Reporters share advice on how to get out of the remote learning rut

A solutions approach can liven up your remote learning stories, point in new directions, and engage readers, according to education journalists who employ it.

By Colleen Connolly

When schools began to shut down because of the pandemic last spring, education reporters rushed to document efforts to ramp up what’s become known as remote learning.

Over the summer and fall, they published important stories about what it’s like for students and teachers to go to class online, who lacks access to reliable internet, which students are falling behind, and much more.

But let’s face it: These stories have become repetitive and may leave readers anxious and frustrated by the litany of problems that don’t seem to be getting solved.

Reporters may be frustrated, too, writing the same stories week after week.

How can education reporters get out of this rut as students across the country head into another round of remote or hybrid learning? One way is to focus on solutions, an approach that has been gaining ground among some newsrooms and education journalists.

“People tend to respond a lot better when you’re reporting on what’s working rather than just focusing on the problems,” the Solutions Journalism Network’s Lysandra Márquez told me in a phone interview. “The doom and gloom is not working right now.”

We talked to education reporters who shared their strategies for incorporating solutions journalism into the remote learning story. If you or your editor are interested, there’s also a fellowship grant available with a deadline coming up this week.

Disclosure: The Grade shares funders with the Solutions Journalism Network.

One way to get out of the remote learning rut is to focus on solutions, an approach that has been gaining ground among some newsrooms and education journalists.

Solutions-oriented stories examine efforts to fix problems in society and whether those efforts are working and could be applied elsewhere. They complement the traditional accountability journalism that appeals to readers.

It might seem impossible to report the remote learning story without any doom and gloom, but some education journalists have found ways to strike a balance. Report the problems but also shine a light on possible ways forward.

The solutions approach is being adopted by different education reporters in different ways, but they all ask the same question: What are people doing about the problems we report on? Where are they making progress?

Related: When good news goes missing

STRATEGY 1: Compare and contextualize

For examples of solutions journalism in education, the Seattle Times Education Lab is a great place to start. The team has been doing this work since the lab launched in 2013.

As an editor, the Seattle Times’ Joy Resmovits often sent reporters to other places in order to report on solutions to problems that also existed in Seattle. These stories would examine the solution and ask, could it be applied to Seattle?

When the pandemic precluded air travel, Resmovits turned to far-flung freelancers to get the job done.

Washington, D.C.-based Alia Wong, reported remotely on how Tulsa Public Schools found ways to support English-language learners in the pandemic.

She found that Tulsa Public Schools spent a lot of its budget on live translation, and teachers and social workers committed to teaching students English as well as affirming their native languages.

“In Tulsa, support for English learners ranges from the academic to the practical — from breakout virtual classrooms for language support to backpacks brimming with underwear and socks,” Wong wrote.

New Orleans-based Danielle Dreilinger looked at how Miami public schools got students online faster than tech-savvy Seattle by drawing on an emergency hurricane plan.

She found that Miami fared better than Seattle in the quick switch to remote learning because it had a preparedness plan long before the pandemic and had invested more in school technology in previous years.

Solutions journalism is sometimes misconstrued as soft journalism, but when done well it can add a second layer of accountability, according to Resmovits. “It makes it harder for [school] systems to say, ‘Oh, this is intractable and we can’t solve it’ if you are pointing to one place that has.”

Related: ‘Complicating the narratives’ in education journalism

STRATEGY 2: Look for the small wins that still make a difference

The Boston Globe’s Naomi Martin says that her mission is first and foremost accountability journalism. But she views solutions and accountability through the same lens.

For example, she published a recent story about how some families have had to choose between getting free meals from school or logging into their remote classes because districts scheduled meal pickups at the same time as classes. However, several other districts in the state found solutions. In Salem, students could pick up food after school. In Cambridge, the lunch period was extended to allow for travel time to pick up free meals.

“Solutions journalism is really an interesting concept because it sort of makes it sound like the whole story has to be, ‘Here’s a solution for this problem,’ ” Martin said. “That does work sometimes, but I also think it helps when you’re doing a story about a problem to mention in a section of the story, ‘Here’s a place that’s doing it well.’”

Assigned a story about how teachers are coping with remote learning in the fall, she reported which ones were most likely to be struggling (mid-career and veteran teachers) and what challenges they faced, like trying to teach kids whose video cameras are turned off. But she focused most of the story on seemingly small, but effective ways that some were managing to get through to students anyway.

“A lot of what these teachers were doing were more subtle tweaks to discussions, like how they would use breakout rooms,” Martin said. One high school English teacher she spoke with noticed that group discussions on Zoom didn’t engage his students like they did in person. So he switched to small group work in breakout rooms. “The results were almost immediate,” Martin wrote. “Online attendance improved. The students grew more animated. And he can see more passion in their poems.”

These adjustments didn’t fix systemic inequities in education or solve shortcomings of remote learning, but they offered schools and families a chance to share something that’s working in a year when so much is not.

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STRATEGY 3: Beware simplistic overgeneralizations

Freelance education reporter Amadou Diallo includes solutions elements in his work for the Hechinger Report and other outlets. But he’s careful not to sugarcoat solutions stories or paint them as happy endings only.

“It’s not the Channel 7 ‘hero of the week’ story,” Diallo said, noting that education journalists need to look at the myriad successes and failures that make up the big picture and to make sure not to overgeneralize about fixes that work in one location.

“I think where we fall short is we just sort of cherry-pick something that worked somewhere and say, ‘Hey, here’s the solution to this problem,’” Diallo said. “And I think that does a disservice to other communities that are grappling with the same thing.”

About a month into school shutdowns last spring, Diallo wrote for the Hechinger Report about how schools in poor rural and urban districts across the country were reaching students without internet access.

In one rural Tennessee county, the answer was a copy machine and printed paper packets for students to pick up. In Boston, it was educational programming on local PBS affiliate GBH.

“Poverty is not a monolithic community,” Diallo said. “Black and Brown, undereducated, under-resourced schools are not a monolithic community. There are things that happen in some places that don’t happen in other places.”

Learn more about solutions journalism:

The Solutions Journalism Network offers several resources on how to incorporate solutions journalism into your reporting, including an education reporting guide. You can also search their story tracker for more examples of solutions journalism.

If you’re working on solutions stories in 2021, you can also apply for a grant from the network for reporting on how schools are adapting and changing in the pandemic. The deadline to apply is Jan. 15. 

Previously from The Grade

When good news goes missing (Karin Chenoweth 2019)

‘Complicating the narratives’ in education journalism (2018)

Journalists’ strategies for covering the school reopening story (2020)

The promise and peril of “solutions” journalism (2105)

The case for the Ed Lab model (Connolly 2020)

How the Seattle Times education team covered the COVID-19 crisis (Miller 2020)