By JOHN RICHARD SCHROCK
Dictionaries are history books, not law books. And these months of school disruption are setting records for the invention of new educational terms and modifying old terms.
“Breakout rooms” were separate rooms or partitioned spaces within a single large classroom that provided for smaller groups of students, often to differentiate instruction for different ability levels. Now these may be extra rooms to provide spacing. Or in cyberspace, it is a reduction in students a teacher must “interact” with during an online lesson since the regular class-size array of online participants causes many students to feel they are ignored.
The “distributed campus” is a more complicated university level concept. It involves not only the spreading out of students across a university to prevent extended periods of close contact, but also includes timing of classes, timing of transport, offsetting of meal times, distancing of seats and desks, etc.
“Crisis learning” is education that takes place during an external crisis (not a student’s personal family crisis). This term was resurrected during this 2020 pandemic to lower expectations that online or remote learning would be equivalent to face-to-face learning and is also called “emergency remote learning.” It has not prevented the tech-industrial complex from lying that their digital devices provide even better education than face-to-face instruction.
“Gating criteria” are the series of conditions that need to be met for students to enter public school buildings and return to face-to-face teaching. Such criteria are generally developed by medical experts.
“Learning hubs” are an invention this pandemic. Despite distribution of digital equipment, there are homeless K-12 students living in a car or couch-surfing who cannot connect, as well as a substantial portion of students with equipment who just never connect. The attempt to get them to cluster in learning hubs is a variation on learning pods that are usually home-based. So far, it is not very successful.
“Discovery duffels” are being used in Colorado districts. It provides K-5 students with bags filled with enrichment supplies, STEM and other learning materials. Teachers across subjects refill the bags with supplies to provide students hands-on activities.
“Skip-year growth” is the comparison of student achievement scores across two years to provide an accurate assessment of students' academic progress, and to measure how school closures affected student progress.
“Slide reversal” is the attempt to make-up learning loss that always occurred during summer vacation but now attempts to recover the lost class time due to the pandemic.
“High-dosage tutoring” is one-on-one tutoring beyond what is normally provided. This is hyped as a method to make up the loss of learning during the pandemic. It is also considered “personalized learning” because a tutor can address just those shortfalls in learning specific to a student. It is also considered a form of Socratic learning, although the school lessons are standardized and Socratic learning is free form and pursues open questioning.
“Social disconnect” is the reduced teacher-student interaction that occurs in distance learning, primarily used to describe the ineffectiveness of online methodology during the pandemic.
“Covid-19 safety influencers” are college students hired to encourage classmates to wear masks and follow rules against off-campus partying. This can also occur in businesses and government agencies.
“Datacasting” is a proposed new use of television signals to transmit a one-way, encrypted signal to deliver lessons without a broadband internet connection. It requires an antennae and connected device.
For teaching evaluation, teachers were sometimes videotaped in class so they could see their teaching. I preferred to watch students’ facial reactions for effective teaching. Now with teachers online, “video coaching” uses the videos of teachers and student to judge teaching effectiveness. However, the resolution is so low that it is not possible to see eye pupil dilation or most other signs of student understanding.
All of the above is considered irrelevant and unneeded to those suffering “pandemic denial,” the continued refusal of parents or school board members to take this pandemic seriously and take reasonable and science-based precautions to minimize contagion.
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John Richard Schrock has trained biology teachers for more than 30 years in Kansas. He also has lectured at 27 universities in 20 trips to China. He holds the distinction of “Faculty Emeritus” at Emporia State University.