I posted this article on Medium. About a month ago I presented slides to educators at my code school about how to support students during the pandemic. I got a lot of good feedback so I wanted to share them further. Here’s the sideshow.
Some key points from the article:
Acknowledge that we aren’t just asking students to switch from in-classroom learning to online learning, we are asking them to do it in the middle of a very serious global crisis with people getting incredibly sick and dying.
Acknowledge that everyone is feeling the stress of this differently, and that all of it is valid and should be honored and respected. We all have our separate experiences of this crazy situation. We need to make room for other people’s experiences and not be judgmental.
Give your students more space and more options. Give them extra assignments so they can pick and choose to match their current abilities. Mix up the choices, make some more manual, some more visual, some involving expressive writing, some involving building things.
If at all possible, allow your students to create projects that feel like they are helping with the covid-19 crisis instead of just consuming stressful media/news. Give them opportunities to be positive producers instead of feeling like powerless witnesses/consumers.