Taking attendance on asynchronous (no-Zoom-days) is presently my absolute least favorite thing about remote learning. (And my “least favorite” list is long.)

Because we in Clark County are experiencing a significant COVID spike, it seems like the earliest we’ll move to hybrid in-person learning for our secondary schools will be February (note: this is not the official line, this me reading between the official lines).

Depending on which period a student is in, they may have two or three scheduled zoom sessions with me each week. I’m fine using zoom attendance as Attendance with a capital “A,” but I’m struggling hard keep up on attendance for non-zoom, asynchronous (or “on-demand,” as our district calls them) days. OSPI has provided guidance around marking absences, and I understand the impulse to hold a base level of accountability.

Nevertheless, I believe that the BIGGEST mistake we are making in distance learning is our persistent systemic disposition toward replicating in remote learning the rules and practices of in-person learning.

For “daily attendance,” my students have to either (1) respond to some prompt or task in Google Classroom, (2) interact with our ongoing work (such as our long-term research paper) by making revisions/edits that I can spot when I sort my class Google folders for “last modified” times, or (3) participate in optional office-hours with me.

This all sounds fine and good… until a kid struggling in Physics or Finance or some other class chooses to use my “asynchronous English day” to power through the work for those classes, saving my work for a different day. Consequently the timestamps don’t line up. They were doing school that day just not my school stuff, and while I can go back and edit attendance, which I do, it means a constant routine of going back in time to see whether that one prompt from two days ago got answered last night at 1am so I can then click through three things in Skyward (our attendance/gradebook platform, which is separate from Google Classroom) to edit each kid’s past attendance…

Then there are the big picture kids. The ones who consistently ask me to “just post the whole week all at once,” and when I do that they inevitably power through all the work in marathon Englishing that falls on whichever days (nights) of the week the whim strikes. Sure, this might mean that they aren’t prepared for the Tuesday zoom, but they have it all nailed down by Friday’s session. Alas, due to their marathon Englishing, they were marked absent Monday, Wednesday and Thursday despite having all the required work done by Friday. Monday is beyond the threshold of manual revision in Skyward, so to change that attendance I have to email the main office to add that to their already overfilled plate…or just leave it an unexcused absence, which doesn’t feel right either.

There’s a huge piece of me that believes (perhaps delusionally) that if someone in power were to just say “Hey, let’s do attendance on a weekly basis,” everything in my life would magically feel easier. Better yet: “Let’s record attendance each Monday for the previous week.”

This attendance mess forces us, also, to consider the function of “attendance reporting” in remote learning. Is it to ensure parents are looped in about when their kids are engaged? That’s the answer that makes the most sense… but there are other ways to accomplish that. Isn’t that idea of “other ways to accomplish that” the very kind of opportunity-silver-lining remote learning was supposed to let flourish?

We have a system in our building where our entire staff (all 10 of us plus the principal and office staff) share a Google spreadsheet with every kid’s name on it. There, we log our parent contact (so families aren’t bombarded with phone calls from all of us at the same time) and we have a color coding system for each of our class periods about the degree of engagement we are seeing for each kid. It works really well… I can go down the list, and if a kid is “red alert” for English, but green in all their other classes, I at least know they are engaging elsewhere and I can tailor my “nudge” accordingly. All periods listed as red? Each kid is connected with a faculty advocate (teacher) who has a “case load” of around 20 students for whom they are the primary contact. If one of my Advocacy kids is all red, I’m the lead for home contact to problem-solve how we might better support or connect with the student.

This system, not necessarily attendance reporting in Skyward, feels much more responsive (and collaborative) than back-editing absences when asynchronous assignments show up a couple days behind schedule. If I as the student’s teacher am satisfied with the student’s level of engagement, I keep them “green,” and then shift them to “yellow” if participation in zooms or engagement in asynchronous lessons trends toward concerning for an individual student.

Think back to last spring and all the talk about how this pandemic might give us the chance to really “shake up” what school is for kids… to diversify our practices and reinvent teaching and learning. Many teachers are finding ways to do exactly that. But clinging to management and accountability systems for a pre-COVID world are the little things… and there are piles and piles of little things… that inhibit the “shake up” our system so desperately needs.