It’s Hard to Teach Writing Online
Editor’s Note: This story is the 13th in our series “On Teaching,” which aims to collect the wisdom and knowledge of veteran educators. As the coronavirus pandemic has forced the vast majority of American students to learn at home or remotely, we’re asking some of the country’s most experienced and accomplished teachers to share their advice and identify their students’ most urgent needs.
We are in the midst of the most sweeping education experiment in history. The coronavirus pandemic has forced the majority of the U.S.’s 3.6 million educators to find ways to teach without what most of them consider the core part of their craft—the daily face-to-face interactions that help them elicit a child’s burning desire to investigate something; detect confusion or a lack of engagement; and find the right approach, based on a student’s body language and participation in the classroom, to help students work through their challenges.
The good news is that this is happening at the end of the school year, after teachers have had opportunities to build relationships with technology-enabled approaches, sometimes called “,” or “” models—essentially, a mix of in-person and online learning.
