Tip 18: Use a Kanban board to organize remote learning at home
Working from home can be a struggle. Teaching from home can be a struggle. Full-time parenting can be a struggle. Doing all at once can be overwhelming, chaotic, and a complete mess!
Here’s a strategy proving successful for many parents, educators, students to keep everyone on track, motivated, and sane! Consider sharing it with your school parents as you transition from “supplemental learning” to “distance learning.”
First things first. What is a Kanban board, you ask? For our purposes, a Kanban board is a tool designed to help visualize work and maximize efficiency (or flow). Kanban boards use cards, columns, and continuous improvement to help get work done. (Credit goes to Atlassian.)
Here are some wonderful, practical stories from educators and parents sharing how they used visual Kanban boards to help support remote learning and sheltering together at home.
Educator and parent Andrew Easton wrote a great blog article, An In Home Learning Strategy for Busy Quarantine Families, detailing how his family was able to find productivity, peace (and self-motivation for his kids) amongst the “corona craze.”
This LinkedIn post by Mandy Ross is a wonderful example of a Kanban board for those with little ones — she uses images instead of words, and color-codes by type of task. Her daughter needs to complete one task from each color and “complete her rainbow” by the end of the day.
Satyajit Joshi also shared a LinkedIn post about his strategies. In addition to a Kanban board, they made an empathy map! Take a peak at the tasks and items of the empathy map if you want a chuckle!
And on a final note, here are two helpful LinkedIn articles!
Michael Watson’s “How Kanban Saved Our Marriage: The First Weeks of WFH Self-Quarantining with Kids” delves into how this process has transformed their family dynamic with the kids home 24/7. At the end, he writes what he’s found to be especially helpful. We love these tips in particular:
“Kids aren’t adults. Yes, they need structure and learning. But more than that, they need empathy, love, and your attention”
“Always make sure you build in time for fun.”
“Realize that if you feel stressed, your kids are probably even more stressed (or scared, bored, and nervous as well).”
Meghan McInerny’s “Kanban for Kids: How I used agile to become a homeschool parent in 24 hours” really delves into specific strategies on how to use the Kanban method for children. She also highlights other examples at the bottom of the article!
K-12 Remote Tips
We send out an email with each new remote communications tip for K12. Some examples use ParentSquare, but these tips will work with any comprehensive communications tool. Sign up to receive them straight in your inbox.
We’d love to know what you are doing — what great examples or ideas would you like to share with other schools? Simply comment below or submit your tip via our web form.