Flexible goals and structures for learning.

• Extended time for learning and reflection.

• Use of commonly available materials.

• Purposeful selection of learning targets allowing students to explore their interests.

• Meaningful, manageable tasks and projects.

• Opportunities to learn without the use of devices or the internet.

An attempt to recreate school at home

• Business as usual.

• Assuming a traditional “school day” schedule 

• Requiring special materials (e.g., lab or materials not commonly found at home).

• Pacing with the planned scope and sequence. 

• Assigning readings to stay “caught up.”

• Packet of worksheets, copying definitions, lecture videos, and busy-work.

Purposeful teacher-student and student-student interactions.

• Optional opportunities to connect with teachers and peers virtually and at a variety of times.

• Teachers provide coaching, feedback, and encouragement.

• Student discourse as a tool for sense-making and problem-solving.

• Encouraging self-reflection on what students learn and how they learned it.

Teacher-centered instruction.

• Synchronous/asynchronous lectures/classes and or video lectures that all students mimic during assignments.

Authentic content learning in the home or classroom setting.

• Connecting disciplinary phenomena and problems to household and community, like community gardening, cooking, fixing things, or math walks.

• Asking students to identify relevant problems in their lives and engage in design cycles to address them.

• Allowing students to deeply explore patterns, phenomena, problem-solving, or problems of interest through investigation to build understanding and practice over time.

Assignments to “get through” content.

• Emphasizing memorizing content or “checking off” tasks on lists asking students to solve contrived or hypothetical problems, or complete design projects that value form over function.

• Trying to cover content through a volume of activities or skipping from topic to topic.

Assessments that monitor student identity and agency as well as what students know and understand.

• Provide actionable feedback that encourages students to reflect on their learning and encourages them to continue learning.

• Continuous “minute-by-minute” formative assessment that informs the teacher about student progress as well as their own practice and informs the students about their own learning progress building their disciplinary identity and flexibility.

• Performance assessments that unveil students problem-solving and sense-making.

• Portfolio-based assessments that describe students learning progress over time through student work.

• Student-led parent teacher conferences that encourage students to prepare presentations about their learning goals, reflection on their learning progress and accomplishments for their parents. 

• Student reflections on what and how they are being taught and what and how they are learning.

• Student Empathy Interviews that will support lesson design and policy.   

• School-wide Quality Review teams that spend time collecting school wide learning culture data through the lens of marginalized students by conducting classroom walkthroughs, student focus groups, individual-student interviews, teacher and parent interviews, etc., using this data to drive local policy decisions designed to improve outcomes for marginalized students.

Assessments that only show what students do not know and understand.

• Tests and quizzes as the primary mode of measuring learning.