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I remember the first time I became dependent on e-learning for instructional purposes.

It was the winter of 2014. The snow started falling right before we were supposed to return from our Winter Break. Nearly every school in our region called off classes for the first day back. And then the next. And then the next. 

For the remainder of the winter, it was one snow delay or snow day after another. We didn’t go back to school for a full week for six weeks. In my second year as an AP teacher, I was nearing freak-out mode. I had students who needed to be prepared for an exam and I wasn’t seeing them at all.

I eventually started using the course management system that our school was using and started sending messages and homework out for them to complete before we would be able to return to school. Soon after, our governor gave the state board of education permission to waive snow days if schools send out “e-learning” for students to complete at home.

It was far from a perfect system. The work I assigned my high school students was far more sensical than the homework packets of word searches that my kindergartener brought home to complete. And not all e-learning was created equal. Some teachers were far better equipped to make the switch online than others and some courses were much easier than others to make the necessary changes that allowed students to work from home. But we did it. We got through that winter and the next, which was not quite as bad but still required more e-learning days from teachers and students.

That is why, when COVID shut down the school systems across the country, I didn’t panic. By that time I was living in Texas, which had its own challenges, but I had done things before. The only difference is, I hadn’t done it for half of a semester, all day, every day, while also supervising the work of two of my own children and trying to stay out of my husband’s hair while he also worked from home.

Still, I tried to be optimistic. After all, the pandemic and the shutdowns that resulted had shown those who were paying attention that our school systems were built for the healthy and those with more financial means. Now that we had all seen what had been hiding in the shadows, we could use those lessons to move on, right?

Unfortunately, there are still several lessons from the spring of 2020 that we need to spend more time discussing. Here are three of those lessons:

Teachers need training for e-learning and in-person instruction

Even after years of using e-learning days to accommodate for all manner of weather events, it only took weeks of teachers learning on the fly and collaborating with other teachers across the country to make abundantly clear just how ill-equipped the majority of our country’s teachers were at effective implementation of technology to teach the essentials. Our teachers are not trained for doing both, and they need to be.

It is more than just knowing how to play games like Kahoot! or using Flipgrid or grading papers online instead of with a pen in hand; it is learning how to design a course that teachers and students can seamlessly use to transition from in-person to online learning whenever necessary. Online learning should never be considered superior or even equal to having students in the classroom with a teacher who can instantaneously respond to all of their needs, but it should be seen as a way to keep the school year going smoothly for teachers and students through illness (not just COVID), natural weather events, and sudden emergencies that require the temporary closing of any school building. And teachers need to be trained to not just see it that way but also design their courses with this in mind.

It would also be helpful to offer training for parents regarding e-learning systems so they know how to better help their children should they need to be instructed at home for any reason. While parents should not be expected to implement that instruction, knowing how that instruction is happening could help them to better support their children as they struggle through the challenges of online learning.

Not everything we do in the classroom matters

No, I’m not saying that we are just wasting student time and taxpayer dollars, but in our efforts to reinforce lessons and enhance student learning, we sometimes find ourselves scrambling for activities to “fill time,” or we come up with fun activities that might reinforce learning but doesn’t necessarily enhance that learning. I remember those first couple of years of teaching when I struggled to fill a class period with meaningful activities that would keep my students engaged, often resorting to worksheets and games that were, in retrospect, nothing but busywork.

The reverse became true the longer I taught. Now I have so much that I want to teach my students that I often find myself assigning too much or trying to go too fast, not allowing my students the time necessary to really demonstrate mastery of whatever skill it is that I am trying to teach them.

The truth is that many teachers fall on either extreme and we should be striving to be somewhere in the middle, collaborating to understand what our students really need to know and spending the appropriate amount of time developing activities that help them to master those concepts and skills. When schools shut down and teachers were forced to come up with activities that could be completed at home, a lot of us, myself included, had to really pare down our lesson plans of the past and our immediate expectations. And while yes, it did result in some element of learning loss, what we should be doing now is a reevaluation of the system as we figure out how to move forward and get students where they need to be to achieve meaningful learning.

It is also important to acknowledge that not all learning happens in the classroom, nor should it. For better or for worse, in the months following shutdowns students of all ages did a lot of learning that is not typically done in our classrooms. If we find a way to use that to benefit both our students and our classrooms, we will have learned another valuable lesson that will benefit our future voting citizens and workforce.

Equity matters and our students don’t have it

First, we learned that when it comes to health, our nation’s children have never had an equitable experience. We spent years giving out “perfect attendance” awards that encourage sick kids to come to school, which then made more vulnerable students ill to the point where they could not go to school. The same was true for teachers, both those who worked while sick (including myself) and those who feared for their long-term health because of vulnerable body systems. For the first time in modern history, the “healthy” and the “vulnerable” were playing on the same relative level field.

But COVID e-learning also taught us just how inequitable our education system is when it comes to our students’ economic situations. We had students who were completing AP exams using the wi-fi services of fast-food restaurants. We had some students with multiple electronic devices at home and others with only a cell phone to complete the majority of their schoolwork. There were elementary students who did not have adults to help them with their work because that adult had to work outside of the home. And there were many teenagers who took advantage of e-learning rules to allow them to work instead of going to school so that they could earn money for their families or to pay for the things that they wanted that their families could not afford. These students didn’t just lose a year of schooling because they struggled with e-learning; they weren’t doing it, period.

And in all of the conversations about the failures of e-learning from the last two years, equity, one of the biggest factors in this whole mess, has been pushed to the bottom of the discussion.

If we are going to have e-learning as a social safety net to keep schools and students on track through illness, natural disasters, and personal issues, then all children need access to all tools to make this possible. This includes technology, tangibles like books, and extra support if necessary. To do otherwise is to set up our students, teachers, and schools for failure.


E-learning, when paired with consistently effective in-person instruction, can be a game-changer in so many areas. The problem isn’t e-learning is inherently inferior, it’s that the last two years have been a wild west of throwing spaghetti against a wall to see what sticks. We’ve thrown best practices out of the window, falling into survival mode and watching students fall farther and farther behind.

What would happen if we stopped making e-learning the boogeyman and instead decided to work towards effective systems that seamlessly work with our schools in a way that benefits teachers and students.

That could really help us move into the 21st century.

Sarah Styf is a 19-year high school English teacher. She lives in the Indianapolis area with her husband...

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