3 things first graders are beating us at
Imagine being in a Zoom meeting with 22 participants for 4 hours. The words that come to mind are chaotic and unengaged. Now imagine those 22 participants being first graders and you’re in charge of leading them. Sounds exhausting, right? This is exactly the situation that our teachers face every day. They are truly doing an amazing job adapting to this new world of distance learning.
After about a month of school, my first grader has become largely self-sufficient with distance learning. Incredibly, his teacher has control over the class from Zoom and keeps the class engaged. Seeing her methods and effort, I have immense respect for her and it grows everyday because keeping 22 first graders in line from online takes real skill.
Seeing how his class has adapted made me reflect on what they’re doing to create the conditions for success. I realized that they are doing some things right that we, as adults in the working world, often get wrong. Here are 3 things that 1st graders are beating us at:
#1: Build a strong foundation
Think back to when you started a new job or when you hired someone for your team. What was your experience like? I remember times when:
- My computer wasn’t ready for me
- My boss handed me a list of people for me to meet with and haphazardly forwarded emails and documents to me
- Orientation happened a month after I started
Contrast that with distance learning. There was a plan to onboard the class. During the first week of school, the objective wasn’t to learn math or reading. Instead, the learning was focused on getting to know each other in the class and the teacher coaching them on how to use the tools. They took the approach of going slow at first so that they can go fast later. Take the time to invest in onboarding and set a good foundation.
#2: Optimize the end-to-end experience for your target persona
Tools are supposed to make our lives easier, but having so many different tools can make work more challenging. For example, to prep for a product review meeting, you have to look at your backlog in JIRA to put data into slides, then pull up the calendar invite so you can email it to everyone before the meeting, all while getting pinged on Slack about other questions. That’s five different silos. We end up expending our time and energy juggling between tools rather than getting real work done.
In my son’s class, they’ve thought about the end-to-end experience for first graders.
- They’ve made it easy to juggle between tools by using Clever to link to the tools they need and SSO into them. They don’t have to mess around with bookmarking sites or typing in usernames and passwords.
- They use Seesaw to upload their work for the teacher to review, and each assignment comes with step by step instructions on what they need to submit. The most critical information is right there in context when they need it, rather than having to search for it.
- They use i-Ready to assess their math and reading levels, but before starting the test, they must go through a product tour that shows them how to do things like use the speaker button and select answers. The product tour is crucial because you want to test for what the kids know and don’t know about the content, not whether they can use the system.
If technology is so easy that young kids can use it, then it’s simple and intuitive for everyone.
#3: Get the most out of meetings
Meetings are a huge time suck for PMs. We’ve all been in meetings where everyone is distracted, looking at their laptops and phones and answering emails. Especially in today’s remote workplace, synchronous time is precious. You should call a meeting when there’s a clear desired outcome and leverage every minute of meeting time to drive towards that outcome.
This is where I’ve seen distance learning excel. First graders only have an average attention span of 15 minutes, whereas adults have an average attention span of 20 minutes. Yet despite 25% less attention span, my son’s class is able to have attentive and engaged meeting time by following these best practices:
- Set expectations for meeting norms — Starting from day 1, his teacher laid out the rules for how the kids should behave at school. It didn’t matter if it was in-person or distance learning, they were expected to maintain the same level of engagement.
- Provide direct and immediate feedback — If a kid plays with a toy during class, is late returning from recess, or isn’t looking at the screen, his teacher will immediately call out the child’s name and address the issue. When the child displays good behavior after that, she will praise them to reinforce it.
- Create breaks to stretch — Knowing that everyone gets the wiggles sometimes, his teacher finds opportunities to get kids out of their chairs to stretch and jump. Get creative! sing a hello song and
- Use different modes of engagement — Since classes are inherently a bigger group for a Zoom call, they mix it up with periods of full group discussion, smaller breakout groups, and independent work. These periods are timeboxed and have a goal — such as read independently for 15 minutes — and then the group gets back together to discuss how they did.
I’ve been super impressed with how quickly my first grader has become largely self-sufficient with distance learning. It’s been a relief for us working parents who struggled with the spring. Now that we’re about a month into school, I’m ready to declare Distance Learning 2.0 a success and am inspired by what we can learn from first graders about how to work more effectively.
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