3 Tips to Keep Distance Learning “Moving”

Families and schools across the country are reeling, thrown abruptly from in-school needs to all of the educational, social and logistical needs of distance learning. As parents all across the country and even the world are discovering, transitioning from “just” “Mom” or “Dad” to being teacher as well is daunting, especially while juggling multiple children and professional obligations!

But what is this time like for our kids? Our lives just got complicated — but their’s just got more monotonous. Gone are the social interactions, romps on the playground, gym class and after school activities — and they are likely itching to move at least as much as they’re itching to learn. What can we do to meet their needs within the confines of our own homes during these difficult and uncertain days?

This is something I think about a lot, both as Cajal Academy’s Head of School and as “mom” to one of the 2e kids enrolled. I thought I would take a few minutes to share some of the principles we are using at Cajal Academy as we transform our intensely-personalized, movement-based program into a distance learning day. I hope they help your family strike this balance as well!

1. Take time to prepare your child’s body to learn

My memories of high school all start the same way: racing against the clock to slide into my seat just before the bell and then just expecting my brain to flip the switch and slam into learning mode—which worked for the few minutes until all that adrenaline ran dry and my mind began to drift.

Turns out there’s a more effective (and humane) way. The level of organization within our bodies has a huge impact on the level of organization within our thoughts and emotions (as our students are learning through our current project on the inter-connections between the two!).

Each morning, we start our distance learning program the same way we did when we were all together at the school: with a structured sensory warm-up that combines tactile, active proprioceptive and vestibular inputs to prepare their bodies for the attentional demands of learning. Choice is important to keeping kids engaged, especially times like these when it feels like everything is out of control, and we find that twice exceptional kids thrive on feeling like they are part of designing their own educational process. We helped each child create a list of different activities that supply the different types of sensory inputs that they need, and then ask them to class with the things they need to do their chosen activities each day. We’ll be publishing in-depth tips on how you can recreate this at home for your own kids—stay tuned to our newsletter!

2. Mix it up.

It’s nearly impossible to imagine this nationwide experiment in distance learning happening any earlier in the developmental lifetime of online learning programs. Yet whether your child is dialing in via Zoom to school-provided curriculum or you’ve essentially been thrown into homeschooling and are expected to provide that instruction on your own, it’s important to remember that these programs have their limitations, and that spending all day online comes at a neurological cost.

Back in “the good old days” of running Cajal Academy as an in-person program at a brick and mortar school, we put a great deal of thought into combining multiple learning modalities into each lesson plan. Leveraging neuroscientific research into the benefits of using motor and sensory input to accelerate learning, we taught spelling rules through obstacle courses and math facts through manipulatives. We’d just launched a new project on the inter-relations between the human body and the brain, and were starting to teach the in’s and out’s of the human body through hands-on models, art projects and more.

Needless to say, doing that remotely has its logistical challenges, and buying one of each of those models for every student’s home is simply cost-prohibitive. And yet, even within this limitation, we still see the power of using these principles for lesson design. The web is full of rich content, practically begging our kids to slide into a passive learning mode. But it’s equally full of opportunities to access that same content in bite-sized articles and videos alike, tailored to any age, reading level or scientific depth. By combining small yet rich pieces of digital content on the one hand with discussion, movement games, role playing and DIY obstacle courses on the other, it’s still possible to leverage the benefits of full-body and multi-modal learning. This also makes room for the analytical and active learning process that are essential for all learners, and especially for the twice exceptional kids at the core of our program. Building movement into how the kids engage with curriculum cuts down on the wiggles, too!

3. Be intentional about your use of spaces.

It’s hardly a new idea that establishing consistent learning spaces, with everything your child needs to complete the task at hand, helps them maintain focus by patterning for the brain that it should expect and prepare itself for learning whenever you come to this particular place.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that you should require your child to do all of their learning activities in the same spot. I have two distance learners at home, and they could not be more different from one another. I also have the privilege of enough space to let everyone find a pocket out of everyone else’s hair. For my 14 year old, all reading, drawing and homework does happen in one spot: at his desk, in his room, with the door closed. But my 9 year old just isn’t that kind of kid! Locking him into one location like that would make him stir-crazy by 11 am, and yet, he needs the mental cues of set learning spaces even more than his brother doe!

The compromise we’ve found effective is to have multiple spaces, even if it’s just different corners of the same room, with each one set up to optimize support for the body demands of a given type of task. Then we make sure to do a given task in the same location every time, using the rotation between them as a way to help his mind transition from one activity to the next. For instance, we always settle him into our big blue armchair for ‘read aloud’ with his teacher on Zoom; remote OT and PT sessions with his team always happen in the basement; and math and other activities that require structure, movement or hands-on materials always happen on the strategically-patterned carpet in the living room. This matches to what we found effective at Cajal Academy’s physical school, where the kids move fluidly between a suite of rooms, with each tailored to a different modality of learning.

Of course, even with these three tips, distance learning is an inherently different experience. Its limitations are obvious, but in a future post, I’ll take a look at some of the silver linings it presents as well. Please stay connected with us by joining our newsletter!