By Michael LaSusa and Mackey Pendergrast

Instead of enjoying graduations and field days, students and teachers in New Jersey are laboring behind computer screens to move through curricula designed for a different context. But taking an instructional program intended for brick-and-mortar classrooms and recasting it in a virtual environment need not be a hastily executed shot in the dark. On the contrary, a purposeful approach rooted in established research in neuroscience and developmental psychology can guide school districts through this unprecedented shift to virtual learning. We see opportunities for reimagining and improving teaching and learning, both inside and outside the physical classroom.

The first opportunity involves instructional delivery. It is tempting to think that the best approach to virtual learning is to imitate a typical school day, with teachers and students logging on to their electronic classrooms at the same time as if they were all together. We do not think so. Those who have spent their careers working in preK-12 classrooms know how much skill and intentionality it takes to shepherd 20+ students through their learning -- managing behaviors, gauging understanding, and involving pupils meaningfully in lessons. This is difficult under ideal circumstances. When teachers are working with a class of students from their homes and through their screens, it is impossible.

Brain research explains why. In order to learn, the brain must be able to focus on one stimulus at a time. Attention is a limited capacity resource; there is only so much bandwidth available to select and attend to information. One of the biggest obstacles to learning, therefore, is cognitive overload.

In an online classroom, cognitive overload is a given: students are looking at a small screen divided among images of their classmates, teacher, and whatever instructional visuals the teacher may present. They must input and process all of that stimuli while at the same time listening, taking notes, and reflecting on the lesson content or others commentary. Additionally, students must contend with a host of possible distractions in their immediate environment -- cell phones, barking dogs, runaway siblings -- over which the teacher has no control. The brain needs focused attention long enough for the information to enter into the working memory. Virtual learning should seek to avoid cognitive overload by reducing unnecessary stimuli that compete with that attention. Thats a vote against lengthy periods of whole-class synchronous virtual instruction.

So what is the best method? To address this question, we need to look no further than to our students. Ask any kid how they figure out how to do something, and they will likely give you the same answer: YouTube. Whether its learning how to make a Rainbow Loom bracelet, memorize Steph Currys best moves, or play the chords to Living Colours Cult of Personality, YouTube is the go-to resource. Similarly, Khan Academy did not become a household name by brokering live tutoring sessions for groups of 25 students. Rather, founder Salman Khan realized that providing students with digestible video segments of mathematics content enabled students to work at an individualized pace, hit the pause button when necessary, and replay key moments as often as needed.

Think of the brain as a hiking path in a forest. Every time you travel down that path it becomes firmer and easier to discern. Similarly, every time a student rewatches a video clip to understand something more completely, to find a missing step, or to think slowly or rehearse, the neural connections and pathways are firming up in the brain, something neuroscientists call encoding and retrieval. A brain that is focused and relaxed is a brain that is ready to learn.

Dont students need to connect directly with their teachers and classmates? Of course! If the front end of virtual learning should rely on video content produced by teachers or thoughtfully selected from existing online platforms, the back end should focus on small group and individualized instruction. To accomplish this, teachers should use video conferencing apps to follow up with small groups of students, take questions, and check for understanding. This is also the place where teachers can encourage students to move through the learning pit-- that crucial stage of cognitive struggle where learners build their capacity and the brain embeds learning more concretely for future retrieval.

The second opportunity is for schools to permanently break away from the tyranny of time. Our current schooling structures date to the 19th century and our concept of credits and attendance are centered on those structures, including the Carnegie Unit -- an attempt to quantify how much seat time a student needs to acquire the material of a course.

Based on the need for seat time, the high school day is too long. We are hearing directly from our students during this prolonged school closure that they are sleeping more and feeling healthier. It is perverse that it has taken a pandemic to provide our adolescent students with a basic life need: sleep. Any conceptualization of schooling that aligns with brain research must afford students sufficient time for both sleep and exercise, both are essential ingredients for deep learning. When this school closure ends, we should leverage what we have learned, reduce the length of the school day, and rethink the demands of time that we impose on our students.

A final opportunity in this national experiment is to seize a salient takeaway: that going to school is vital to children. We need students to gather and learn how to navigate social relationships. We need students to interface with positive adult role models. We need students to take part in extracurricular programs that impart critical life skills.

When school resumes, we will better appreciate what we have been missing, but we should build upon what we have learned. After Hurricane Sandy, we better fortified New Jersey. We raised homes along the shore. We installed generators at critical facilities. We revised building codes. We should now take the same approach with our public schools.

We should make our instructional design stronger, better aligned with how the brain actually learns, and more conducive to helping students become independent learners. This will be crucial to position us for the next school closure and also to enable us to better serve our students at all times. Lets use this experience to fortify New Jersey again, this time for our children.

Michael LaSusa is the superintendent of schools in Chatham and was the 2018 New Jersey Region One Superintendent of the Year.

Mackey Pendergrast is the superintendent of schools in Morristown and is the 2020 New Jersey Superintendent of the Year.

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We have a lot to learn about teaching while schools are closed, 2 superintendents say - NJ.com