Early on in every school year my students answer the following question: “What do you plan on doing after you graduate?” This year they also answered an equally important question: “How will you achieve your plan?”
My students plan on being engineers and athletes, paleontologists and dancers, actors and scholars. As their teacher I wonder about the path they plan on taking to reach their goal. Personalized learning is one way they can get there as it offers choice, flexible scheduling, and novel teaching methods that resonate with this generation of digital natives.
Over the last two years I taught sixth- and seventh-graders in Holyoke as one of the founding science teachers in the P3 program — the Personalized Pathway Program. Rather than print textbooks, every student in this program at the Peck Community School had a Chromebook that served as their textbook and portal to the internet. Students used the Summit Learning Platform, an app that was developed and maintained by Facebook engineers. The program was project-based and provided opportunities to work ahead if ready. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative funded the program.
This year, I am teaching seventh- and eighth-graders science at the Greenfield Commonwealth Virtual School. My students use platforms like Blackboard and Canvas and the Florida Virtual School learning system and they come from all over Massachusetts from Holyoke to Holbrook to Hadley to Hudson. When friends and neighbors hear about my new gig, they wonder what virtual school looks like and how it is different from a brick and mortar school.
Quoting one of my seventh graders, “Not much is different, but a lot is different.”
At Greenfield Commonwealth, students attend classes every day just like at a traditional school — but lessons are recorded so students who are at appointments or acting in a movie or attending dance lessons can watch and learn later — or repeat part of a lesson if they need to see and hear something again. Students do homework and they turn in their work online; lost homework is less of an issue.
My students interact with each other through an ongoing chat and breakout rooms where small-groups of students work together, even if they are more than one hundred miles apart at the time. One day a week we check in with our students during an advisory block. Once a month we meet with parents who serve as on-the-spot learning coaches helping us help their children learn.
We are a public school under the auspices of the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. We are our own school district. Our school year goes 180 days just like other public schools. Snow days are rare as we all work from home or near home. Approximately 600 students in grades K-12 attend GCVS. It is school at home rather than homeschool.
When asked how they would describe their virtual school experience to their friends and family, my students shared that they are here because:
■Classes are less distracting
■School begins later (at 8 a.m.)
■We meet new people from all around our state
■We can contact our teacher after school if we have questions
■There is no judgment from peers
■We can’t lose our homework
■We improve our computer skills every day
■It is safer (a number of our students reported being bullied and feel much safer attending school in a virtual setting)
Parents have added that virtual school has been a lifesaver for their children. One mother shared that her child’s doctors at Boston Children’s Hospital were impressed that school could still happen far from home while he was receiving care.
As a virtual middle school teacher, I try to teach like a TED Talk, blending media, involving students (peer work) and using online assessments and games to meet the needs of my students wherever they are. For the right student, this can be the perfect pathway for learning.
Jack Czajkowski, of Hadley, teaches at the Greenfield Commonwealth Virtual School and is a teacher-consultant with the Western Massachusetts Writing Project.