The grinch who stole snow days

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This week's hot topic at Borgia is last week's eLearning Day. This day represented the first time in our history that students had academic responsibility on what would have been a stress-free snow day in the past. I have a lot of thoughts on how it turned out:

1. The day worked really well. Some snow days are easy to call; Thursday's snow day was not easy to call. However, student safety is always at the forefront of those decisions, so we felt really good about the fact that we could keep them off the roads and still have learning take place.

2. While some students were disappointed that we didn't just call a snow day because we have two built-in and haven't used either of them, I think the majority of them understood that we want to save those in-case of a larger storm and the potential to miss a string of days still this winter. I think some students recognized that we had this idea in place and wanted to try it, as well.

3. Reviews were admittedly mixed. However, the majority were very positive. In education, we have a concept called the "flipped classroom" where students are supposed to build understanding of the material prior to class, allowing the teacher to begin the class with a formative assessment of understanding so that he or she knows where to begin teaching. We had a lot of that going on. Teachers were not afraid to introduce new concepts. Teachers recognized more complicated concepts and had videos prepared to help those students. Other concepts were able to be introduced with readings or with web-based activities. 

4. The reviews were only negative if the students felt like they were completing busy work. Also, I had more than one student tell me that some teachers assigned more work than they ever would have if they had school. So, we have a bit of work to do with balancing the amount of work and the nature of the work, but we thought that might be the case. Now we can work on that.

5. One change we will make is that students are expected to access their assignments prior to Noon. We had recommended that, and most of our students did it, but some did not. Some teachers had created quizzes and other activities that required timely access to the internet. We are going to ask the parents of students who do not have internet access to "call in an absence," just like any other school day where a student is unable to participate. We want our teachers to have the power to assess students on an eLearning Day, and we want them to be able to mandate visits to web-based classrooms, times to chat on Twitter, and other such activities, if they want to.

Our students are awesome. They were open-minded and tried something really different. Twenty years from now, I hope others don't remember me as the "grinch" who stole snow days. Instead, I hope parents and students recognize that we are taking action to guarantee the continuity of learning, and to guarantee that we never have to take away from our scheduled breaks again. Last year we came to school on President's Day, took a day off our already short spring break, and added to the end of the school year. I think we can avoid ever doing that again.

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