I mentioned in my Virtual School during SARS post that we formed a leadership team for our virtual school at HKIS that included green hat thinkers. I also wrote about the grade-level teams dividing up the work by the various strengths and talents that the team members presented. While our VS Leadership Team at HKIS did all the organizational, logistics, and curriculum design work, I am now thinking of a new approach to separate leadership and curriculum design into two teams.
Elementary schools have leadership teams made up of administrators, grade-level team leaders, a leader for the specials, possibly a representative for other groups, and of course the instructional coaches. This can add up to a lot of people. While performing their normal duties this works just fine and it can work for running the virtual school with all stakeholders having a voice while receiving information back from the leadership team.
What might be unwieldy is the curriculum collaboration design work that needs a special skill set from its members. This is where a portion of the overall VS Leadership Team could provide the nucleus for a VS Design Team. The VS Design Team not only provides ongoing curriculum development but also works as a skunkworks for longer-term research and program design especially if the virtual school continues over the long term. Additional members would be the teachers who have the strengths of creativity, curiosity, and zest along with a good understanding of using technology effectively. They would need to be especially creative regarding pedagogy. The tech background doesn’t have to be a prerequisite as the instructional technologist can lead out on how to make the instructional strategies viable for virtual delivery. This is where school leaders who really know the talents of their staff can review their profiles to construct the VS Design Team.
The instructional coaches would be the main communicators working with the grade levels and specials teachers. They would be the busy bees gathering the learning outcomes from the teams and bringing that information to the VS Design Team to then do their design work. This would especially be the case for the transdisciplinary units of study. The team’s work would go into a lesson database (curriculum mapping tool or Google Docs for example) with the coaches returning to the teams to unpack the strategies and fine-tune them for delivery.
The value of this approach is that the VS Design Team would not only come up with delivery approaches that could be used across grade levels but also would cross-pollinate by curating and iterating the ideas that come in from the teams. It is important to note that there must be trust and buy-in from all the teams to hand off some of their design work. One cannot have the VS Design Team come up with instructional strategies that are then ignored by some teams.
An additional design approach is to nurture the real innovators on staff to let them do mini-pilots playing a bit in their virtual sandboxes. This approach is supported by the School Retool “hacking mindset” approach to redesigning school cultures to be more nimble and innovative.
It is important to remember that the first couple of stages of virtual school mainly deals with setting up systems (i.e., delivery, communication, etc.). The next phase has the teachers in a more comfortable place where creativity and innovation really can come into play as they deliver their math and literacy curricula. The longer virtual school lasts, the more important it is to find ways to strive for helping students move up Bloom’s Taxonomy aiming for concept learning while building in collaboration for learning and for social-emotional support. And the longer virtual school lasts, the more the grade level teaching teams need to teach the units of study. So if your units of study involve inquiry, project, and problem-based learning, look to your VS Design Team to find age-appropriate ways to support these pedagogical approaches.
To balance the big ideas and efforts to try small pilots look to bring in your learning support teachers to fine-tune your design efforts. They specialize in individualization breaking learning down into concrete step-by-step processes. Just as we naturally differentiate for content, process, and product in face-to-face learning, we need to do the same with our virtual instruction. Some students will only need a little explanation while others will need lots of scaffolding, especially when working in teams on project work. Count on your learning support teachers to help with this process.
There is one more member of your VS Design Team- the counselor or as I say, the Wellness Coach. The longer students are away from the normal social-emotional support of being in school with their classmates and teachers, the more they need very intentional sharing of information and strategies to support their well-being. I would add wellness as a subject area for teaching teams to incorporate into their lessons. The Wellness Coach is the person to find out what teams are already doing regarding wellness to then share their activities across grade levels. The Wellness Coach can curate those activities and add new ones to have a central database of lessons to help students learn about their wellness while also providing activities for each of the PERMAH pillars guiding students to engage their character strengths.
One final thought is that we don’t need virtual school to bring innovators together to create, craft, and share powerful instructional and assessment strategies. If our schools are truly innovative learning communities, we of course find ways to nurture and cross-pollinate our ideas also during regular school. 🙂
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