Remote Learning: Access, Infrastructure, and Instruction

“Districts had to really scramble to provide devices, to provide internet service.” —Kristin Percy Calaff

Schools Provided Hotspots and Opened Learning Hubs

When children across the country were sent home from school in mid-March 2020 and told that they would have to remain there for at least the next two weeks, some were sent home with a laptop and others were sent home with paper worksheets. Schools slowly built up online classes, but much learning happened asynchronously, with teachers posting video lessons and holding office hours to help answer student questions. Two weeks turned into the rest of the school year and more schools began handing out laptops and hotspots to help students get connected and get online.

As Elvira Armas, director of programs and partnerships at the Center for Equity for English Learners (CEEL) at Loyola Marymount University, told us, the digital divide quickly became a significant concern. “One of the things that we were primarily concerned about is the way in which the immediate response was structured and how that left many of our English learners and their families really outside of the reach of that structure,” she said.

Indeed, research has identified a digital divide in internet access and technology among low-income and immigrant-origin students, groups that have significant overlap with the English learner student population. A 2021 study by Vikki Katz and Victoria Rideout surveyed 1,000 parents to learn about their experiences learning from home during the pandemic, including their digital access. All of the parents in the survey had household incomes lower than the national median for families.¹ Of those surveyed, 15 percent did not have access to broadband at home, and this was higher, 26 percent, for immigrant Latinx families. Instead, they relied on mobile devices or dial up, or in some cases had no internet access at all. In addition, 66 percent of Latinx parents reported that their children had experienced disruptions in their schooling (e.g., missing school, not finishing work, participating via a cell phone) as a result of being under-connected.

A February 2022 report by the Migration Policy Institute examined the experiences of immigrant-origin youth between the ages of 15 to 17 and found that lack of access to reliable internet was the biggest challenge these students faced during the pandemic.² It also found that many of the learning management systems used to structure remote learning had limited translation functions and were not optimized for use with mobile devices. These challenges had a direct impact on students’ engagement and attendance during remote learning. The authors of the report gave the example of a high school in Salt Lake City, where only 3 percent of ELs were logging into class due to English and digital literacy barriers. These findings are consistent with what we heard from the individuals we interviewed, many of whom pointed to the digital divide as a central and ongoing issue for English learner students and their families.

School districts around the country worked to address gaps by providing devices and hotspots to students. Percy Calaff noted both that the pandemic forced school districts to work on closing the digital divide within a matter of months, and that the challenge of helping to close these gaps was felt differently by school districts, even within the same state, due to disparate resources. “Districts had to really scramble to provide devices, to provide internet service. In many areas of our state, there was tremendous work that took place to make that happen,” she said. “Some of that was also impacted by the resources of the districts, you know, where they were located….More urban areas, I think, were able to probably manage that more rapidly and deploy a lot of that support, but they also have stronger infrastructure.” In “some of our more rural areas, that was more challenging, because in many of those areas, they already struggle with internet service.”

In some school districts, it took time to address the connectivity challenge due to the high number of families that required access. Harrisonburg City Public Schools (HCPS), located in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, placed hotspots into neighborhoods using school buses and city cars. Part of that was because there was a huge demand for the individual hotspots and it was easier to secure big hotspots. But even providing internet access did not solve all of the challenges, since “sometimes the signal wouldn’t be good enough or sometimes it would cut out,” Laura Feichtinger McGrath, HCPS director of EL services and Title III, told us. As remote learning became more sophisticated in terms of the digital tools and innovation used to support student learning and engagement, these resources put a lot of pressure on the bandwidth of the internet hotspots.

Finally, some school systems prioritized English learners for in-person learning in order to promote attendance and reliable access to remote learning. One community in Los Angeles County opened up a school building in a neighborhood that had issues with connectivity and where many students were not logging on to remote learning. “They created a hub for kids where they were still doing distance learning throughout the pandemic, but they were able to come into the school to do it, so that they could have both support and also consistent internet that wasn't bumping them off all the time,” Hurwitz, of SEAL, told us. In Harrisonburg, newcomer students and those with the lowest levels of English language proficiency were prioritized for in-person learning and were able to attend school in person for the majority of the 2020–21 school year. Feichtinger McGrath said that the newcomer programs provided substantial supports and resulted in students making progress on their language skills and academic learning.

Family Engagement was used to Close Communication Gaps

Beyond providing access, school systems also worked diligently to provide assistance to students and families in navigating remote learning systems and technology. This proved to be challenging, particularly early on in the pandemic. Teachers were not always able to reach families due to challenges in communication and limited availability of translation services in less dominant languages. Armas said that these communication gaps negatively impacted families’ confidence in school systems’ ability to meet their needs. Other interviewees shared this perspective, with Passante noting that promoting language access for families was crucial and that schools that had not prioritized this prior to the pandemic were left scrambling.

In Harrisonburg, bilingual home-school liaisons saw their responsibilities expand, from helping families enroll in school, facilitating school-parent communication, and sharing comprehensive resources, to helping families get connected to the internet and navigate different websites. “I think that we also learned a lot too, about how to do that and being able to show things on screens. So that was really nice for parents to switch into that, ‘oh, I can actually see what you're talking about,’ as opposed to having a conversation on the phone,” said Feichtinger McGrath.

UnidosUS affiliates launched Padres Comprometidos Ed-Tech (PC Ed-Tech) to help orient families to remote learning, including how to use Zoom and Google Meet, and increase their confidence and skills in helping support their child during distance learning.³ Maria Moser, former senior director of curriculum and data at UnidosUS, explained that parents came to PC Ed-Tech with a broad range of experiences, with some feeling overwhelmed and others who were eager to help teach other parents about the tools.

Teachers also provided direct support to students. For example, at the Internationals Network for Public Schools, which serves immigrant and refugee secondary students, teachers walked students through the process. Lukes described the experience of one ninth grade teacher who works with many students who have emergent literacy: “One of the things she realized is students had never used email. So they're trying to use Google Classroom and it's like, wait, email, what are we doing here? What is this? So she had to begin way before the beginning and walk students through that.”

Interviewees said that in some school systems, the gains that were made in closing the digital divide have now been erased, with the return to in-person schooling. Moser described a return to the status quo, with school systems pulling back digital devices and hotspots once students returned to in-person instruction. “I think that the lack of seeing this as a long-term investment has a lot of trade-offs,” she said. “Because…the things that we had to do for COVID overlap with things that might be good practices in terms of accessibility, or encouraging people to participate or be aware of what's going on. And rolling it back sends a pretty strong message that we were only doing this because we absolutely had to."

“Last year it was really hard for us to maintain the integrity of all of our programming.” — Laura Feichtinger McGrath

ELs of Different Ages Experienced Remote Learning Differently

English learners are far from homogenous. Students range in age from three up to 21 and speak hundreds of different languages. Some were born in the U.S. and others immigrated here. Some have experienced interruptions to their formal education. As a result of these differences, school systems must be adaptive and avoid adopting a one-size-fits-all approach. During remote learning, many interviewees observed substantial differences in the opportunities afforded to ELs based on their age and developmental stage.

Younger students appeared to be the most negatively affected by remote learning due to their limited experiences with formal education and shorter attention spans, said Jennifer Paul of the Michigan Department of Education. Many school systems also did not feel it was developmentally appropriate to have younger students on screen for most of the day. As Berger explained, “we did create, for every grade level, an expectation of teacher-directed work, synchronous work, and asynchronous work. We were super intentional about taking into account the developmental needs of the kids,” she said, “and…students in the upper grades had more FaceTime, more kind of direct instruction via Zoom, than our younger students.” The result of this differentiated approach was that younger EL students, such as those in pre-K or kindergarten, had less English instruction because of limitations in screen time and direct virtual instruction from teachers.

Younger learners also lost learning because the platforms used for remote learning were not able to fully meet their needs, according to some interviewees. They said that older students did not experience a similar level of loss in terms of engagement and ability to use the technology. Macias of Chicago Public Schools described the particular challenges faced by pre-K and kindergarten students: “It just wasn't the same virtually as it would have been in the classroom environment, because of the platforms that you're using. And because you’re working with really small children, there's not a lot of chance for them to interact with each other in that type of platform. It's more teacher-directed instruction,” he said, “and so, you know, those natural conversations that come in small groups among children, thinking through whatever content they're working in, and the use of the language in that content—you didn't have that in that room in that virtual setting.”

Remote Learning Inhibited Language Development

The way that elementary classrooms are decorated—class rules, student artwork, the alphabet, number lines, charts outlining learning strategies, a daily schedule, a calendar, and a white board detailing the day’s objectives—does more than just fill the otherwise blank walls. These visuals provide students with scaffolds to support their learning.

Some approaches to supporting English language development (ELD) rely heavily on charts that show sentence patterns, processes, and KWL charts that ask students to list what they know and want to know about a topic, to name a few of these visuals. Feichtinger McGrath noted that teaching without visual scaffolds from the classroom was difficult and that many ESL educators were eager to teach in person, as “their level of comfort, being away from all of that tangible space to do language” was hard. “Most of them,” she said, “couldn't wrap their heads around it. They really wanted to be with kids, and they wanted to be…touching their walls and making this all come alive.”

Several other interviewees emphasized the fact that remote learning did not provide sufficient opportunities for students to receive targeted ELD instruction, to engage in conversations with peers, and to practice and use academic language. Californians Together surveyed over 650 teachers and administrators in April and May of 2020 to learn more about how ELs were being served in the state. Only 55 percent of respondents reported that ELs were receiving ELD online and just 39 percent reported that students had weekly interactions with ELD teachers as part of their district’s distance learning plan.⁴ According to Armas, who works with school systems throughout California, providing designated ELD was a challenge, in part due to gaps in policy and guidance from the state around how to ensure that it was happening and supports for teachers on how to design instruction to accommodate for it.⁵

Armas also told us that school districts had different policies about allowing unsupervised break-out groups. “In some districts the answer was a hard no,” she said. “And so, if breakout groups aren’t allowed, how can you design peer-to-peer and individualized instruction for students? In other cases, there were additional paraprofessionals or policies…that were put forth to support students beyond whole group instruction, and there, it was more feasible to deliver designated ELD,” she said. Language learning does not happen in a vacuum; it requires multiple types of inputs and experiences. At school, peers provide an essential source of learning and interaction—an element that was lacking during remote learning. “Peer learning is a lot of the way students are actually getting engaged,” Chicago’s Macias told us. “A lot of the ways they apply new content, a lot of the ways they master things…interacting in groups, interacting with a partner, that's what was really lacking…especially with the ELs, they need that peer interaction, especially with students who are maybe slightly higher proficiency,” he said.

In addition, many students chose to have their cameras turned off during remote learning and some had spotty internet connections, which interfered with their ability to fully participate in class. In one remote class that Luft dropped into, he was placed into a breakout group with three students.

Two of them were off camera, because they said there was just too much going on in their apartment and they didn't want to be on the camera. And it made the conversation harder. It made the work harder in the group; they couldn't see each other. It was harder for them to understand each other…there were some language barriers….I was only in the group for, like, five minutes and like everything on your bingo card happened, you know: stalled connection, kid got kicked out, something was going on at home, the kid got distracted, got pulled away from, you know, so it was a good microcosm of what happens with this.

Given these challenges, the drop in speaking proficiency among ELs seen in the WIDA national results is not surprising.⁶

“If it was lousy instruction before, you are simply digitizing lousy instruction.” —Joe Luft

At the beginning of the pandemic, all schools and teachers were scrambling to transform their non-digital instruction models into a fully remote setting. As Bryant explained, COVID caused a pedagogical crisis where teachers were trying to figure out their identity in this new virtual space. For many of our interviewees, the definitive factor that helped some schools get “through” the pandemic better than others came down to the school systems and structures that were in place pre-pandemic. As Gonzales of the English Learners Success Forum explained, “places that had a strong curricular plan pre-pandemic and committed to that plan are the places that fared better in terms of maintaining coherent and consistent learning.” The pandemic revealed that not many schools and districts had the necessary curricular and instructional infrastructure to provide ELs with integrated language and academic support in person, let alone in a remote setting.

According to Orly Klapholz, founder and CEO of Inlier Learning which focuses on improving instruction for SLIFE ELs across the country, it became obvious that "most of our educational technology tools were not built with our multilingual learners in mind." She recognized how challenging it was for teachers to support their EL students and in particular their SLIFE and newcomers, many of whom were in need of foundational skill work. Many of the academic tools used pre-, mid-, and post-pandemic are not accessible to them, especially not in languages beyond Spanish.

Moser said that few schools had any kind of plan for how EL services were going to be provided outside dual language classrooms, especially in places where the district did not take a leadership role in creating a coherent approach. In California, Armas and her colleagues at the Center for Equity for English Learners (CEEL) found that the first few months were particularly difficult because there were no clear guidelines for how many hours were required for EL synchronous and asynchronous models. They observed that although a minimum number of hours was eventually set by the state, implementation still varied and some teachers did not feel like they could adequately serve these students based on that minimum threshold. This placed the onus on individual teachers to ensure their students were prepared to make socio-emotional, linguistic, and academic progress.

Furthermore, it quickly became evident that simply taking what teachers were doing and squeezing it into a virtual platform does not work, especially when it was inadequate to begin with. As Luft asserted, “if it was lousy instruction before, you are simply digitizing lousy instruction.” Several interviewees said that while curricula were being translated a lot last year to allow ELs to access remote instruction, it was challenging to ensure accuracy, particularly when using automated services like Google Translate. As Gonzales stated, “there is a science to translation and there are unintended consequences when it is not done properly.” The meaning of a text can literally get lost in translation.

Additionally, as Armas told us, the pandemic proved just how critical solid pedagogical practices are in delivering integrated and designated English language development. Though the intent was there to deliver ELD in this virtual space, doing so required a huge scaffold and lift by teachers and administrators to make it happen. Teachers relied on existing strengths and research-based practices to cope with the challenges of delivering integrated instruction online. At the Internationals Network, schools leveraged collaboration between interdisciplinary teams, a key component of their model even prior to the pandemic. In addition, established practices of mastery based learning allowed students to demonstrate their learning in language and content thanks to the flexibility this approach offers. In Washington DC, Center City Public Schools had made deliberate investments in equipping all teachers with asset-oriented instructional practices for ELs, an approach that has been an integrated part of their model for years⁷ which they were able to draw upon during the pandemic. And importantly, several interviewees said that it was important that schools’ vision of instruction was used to drive how technology was leveraged throughout the pandemic, not the other way around.

In Washington State, Percy Calaff said that a silver lining of the pandemic was that it pushed schools and districts to rethink services to be more inclusive, intentional, and systematic within the classroom, towards a more integrated model for ELs. This is because many local education agencies (LEAs) in her state were still using a pull-out model and were overwhelmed by the prospect of having to set up all these additional pull-out groups to meet higher EL numbers. Percy Calaff and her team were able to remind people that this might not be the best model for ELs, particularly in younger grades.

Indeed, many of our interviewees agreed that COVID presented an opportunity for school systems to reflect and rethink their services for ELs from an equity and asset-based standpoint. Unfortunately, as Hurwitz said, “some things are equity driven but student agnostic” and “DLLs/ELs have historically been treated as an add-on, pull-out, or a text-box in the curriculum.” In rethinking how to operate, Hurwitz calls on schools to home in on who the children are and not talk about equity in the abstract. And as Measel of the Pennsylvania Department of Education said, “if districts have not been taking an asset-based approach to ELs and their academic program, they should definitely start now, but not because of the pandemic, but because they should have done that all along.”