Asynchronicity for Deep Dive Education in Middle School

Our Head of Middle School, meeting virtually with me and other department chairs last week, posed a couple of questions. Now that we have had "distance learning" through internet apps for a full quarter, how might learning next year benefit from the experience? The second question seemed unrelated: As our school has provided a strong network of services and teachers to serve students with special learning needs, how can we do the same for highly-motivated students who want more than the usual classroom experience?

The whole time we were meeting, I was nominally "in class," but free to talk because my students had "asynchronous" work to do, editing their portfolios and reading a chapter. They had nearly an hour to work on their own before they would join me for a short synchronous videoconference, part spoken discussion in "break out" rooms, and part written comments on "chat." Students who missed it all did it all by email later in the week.

Later, I saw that the asynchronous techniques of distance learning could be the key to creating a "deep dive" experience for students motivated enough to want it. The answers to all of our Head's practical questions, printed below in italics, fell in to place:

• What are the pre-requisites? What is the interview process? What restrictions are there on the program? Participating fully in regular synchronous classes during the first quarter, students who self-identify as interested in the program are evaluated for traits of curiosity, near-mastery of the skills exercised during class, and willpower to work independently.
• What personnel are involved? In our school, our classes rotate in a cycle of seven days, and each class meets six times. Students who qualify for this program come to half of classes in their field for three days, keeping up with reading and discussion, other days reporting to the media center or a middle school classroom set aside for asynchronous study. During the second quarter, they spend that time researching broadly in their field. They will need a study advisor -- not necessarily the same as their classroom teacher -- and, being middle schoolers, some adult in the room. By the end of the second quarter, they and their study advisor will have mapped out a course of study: sources to read, or people to meet, or data to collect.
• How does this align with extant curriculum, especially with classes in the higher grades? Throughout the third quarter, and some time beyond, the students will do the deep work of following the map they made in the second quarter, collecting data, quotes, impressions, pictures -- whatever -- going deeply into a tangent to the same subject that their classmates are studying. They're not "getting ahead," but going deep.
  
• In the fourth quarter, they collect what they've learned into a form that can be presented to classmates, teachers, parents. Tools that we're using for distance learning could be useful, here. Over time, the school will have accumulated a library of videos and virtual books for use in the classroom.

While the terminology of "asynchronous" learning comes out of the world of on-line experiences that may or may not happen "in real time," technology only facilitates the kind of educational experience that, in my own life, has been most valuable. Looking back through my own secondary education, I realize that all of my ah-ha moments happened because the teacher got out of the way. While we read Faulkner with Mr. Scott, he had us choose another Faulkner novel of our own choice, to write on a topic of our own devising. Mr. Boggs sent me off to put together a program of songs by Sondheim. (Read my tribute, 11/2015). At Duke, Professor Holley assigned a research paper on the first day of class that had to be about something on Duke's campus that had never been researched before. My first draft, due in December was 20 pages long; my second, in May, was 40 with 40 more pages of notes from letters, interviews, and yellowed original documents. (Read my tribute to Dr. Holley 09/2013) A graduate professor at Millsaps College freed me to research solutions to the three greatest classroom challenges that I'd identified during my first three years of teaching, resulting in essays that still fuel what I do.

The program I've laid out, it hits me now, is pretty close to work I've done with all the students in my regular classes. My 8th graders came to two classes a week prepared to learn about American history through documents, but the other two classes, they circulated between conferencing with me and going to the library to work on research for a pair of related papers, one per semester.

At St. Andrew's in Jackson, science teacher John Davis assisted fifth graders who had passions in an area to find grown-up experts in the field who became their "colleagues" on a project, and presented them with much fanfare to a live audience, child and adult both on stage. (I remember especially the one with the life-size papier mache whale.)

So, problems solved. I'm going to ride my bike this morning, so that I can meet my synchronous responsibilities in the afternoon.