Make Virtual Learning Matter: How to Turn Virtual Classrooms into a Remarkable, Authentic Experience for Kids

By Paul Axtell and Jacob Mnookin

While few things can replace in-person learning, virtual learning can create an extraordinary opportunity for students. In fact, often more immediate, flexible, and for many students growing up and learning in this virtual age, more authentic: virtual learning, when yielded properly, can create amazing results.

So how can you make Virtual Learning a force for good in your child's life?

From education expert Jacob Mnookin and virtual meeting expert Paul Axtell, comes a tool to ensure virtual learning at its finest. Together with our children and their teachers, we can help ensure that our kids are back on track, learning as they would be in a school building.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sourcebooks
• Release date: Sep 30, 2020
• ISBN: 9781728242408

Paul Axtell

PAUL AXTELL provides consulting and personal effectiveness training to a wide variety of clients, from Fortune 500 companies and universities to nonprofit organizations and government agencies. A large focus of his work is how to run effective and productive meetings - to turn them from the calendar items people dread into useful, productive sessions with measurable results. Paul is the author of 10 Powerful Things to Say to Your Kids, Meetings Matter: 8 Powerful Strategies for Remarkable Conversations, Make Meetings Matter (Ignite Reads), and Compassionate Leadership (Ignite Reads). Find meeting and leadership tips in Paul's blog posts>>

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Copyright © 2020 by Jacob Mnookin and Paul Axtell

Cover and internal design © 2020 by Sourcebooks

Cover design by Jackie Cummings/Sourcebooks

Cover images © elenabs/Getty Images

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To all parents working hard to make virtual learning matter right now: you got this!

Contents

Front Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction

Chapter 1: Create Supportive Relationships

Chapter 2: Decide What Matters and Why

Chapter 3: Taking Care of Teachers

Chapter 4: Provide Structure

Chapter 5: Set Expectations

Chapter 6: Know the Tools

Chapter 7: Participating in Virtual Learning to Learn

Chapter 8: Maintain Social Bonds

Conclusion

Endnotes

Acknowledgments

About the Authors

Back Cover

Introduction: Choose the Perspective: This Matters

If you don’t like something, change it; if you can’t change it, change the way you think about it.

—Mary Engelbreit

Anyone who had any part in the Great Remote Teaching Experiment of 2020 will tell you that it was not great. In fact, many would tell you that it was terrible. It is rare for school administrators, teachers, students, and parents to agree on anything, and yet, most agree that remote teaching is not as effective as in-person instruction. As we prepare to start the 2020–2021 school year, however, it seems clear that virtual learning, at least in part, is here to stay.

As cities and states across the United States went into lock-down in spring 2020, the initial school closings were not the top concern for most. We all scrambled to deal with a new reality that included essentially a complete shutdown of our society. For some, that meant losing their job. For others, that meant figuring out how to do their job from home or going into work in person in an environment that potentially felt unsafe. It meant caring for family members who were sick, coping with the loss of loved ones, and connecting with those closest to us remotely, who were scared and suffering. It meant canceled weddings and remote birthday parties. And it meant teaching and learning moved from the schoolhouse to the house-house.

For schools, the scramble to move from in-person to remote teaching and learning meant that there were a lot of basic, logistical challenges that needed to be figured out. Did all the students have laptops? Did all the households have internet access? If they did have internet access, did they have sufficient bandwidth to handle potentially two parents and two children all online at the same time? Did teachers have the technological tools (and the bandwidth) they needed to teach remotely, whether that be asynchronously via recorded video lessons or through live, remote teaching?

For families, it meant figuring out who could be in what space when, with the hope that they had the quiet needed to engage in the activity before them, whether that be work, school, or downtime. It