A few months ago, the Center for Reforming Public Education (CRPE) released a report titled “Crisis Breeds Innovation: Pandemic Pods and the Future of Education. In the report, authors Ashley Jochim and Jennifer Poon’s research offered the first in-depth look at families’ and educators’ experiences with pandemic pods, drawing upon a national survey of 152 parents and 101 instructors who participated in a pod during the pandemic, and follow-up interviews with 62 survey respondents. Pandemic pods are learning groups formed, mostly by parents, to provide learning opportunities for their children during the time when many of those children were not able to go to school because of COVID-19. Pandemic pods could be led by parents, or sometimes they are led by other adult learning leaders hired by the pod to facilitate learning for the participating youngsters. Although most schools are now fully back in session, learning pods still exist and operate across the country.
According to Jochim and Poon, “Families and teachers alike saw benefits in pods. Overall, two-thirds of families who responded to our survey cited at least one tangible benefit over pre-pandemic schooling. Pod instructors also reported satisfaction with the experience—they had the flexibility to design learning experiences and developed close relationships with students and families.”
Back in 2014, I was part of a team that designed a personalized learning lab school launched in the Houston Museum District. We called it A+UP. We recruited a diverse group of 50 middle-school-aged learners and promised the families of those kids they would see 4 ½ years of growth in reading, writing, and mathematical problem-solving over a three-year period. We met that goal with 48 of the 50 young learners. We saw the same satisfaction from our parents that Jochim and Poon write about in their report. Likewise, we saw tremendous satisfaction from the adult learning leaders, we called them learning coaches, regarding the empowerment they felt to make the right decisions for their learners and the deep relationships they formed with the young learners and their families. They also enjoyed the fact that they had decision-making power over a $450,000 annual budget and that they were compensated around $100,000 each for their leadership.
Jochim and Poon go on to write, “But not everyone reflected positively on their experience. Parents in pods that relied more heavily on remote learning reported less overall satisfaction with their experience than those that operated independently. And some families and educators reported feeling cut off from essential supports, including special education services for students and professional development and opportunities for collaboration for instructors.”
We had the same experiences with remote learning struggles and essential support access as those surveyed by CRPE for their report. Our saving grace from remote learning challenges was that we didn’t launch A+UP during a pandemic, so most of that learning involved daily interaction whereby learners were able to work with other peers, and their learning coaches. Even though we asked our young learners to do a lot of online work, whether they were in-person or away from what we called our “base space,” it was the relationship piece, between the learning cohort and their learning coaches, that produced the deep learning we saw over the three-year pilot. Regarding essential support access, like special education, our struggles, even though we experienced some, were rather small since we had maybe 7 to 8 identified special education learners within our cohort of 50. One would suspect, if the pilot would have increased to a 500 or 5,000 learning pod, then essential support access would become an even greater priority to solve moving forward. One possible answer to this problem might be a specialized adult learning coach that can be hired by the pod to support special education learning or other needs.
The two CRPE researchers conclude by saying, “Our findings suggest that families and educators can carve new, promising paths forward when freed from the rules around how school is supposed to work. At the same time, some of pods’ flexibility arose because they were disconnected from the rules and routines that typically govern school systems. While this could yield benefits for students and freed educators to work in ways they found fulfilling, it also meant that students and educators in pods were cut off from critical forms of support.”
Just because we have to figure out critical forms of support for young learners choosing not to attend traditional school, doesn’t mean we should give up on “out of school” opportunities like those described in the “Crisis Breeds Innovation” report. The benefits that young learners, and their adult learning coaches, receive from the deep relationships built within learning pods, the flexible time available away from school to work on individual learning goals and skills like reading, writing, and problem-solving, and the empowerment felt by both the young learner, their coaches, and their families, make it imperative we continue to support these new ways of organizing learning – especially when it comes to black, brown, and poor learners.
Schools no longer get to play the monopoly card.
Til tomorrow. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
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