, Berger admitted, “we’re simply not able to turn a school around. We’re not providing them what they need, and we get divorced.”

That divorce rate is far lower among schools that were founded in partnership with EL, such as Casco Bay, than it is among schools that adopted the model after many years as a more traditional school. Casco Bay’s principal, Derek Pierce, credits much of the school’s success to the way Crew culture personalizes each student’s journey over four years.

“We have three big questions in Crew: Who am I? How am I doing? And what are my plans for the future,” said Pierce. The questions crop up explicitly at the twice-yearly student-led conferences with parents and Crew advisers. “We’re prepping for those now,” Pierce said. “We’re looking at each of their classes and what they’re proud of, what their targets are and what they need to work on to meet them.”

Students tackle the three questions again in short addresses to their Crews at the end of freshman year, in sophomore presentations about a personal passion to students and staff and in the reflective “Final Words” remarks they give as a prelude to graduation. According to Pierce, all this self-reflection actually bolsters the team-focused mission.

“Kids are social beasts, and they’re at their best when they’re asked to help each other,” he said. “They can’t get enough of helping each other. It motivates them.”

The Casco Bay Crews also have online (teacher-monitored) chat groups. “We’re in contact with each other all the time,” said Phoebe Kolbert, a senior. “Crew is like family. It’s about getting to the top of the mountain with a little help from your friends.”

Related: A year of personalized learning: Mistakes, moving furniture and making it work

During a recent lesson on square roots, King’s eighth-grade math teacher, Ann Young, was quick to call out, “talk to your neighbor!” whenever her questions drew hesitant and confused murmuring from the class.

“I like to have kids talk in class, to me and to each other, about how they’re trying to figure out a problem,” Young said in an interview, and that makes for an ambivalent relationship with education technology.

Young gets the utility of online lesson plans geared to math standards and targeted to students at any level. Indeed, this year, the district’s new math curriculum is aligned with units from the web-based Khan Academy, and Young started directing students to the site’s online videos and lessons for extra practice or new challenges. But she doesn’t want students disappearing into their own digital worlds, so she only lets them go to Khan Academy at home, never in class.

While no guidelines on classroom technology govern the network, according to Berger, there is a shared wariness of anything that might undermine EL’s collaborative ethos.

“I’m skeptical of personalized learning that is too much about kids spending a lot of time on computers marching through discrete tasks at their own pace,” he said. “It pulls kids too often away from doing meaningful work and having meaningful interactions with peers, and it can value the individual needs over the idea that we’re all in this together.”

The sentiment is echoed by Jason Krause, principal of Denver’s Columbine Elementary School, which joined the EL network in 2018. He had been disenchanted with his school’s previous personalized learning initiative. “I started feeling like we weren’t talking about people as much as technology and infrastructure and very solitary, parallel learning that created almost a disconnect,” Krause said. “We were looking at a lot more data points, but there were fewer student voices in the room.”

That said, EL’s leadership now relies heavily on technology to spread Crew and expeditionary learning concepts more broadly. Until five years ago, efforts were limited to word-of-mouth. “We would go out and talk about what we did, and invite people to come see our schools,” said Berger, and that was about it. But when the network reached its growth target, EL’s leaders opted to spread their model piecemeal through a web-based library of books and videos and an open source K-8 English and language arts (ELA) curriculum.

“We woke up to the fact that we can’t reach enough people through these in-person gatherings. We have to get some stuff online,” Berger said.

Related: Why Maine’s new high school graduation rules could hurt more than help

Berger said that there are now 10 books and around 250 videos covering everything from student-engaged assessments to learning showcases to examples of expeditions. The only major topic still not featured is Crew, and two books and several videos to cover that subject are now underway and should be ready by the fall of 2019.

Meanwhile, EL’s open source curriculum combines literature, nonfiction and historical documents to teach ELA standards with deep dives into topics such as the sustainability of America’s food supply and the American Revolution. At the close of each unit, students do independent research for a final project they present to outside audiences, just as EL students do with learning expeditions. For instance, fifth-graders learn about natural disasters by reading and analyzing a book about a Haitian boy in his country’s 2010 earthquake; they then write an opinion essay about the critical items for an emergency preparedness kit and present a public service announcement to an audience.

The lessons “bake in a focus on collaboration, character and personalization in terms of kids showing evidence of their own learning,” Berger said.

In the fall of 2018, Detroit’s public schools adopted EL’s English language arts curriculum throughout the district, joining several other districts that use it in some schools or grade levels and, EL reports, more than 40,000 teachers who have downloaded at least part of it. With EL sponsorship, Mathematica is now studying these districts to see if the curriculum boosts test scores.

“There’s lots of importance in these lessons that have nothing to do with standardized tests,” said Berger. “But, none of that will matter unless scores go up.”

As her 11th-graders filed into the classroom, Casco Bay English teacher Susan McCray paired them up at tables labeled “Healthcare,” “Criminal Justice,” “Housing,” “Addiction” and so on. The categories roughly matched the policy topics her students had chosen within the larger class theme of America’s widening wealth gap.

Ultimately, every student would write a paper on a proposed policy solution to a societal ill, and then present their proposals to a panel of experts. For now, however, they were mired in the initial research and needed to get out of their own heads.

The students took turns explaining what they’d learned so far about their chosen topics and potential solutions. Their partners’ job was to ask a bunch of questions. “How much would that cost?” “What statistics back you up?” “What else has been tried?”

“You need questions to move your research forward,” McCray announced.

All expeditions follow a similar pattern, weaving personalized choice and collaborative effort. Students start together with teachers directing them to background knowledge on a larger topic such as “The Four Freedoms” or invasive species. Then, they do independent investigations of their own choosing, while reconvening periodically in class and Crew for peer feedback and advice.

The final products, known as culminations, are another shared experience. For example, if students are expected to write scientific reports about field research on a polluted local ecosystem, they can’t ditch the report in favor of, “a dance or a diorama,” said Berger. “We have a vision of kids working together to create something of high quality. We want all of us working in the same format, so we can bring in outside experts to help us get really good at it.”

The schools also regularly host events, such as kedTALKs (for “King Engineering and Design”), where students present projects and inventions to peers, parents and experts. Two years ago, Casco Bay’s juniors screened their documentary about Maine’s unsung heroes, produced by stitching together their individual mini-documentaries on the subject.

Expeditions are interdisciplinary. Before engineering their own alternative energy machines, for example, King students met the grade-level science standards on light, energy and natural resources. They dug into the history and economics of different energy sources in social studies and read a book in English class about a boy in Malawi, Africa, who electrified his village with do-it-yourself wind power.

Also, expeditions are embedded in the real world. At Casco Bay, for example, an entire wall of the school’s “Great Room” is plastered with senior photos and summaries of their expedition projects. Their goal is to offer a “slice of the solution” on issues ranging from hunger in Maine to jump-starting the state’s aquaculture industry to Portland’s need for affordable housing. Personalized learning and shared endeavor aren’t at odds here, according to Pierce, they complement each other.

“The goal of this work is to find the intersection between a personal passion and a need in the world,” he said. “That’s the intersection where we want kids to live their lives, and as adults, too.”

This story about personalized learning was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

The post What if personalized learning was less about me and more about us? appeared first on The Hechinger Report.

PANGUITCH, Utah — Both before and after classes at Panguitch High School, a low-slung brick building nestled in the high desert of southern Utah, students find their way to Shawn Caine’s classroom. They settle in at the computers where Caine teaches coding and software, such as Illustrator and Photoshop, or they head to the back room for the 3-D printer, vinyl cutter and robotics kits.

Some kids come to log extra time on class projects. Others show up just for the internet. Caine oversees the school’s Chromebooks. Her district of Garfield County has provided a computer to every student since 2016. And yet, reliable broadband is far from guaranteed in this region of towering plateaus, sagebrush valleys and steep canyons.

Like much of rural America, Garfield County is on the wrong side of the “homework gap” — a stubborn disparity in at-home broadband that hinders millions of students’ access to the array of online learning, collaboration and research tools that are enjoyed by their better-connected peers. Many of Garfield’s students trek to internet oases such as Caine’s classroom or one of the local businesses willing to host a district Wi-Fi router.

Going without isn’t an option. “All their work is on that computer,” said Caine, “and they need that access.”

That’s why district leaders are eager to pilot an ambitious, statewide broadband initiative. Utah’s schools are already hard-wired with high-speed internet through a statewide network. The new plan would extend that network into a wireless blanket of access covering rural households and the highways on which students spend hours busing to and from sports and other activities. The broadband expansion is supported by the managers of the existing network, and the plan’s backers could tap multiple statewide funding sources for education technology. But the pilot can’t get started without one critical ingredient they still lack — access to frequencies of electromagnetic spectrum.

Federal licenses to use spectrum that can carry mobile internet are a hot commodity, coveted by big telecommunications companies with money to spend at the periodic spectrum auctions conducted by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). But the FCC is now poised to decide whether a treasure trove of currently untapped spectrum should be given away for free to Garfield County and other rural school districts — or sold to the highest bidder.

***

On a recent fall morning, Garfield County’s superintendent, Tracy Davis, was stuck behind an out-of-state car crawling up a two-lane highway flanked by red, rocky spires that reached into a cobalt-blue sky.

“Probably lost,” Davis grumbled. The tourists who flock to this part of Utah, to visit places like Red Canyon and Bryce Canyon National Park, clog up the roads, and yet, Davis said, “they are the only money there is.”

Drought and low dairy prices have crippled the region’s family farms, and the minerals and coal hidden in the surrounding plateaus can’t be exploited due to federal land ownership and the undeniable remoteness of the place, so far from markets, power plants and processing facilities.

“As you can see,” Davis said, gesturing toward an expanse of scenery home to just one person per square mile, “We’re out in the middle of nowhere.”

The same issues hamper Garfield County’s access to a less tangible, but perhaps more valuable resource — the internet. In sparsely populated rural America, there’s little or no profit motive for commercial providers to invest in broadband service. According to an April 2018 Department of Education report, 18 percent of 5- to 17-year old students in “remote rural” districts have no broadband access at home, compared to 13 percent in cities and 7 percent in the suburbs. In total, the homework gap hits some 12 million school-aged kids nationwide, according to a 2017 congressional report, “America’s Digital Divide.”

And when pioneering districts try to build their own broadband networks to reach students beyond school walls, they must first navigate federal control of the electromagnetic spectrum that carries every wireless signal, from radio broadcasts to satellite communications. To avoid interference, licenses to use specific frequencies of spectrum are tied to geographic location. That’s why, for instance, the same preset button on your car radio will be news-talk in one city, classical music in another and static in between.

While several slices of spectrum can carry mobile internet, the most promising for rural school districts is the one the FCC first reserved for educational television broadcasts in the 1960s. Over three decades, the government gave away more than 2,000 spectrum licenses to school districts and education nonprofits, primarily in urban areas. But the FCC effectively stopped issuing such licenses in 1995, because many license holders weren’t using their spectrum, but were instead turning it into revenue by leasing it to commercial telecommunication companies.

Nobody made a big fuss about the licensing freeze until 2004, when the FCC expanded the allowable use of this frequency band to include broadband internet and renamed it Educational Broadband Service (EBS). Suddenly, this sleepy spectrum became extremely valuable. But the freeze on new licenses was kept in place, which left huge swaths of the country without any legal access to EBS frequencies, areas collectively known as EBS “whitespace.”

In recent years, pressure has built on the FCC to open up licensing in EBS whitespace — pressure both from big telecoms eager to fortify their nationwide wireless networks and from tech-savvy educators hoping to spread their schools’ internet into students’ homes.

Finally, in May 2018, the FCC suggested lifting the whitespace licensing moratorium, among several proposals to change EBS.

“Currently, a large portion of the [EBS] band in approximately half of the United States lies fallow. And it’s been that way for more than 20 years. This must change,” FCC chairman Ajit Pai wrote in a statement. “Today, we take the first step toward putting that asset to work.”

Broadly speaking, the proposals reflect an ongoing tension between the public-interest origins of EBS and the fact that the free market has been far more efficient at putting this spectrum to use. On the one hand, the changes would steer existing EBS licenses further toward the free market, by eliminating requirements that a sliver of leased spectrum still be used for education. On the other hand, the FCC would still give new EBS licenses free to educational institutions, including rural school districts such as Garfield County, within the current whitespace. (Native American tribes would also get preferential access to new licenses.)

Hundreds of people and organizations weighed in during the FCC’s first public comment period on the proposals, which closed in August. Submissions from school districts and education nonprofits largely supported keeping, or strengthening, the spectrum’s ties to education. Meanwhile, representatives of commercial wireless internet providers, and open-market advocates such as the nonprofit R Street Institute, pushed for full commercialization and urged the commissioners to auction off whitespace spectrum licenses.

After the FCC weighs the first batch of comments, it may allow a second period of public comment on a revised proposal. According to Steve Rovarino, president of Red Rover, a Reno-based broadband network design firm hired as a consultant to Utah’s bid for EBS spectrum, a final ruling was originally on track for the end of this year, but has been delayed indefinitely due to the pending T-Mobile merger with Sprint, the largest holder of leased EBS spectrum.

“There are rumors that a concession to push through the merger might be Sprint relinquishing some of that spectrum,” said Rovarino. Reached by email, an FCC spokesperson declined to comment about the merger’s potential impact on the EBS deliberations.

***

The godfather of Utah’s new educational broadband plan is Jason Eyre, who was the IT director for Garfield County Schools during their one-to-one Chromebook rollout.

“We branded it as expanding the classroom beyond the school,” said Eyre, who now works for Murray City Schools, just south of Salt Lake City. Knowing that some students had no broadband at home, Eyre convinced a few local businesses — a gas station in one town, a drugstore in another — to host a Wi-Fi router where kids could connect.

But the challenge went beyond students with no home internet whatsoever. Indeed, the vast majority of families had some form of home internet access, but their connection speeds were sometimes too slow to retrieve pages and documents from the school district’s heavily content-filtered system.

So, Eyre and Davis looked into creating their own broadband network to cover Garfield County. That led them to see the potential for a statewide solution. Key to that possibility was Utah’s existing broadband service connecting the state’s school buildings and hospitals. This wired network, known as the Utah Education and Telehealth Network (UETN), is run by a public-private partnership of state agencies and commercial telecoms. By the summer of 2017, Eyre and his counterparts in other districts had persuaded UETN to back a wireless expansion of their broadband service statewide.

The idea was to mount transmitters on schools to blast broadband into surrounding communities, using UETN as the core and tapping state education-technology grants to defray the cost. Garfield would pilot the project, along with Millard County, another massive rural district. But before this effort could get underway, the districts needed spectrum licenses.

Last summer, UETN was among the groups that submitted comments to the FCC in support of the whitespace licensing of EBS spectrum. So was the Nebraska Department of Education, which has a statewide broadband plan similar to Utah’s, whereby an existing wired network in the school buildings would be broadcast wirelessly into surrounding rural communities.

“We know all too painfully well the extent of our homework gap for rural students here in Nebraska,” said Tom Rolfes, education IT manager for the Nebraska Information Technology Commission, one of the partners in the state’s broadband initiative. Indeed, nearly two-thirds of Nebraska’s districts have fewer than 500 students, and more than a third of the rural students have no broadband access at home, compared to just 9 percent of urban students, according to a recent state study.

In an email attached to Nebraska’s FCC comments, one mother whose only home internet is a smartphone hotspot with an expensive data plan wrote to the superintendent of her rural district about driving her daughter to the parking lot of a public library after hours so she could do her homework using the library Wi-Fi.

“[My daughter] was told, `Since you get to take the Chromebooks home, you have no excuse for not getting the vocabulary homework done,’ ” she wrote.

By 2017, Nebraska had wired every K-12 school building, along with 25 colleges and universities, with fiber-optic broadband. And, according to its FCC comments, the state owns or leases more than enough towers to blanket its rural areas with broadband, provided they get licenses for the necessary spectrum.

“We have this perfect alignment of stars. Not only is there a dramatic need, but we have extraordinary assets to throw at the problem,” Rolfes said. “But the premise of this is new licensing, with a more strategic approach, and if the FCC doesn’t grant that, then anything we’ve proposed will be moot.”

***

Back at Panguitch High School, a junior named Hagen Miller sat in the cluttered back annex of Shawn Caine’s classroom. As one of the tech-savvy students in the district’s “CyberCorps,” Miller was debugging and cleaning a few Chromebooks for recent transfer students.

Miller has decent home internet, but he knows friends and neighbors who don’t, and he also cites the hours he and other students spend without internet access on lengthy bus rides. Travel for any school athletic team in Garfield County can easily top an hour each way, and Miller competes in four sports — basketball, baseball, cross country and track. Every team covets the district’s only bus with a Wi-Fi router, even though internet service on “the Wi-Fi bus” cuts out for long stretches.

“If you have an assignment due the next day, you want the Wi-Fi bus, so you can get it done and don’t have to stress about going home and staying up all night to finish,” said Miller.

In the meantime, some teachers at Panguitch High School are moving more of their classroom work online with the learning management system Canvas.

“Given the expectations we now have for student access, it’s difficult for those students who don’t have good internet at home,” said the school’s principal, Russell Torgersen. He’s seen the students sitting in the school parking lot to tap the Wi-Fi on weekends, and he’s had many conversations with teachers about how to work around students’ spotty home connections.

For now, it’s a waiting game, as the FCC plods toward a decision on the fate of the EBS spectrum. Given the uncertainty, Eyre and his allies are looking at alternative paths to spectrum licenses, such as the lengthy and complex FCC waiver process successfully used to create a rural educational broadband network in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Even if the FCC ultimately decides to give new EBS spectrum licenses to rural school districts like Garfield County, it’s hard to say how much of the homework gap could then be eliminated. Current estimates of rural broadband don’t take into account the boundaries of EBS whitespace, nor the fact that a home broadband connection can be inadequate for a school network’s needs, according to digital-inclusion advocates such as Susan Bearden, chief innovation officer for the Consortium for School Networking (CoSN), a professional association for school technology leaders.

What Bearden can say for sure is that “There’s no silver bullet” to solve unequal student broadband access. She favors giving rural districts EBS licenses, but not every district can build its own broadband network. And in many urban communities, broadband access is plentiful but unaffordable to families struggling to make ends meet.

Closing those gaps will depend on a variety of measures, from hot-spot lending programs at public libraries to nonprofit digital-inclusion efforts and districts buying mobile hotspots for students from companies such as Kajeet.

“I’d love to see the equivalent of the rural electrification program happening for broadband,” said Bearden, referring to the sweeping New Deal effort to bring electricity to America’s countryside. “But until that day happens, we’re kind of stuck with these patchwork solutions.”

This story about the Educational Broadband Service was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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HUNTER, N.D. — On windswept fields outside Fargo, North Dakota, a bold experiment in education has begun. In a lone building flanked by farmland, the Northern Cass School District is heading into year two of a three-year journey to abolish grade levels. By the fall of 2020, all Northern Cass students will plot their own academic courses to high school graduation, while sticking with same-age peers for things like gym class and field trips.

The goal is to stop tethering teaching to “seat time” — where students are grouped by age and taught at a uniform, semester pace — and instead adopt competency-based education, in which students progress through skills and concepts by demonstrating proficiency.

That alone isn’t unusual; a majority of states now allow competency-based pilot programs, and many schools have fully implemented the approach. What makes Northern Cass notable is that very few mainstream schools, let alone districts, have set out to topple grade levels.

But as the movement against seat-time learning grows, more schools nationwide will be grappling with grade levels, deciding whether to keep them or to hack through thickets of political, logistical and cultural barriers to uproot them.

Some school leaders insist that competency-based education can survive and even thrive within grade levels, or a modified version of them.  Others, however, echo Northern Cass superintendent, Cory Steiner.

“We can’t keep structures that would allow us to fall back into a more traditional system,” said Steiner. “If we’re going to do this, we’re going to have to manage without grade levels.”

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One recent spring afternoon, about a dozen Northern Cass students working on laptops made themselves comfortable in a large classroom with mobile furniture, beanbag pillows and a plush blue couch.

The kids were rounding out eighth or ninth grade, but that had little to do with their choices of self-paced lessons in several subjects. Some had finished all the material pegged to their grade level months ago and had moved on, while others were taking more time.

Two teachers, known as “academic advisors,” were on call to field questions and ensure everybody stayed on task (the teachers also lead weekly seminars or labs to bolster the computer work).

These students, and a couple dozen others circulating through the classroom for three periods each day, make up Jaguar Academy (named for the district’s feline mascot). As a first-year pilot, Jaguar Academy is just part of the larger overhaul. But it’s one of the district’s first steps toward a grade-free future.

For students like Katelyn Stavenes, reclining on the couch and catching up on science she missed during an illness, Jaguar Academy is a welcome taste of autonomy.

“I can just lean back and do my stuff instead of always watching the clock and wondering, when can I get out of here?” said Stavenes, who will be a ninth-grader this fall.

Meanwhile, at one of the tables in the hallway set up for kids working together, a girl named Silver Anderson said that doing three courses in Jaguar Academy (physical science, English and American history) gave her the schedule flexibility to meet with the band teacher on Friday mornings for an informal class in music theory and composition.

“I’ve been experimenting with chord progressions,” she said. “There’s so much behind music to learn.”

The district plans to expand the pilot until it’s an option for all students in what are now called the eighth through twelfth grades.  And, beyond Jaguar Academy, Northern Cass educators are rewriting lessons and assessments, both for academic subjects and for “habits of work,” such as perseverance and collaboration, into progressions of competencies free of grade-level expectations. They have spent evenings and school breaks shuffling teacher schedules and prepping for competency-based classrooms; they’ve visited other schools around the nation that have a head start down this road; they’ve added another guidance counselor to beef up internship opportunities for older students; and they’ve held several workshops to explain it all to parents.

“I’d love to tell you we have every answer,” Steiner said, but “we’ve got a long way to go.”

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While seat-time schooling is fiercely opposed by reformers, it is backed by state and federal law. Northern Cass’s reforms rely on North Dakota’s 2017 decision to let districts apply for waivers from requirements such as hours of instruction.

Most states have something on the books to encourage competency-based options, but only about a half-dozen have loosened seat-time dictates enough to dispense with grade levels, according to Matt Williams, chief operating officer and vice president of policy and advocacy for the personalized-learning nonprofit KnowledgeWorks.

In North Dakota, Williams and his colleagues worked with Kirsten Baesler, the state superintendent of public instruction, to write the waiver bill, and Northern Cass leaders lobbied legislators to pass it.

They pushed for radical change even though North Dakota districts were doing well by traditional measures, such as graduation rates, ACT scores and the National Assessment of Educational Progress, on which the state regularly ranks among the top fifteen in most subjects and grade levels tested.

According to Baesler, however, “We were too often teaching to a test. Educators wanted students to engage more and apply their learning in meaningful ways.”

At Northern Cass, momentum for change began during the district’s 2016 accreditation renewal when staff checked up on students after graduation. They found that graduates’ college grades tended to dip compared to their high-school GPAs, and the students bounced around a lot — switching majors, transferring to other universities or dropping out.  District leaders decided they hadn’t done enough to prepare students for life after high school.

According to Melissa Uetz (pronounced yoots), a special education teacher who became Jaguar Academy’s lead facilitator, the message was, “We needed to help kids find their passions before they left school.”

That meant more flexibility and potential for exploration in student schedules. The primary goal for Jaguar Academy was to give high school students more opportunities for job shadows and internships. More proposed changes spiraled out from there, including the decision to do away with grade levels.

“Teachers said, ‘If this is good for kids, why not bring it to all of them?’ ” said Steiner. “Our conversation went from Jaguar Academy to ‘What if we tore the whole system down?’ ”

Of course, no matter what individual states and districts allow, federal law still mandates grade-level-pegged testing. Education departments use those scores to evaluate schools. Quite often, so do parents.

California’s Lindsay Unified School District, which switched to competency-based education years ago and has been mentoring Northern Cass, kept grade levels because of standardized tests. Lindsay Unified’s director of advancement, Barry Sommer, said he would love to scrap grade levels, because they get in the way of “truly moving to a 21st-century school that’s learner centered.” But California’s district-accountability tracking system is based on grade-level achievement tests.

Meanwhile, even the handful of schools that have successfully ditched grade levels, such as Waukesha STEM Academy, a charter school about 20 miles west of Milwaukee, must still keep age-based groupings in the background to sort students for standardized testing.

“We take the tests. But we don’t think much about them, quite honestly,” said James Murray, Waukesha’s principal.

Steiner plans a similar approach. For testing and student data reporting, Northern Cass will still link students with an expected year of graduation.

“We’ll do whatever we have to do for testing,” said Steiner. “But we won’t put any extra effort or incentive into them. They’ll be something we have to do and move on.”

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Jaguar Academy is often library-quiet. Prepackaged lessons from an online curriculum provider comprised about 80 percent of students’ work in the first year. Steiner wants to cut that online learning quotient way back, to 20 percent, partly by expanding the number of seminars in which teachers lead a deeper exploration or a lab on select topics.

Still, it has been hard enough to schedule just one weekly seminar, he said. Students often skip a non-Jaguar Academy class to attend, and there have been no math seminars, because none of the academic advisors are math teachers.

And seminar scheduling is just one of the logistical headaches Northern Cass will face as grade levels disappear.

“Competency-based schools still need structures — they just need new structures,” said Sydney Schaef, a mastery learning designer for reDesign, a Boston company that guides school overhauls. “We still need ways to identify where kids need to be when they come into the building in the morning.” And when kids should stop going to elementary school and start attending a middle school across town. (Because the Northern Cass district is in a single building, they dodge that particular challenge.)

“Even reimagining space is bigger than any of us thought,” said Steiner. “Classrooms that used to be owned by a teacher will have to be more flexibly used. We’re looking at one of our gyms and asking, does it have to double as a classroom space?”

Then there’s the question of whether to place limits on how quickly or slowly students move through competencies. For instance, another of the districts mentoring Northern Cass found that just letting students work “at their own pace” led some kids to slack off and disrupt classmates.

“I remind teachers that we need to put some controls on this,” said Bill Zima, superintendent of the district in question, Maine’s Kennebec Intra-District Schools regional school unit #2 (RSU2). “First-graders are not ready to completely manage their time. Nor are seniors. Nor are adults, really.”

The solution for some is grouping kids who would traditionally be in two or three different grade levels together in a single classroom, a longstanding practice of Montessori schools.

“A lot of schools are finding ways to blur grade levels rather than getting rid of them,” said Karla Phillips, policy director for personalized learning at the Florida-based Foundation for Excellence in Education, or ExcelinEd.

At Northern Cass, teachers plan to step in if a student gets more than three weeks behind or ahead of an expected “teacher pace.” Students who struggle will get extra support. Students who speed ahead will get a conversation about next steps.

“Maybe we let them fly,” said Steiner. “Or maybe they want to do an independent project, or work as a peer teacher or go back to work more on a competency where they’ve struggled.”

Meanwhile, the district is reworking teacher assignments to better fit a school where age and academics are no longer tied together.  Last year, for example, the elementary teachers stopped being generalists and started to specialize. The idea is that teachers will encounter students in a broader range of ages and abilities, but only in their own academic areas of expertise.

“We asked, who’s passionate about math, writing or science, and so forth. And we ran with it,” Steiner explained.

One early adopter was math teacher Danielle Bosse. On a typical day, most of her students spread around the classroom, working independently on math skills, while one or two at a time pull up a chair to Bosse’s desk for a coaching session. Kids who feel ready to move on ask Bosse to unlock an online test, which they take at a table topped with black cardboard dividers.

Asked how students have adjusted, Bosse said, “Standard operating procedures. We did a lot of standard operating procedures.”

Known around Northern Cass as “SOPs,” these procedures are co-developed by students and teachers to help kids manage their time and stay organized. An SOP might require students to take out planners at the start of class and jot down their learning targets or put their names on a whiteboard next to the competency they are working on that day.

The SOP brainstorming began last October, after many students struggled with their newfound autonomy. In fact, Steiner’s plan is to start this coming fall with a week devoted just to SOPs and other “soft skills,” such as critical thinking.

“All these key skills we want kids to learn, like time management,” he said, “we need to teach them very explicitly.

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After cutting the regulatory red tape and solving the logistical puzzles, a deeper challenge remains in the move away from seat-time. Grade levels are part of our culture, deeply rooted in how we think about learning and childhood more broadly.

“When you meet somebody and ask how old their kids are, they say, oh, they’re in third grade or fourth grade,” noted Phillips of ExcelinEd.

Cultural norms have kept grade levels partially intact in Maine’s RSU2 district, which has hosted Steiner and Northern Cass teachers many times.

“We’ve decoupled the curriculum from those grade levels,” said RSU2’s Zima. “You are studying what you need to study at your level.” But, he added, the district has kept the grade levels as a “social moniker.”

Even Waukesha STEM Academy gives grade levels a cameo in student progress reports. “Parents still wanted to know how their kid was doing compared to a kindergarten through 12th-grade scale,” said superintendent Murray. So, the school added a grade-level scale across the top of report cards that mostly measured student progress along broader “learning continuums.”

“Parents had the comfort of seeing the old system while being aware that the new system and progression was in place in school,” said Murray.

Some competency-based schools want to keep grade levels for reasons beyond offering parents a safety blanket. Grade levels, they argue, can give students a sense of camaraderie and enhance social learning. For instance, at Casco Bay High School, in Portland, Maine, two or three interdisciplinary “learning expeditions” a year are arranged by grade level. Last year, a junior-year expedition had teams of students visit rural Maine to interview local “unsung heroes” and create mini-documentaries about them. that were stitched into a large, single documentary for the entire grade.

“There’s an element of ‘we’re all in this together.’ We’re all taking on the same complex project,” said the Casco Bay principal, Derek Pierce. “Our kids support each other, and they are really good at giving each other feedback, because the quality of your project will reflect on the whole project and, therefore, reflect on me.”

Back at Northern Cass, however, they believe that grade levels would become a crutch for students and teachers and ultimately stymie reform. “All of us have a pit in our stomach right now,” said Steiner. “We know that we’re taking a big leap and not everybody’s going to be on board.”

This summer, Northern Cass teachers and administrators have continued rewriting lesson plans and assessments, including those for “habits of work.” They’ve also been visiting more-experienced competency-based districts such as Lindsay Unified. By 2020, Steiner wants Northern Cass to be the district hosting visitors, as a mentor to other schools mulling the idea of nixing grade levels.

“On their way to visit Lindsay or another of these pioneering schools, they can stop in North Dakota,” Steiner said, “because there’s a school out in the middle of a cornfield that’s doing this transformative work.”

This story about competency-based education was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.

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