Profile: Adapting to Distance Learning

As President of The Heritage Institute, Mike Seymour ’61 offers training and online courses for teachers delivering distance learning.

Mike Seymour ’61 is the owner and president of The Heritage Institute, which offers workshops and online courses for teacher professional development. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, the institute has offered classes for teachers as they adapt to delivering distance learning to their students. Teaching Tips & Strategies: Virtual Class for Educators, a series of ten one-hour online sessions, launched on April 20. Seymour spoke with Alumni Horae editor Jana Brown.

What are the roots of The Heritage Institute?
My company started in the mid-1970s doing place-based education for teachers, primarily around the natural world. We began to offer workshops in all curricular areas all around Washington state. I introduced distance learning when I took over the company in 1993, primarily courses done by e-mail. We were one of the first in the country to be doing continuing education for teachers online, and it grew from there.

What was the impetus for offering new classes as the pandemic took hold?
The world of K-12 education was turned upside down when the pandemic became a reality. Teachers and students left classrooms in droves. School districts were trying to figure out how to keep some connections and started asking teachers to work remotely with students. Some familiar to Zoom and other digital/online teaching resources didn’t do too poorly. Most teachers, though, were floundering. I knew this presented the ultimate ‘teachable moment,’ and decided to pull together a class for teachers using Zoom meetings as the platform. Our goal is to support and encourage teachers in reaching their students, and making it as easy as possible for the less tech-savvy to join the course.

What are best practices recommended for teachers as they adapt to teaching from a distance?
A lot depends upon the age group. I do believe engagement is key. They have to get the students’ buy-in and a certain degree of enthusiasm. I don’t think you can do distance learning without some degree of face-to-face interaction, whether through Zoom, Webex, or Google Meet. The difficulty with using Zoom is how to get a group of kids on a call and get them to settle down. Teachers don’t have the same authority to give non-verbal cues. We talk about how to regulate the environment so it is opportune for the students. It’s about setting expectations for classroom management.

What’s the best combination of synchronous and asynchronous classes?
If I had a class that met five days a week for an hour each time, I would want to have at least one or two live sessions and then supplement that with asynchronous learning. My company is pretty much all asynchronous, however what you can do in an asynchronous environment is add things to it, such as pages and links and videos.

What questions are you getting most frequently?
We’ve had a very strong focus on health, mindfulness, and the importance of self-care. Also, we have talked about how teachers can help the emotional wellbeing of their students. We give them strategies for how to alter their own and students’ negative thinking. The other piece is the importance of building and maintaining relationships. We are finding kids get tired with a lot of screen time. It’s easy to forget that fundamentally learning is not about content, but more about process. How do we help young people become people of character, grounded enough in who they are?

Are you worried there will be learning gaps for students if their teachers are not prepared for distance teaching?
Teachers in this environment and going forward should search out and assemble an inventory of online teaching resources. Khan Academy has all the math you ever need, plus other subjects. We just designed a course called ‘Flipping Your Lesson.’ Up until this crisis, teachers taught and sent kids home with homework. With this model, the students are getting the instruction at home and then, in class, the teacher has a wonderful opportunity to discuss what they have learned.

What do you think may remain after all this is over? How will it change education?
I suspect that the teachers who have put in so much time and stress to learn these online tools will not quickly abandon them.