After just one week of distance learning, it became very apparent that our middle school students really benefited from having synchronous learning, so much so that one of our early iterations was to ask all middle school teachers to start their classes with a Google Meeting. While it was not required for the real-time online experience to last the entire length of the class, it was beneficial for the class to be together regularly.
Some important benefits of this shift were:
• Students felt more connected to their teachers and their peers.
• It helped the students establish habits and a schedule at home, they had to “be” somewhere at a certain time each day.
• It gave everyone a small sense of the community they are missing.
After the second week of distance learning, our middle school teachers were so positive about this change that our upper school faculty followed suit.
