The first time I read Christi’s beautiful writing I nearly cried.

Christi (I’ve changed her name) had come from Institutional Services after attacking her teacher with a fork. It was the end of the line for her. We took her into our blended learning program thinking (to be perfectly honest) that she wouldn’t last a week. We were wrong.

Free from the social interactions she couldn’t manage, and offered a way to learn that didn’t involve daily attendance, Christi flourished. Three years later, she is acing her high school courses, and told me she wants to be a lawyer.

Her success, and that of so many other at risk students who are learning online, points to a critical and often overlooked truth: Not every learner can manage attending in a building. You can contract, threaten, cajole and bribe but you won’t get them to do it, not for long. They can’t, or they would. Attending school, however, is completely separate from attending to learning.

We have to begin to separate attendance and achievement. We need to offer students an alternative to building-dependent learning.

The Problem of Time

Attending school requires a more complex set of skills than many people realize.
Regular school attendance involves:

– structure in the home around sleep schedules and morning routines
– managing illness, including mental illness
– accessing resources for transportation (bus fare, winter jacket, rides to school)
– managing peer interactions/conflicts
– advocating for self when “I don’t understand” ... etc …

When students miss any of these skills, we start to see school avoidance. When several of them are missing, we get chronic attendance issues and learning delays.

Building-dependent learning is like live theatre. When the curtain goes down, you’ve missed the show.

Chronic non-attending students are the most challenging learners to support. In a fantasy world, we could step into a Doctor Who time travel booth and let them sit in on yesterday’s science class. In reality, they are often given a review booklet or a condensed version at lunch hour at the teacher’s desk. A vicious spiral begins when, at some point, there just isn’t enough time to fit reviewing previous material into the precious hours we have with them. What happens? … At risk students sitting in classes receiving new learning, without ever having learned the foundational pieces that came before it. The result is even more school avoidance.

Plugging in

The ability to offer a building-independent education, is the promise of online and blended learning.

As a companion to classroom teaching, or alternative to it, online learning is a powerful solution. It has the ability to engage learners who need a unique combination of offsite access to lessons, visual learning/media and non-linear (and low threat) ways to review missed concepts.

It takes humility and courage to stop punishing students for their non-attendance and start plugging in to the potential that is inside each of them. Returning them to the circle of learning is the goal and the prize.