How to Help Your Child Learn Efficiently in Online School and Courses: Practical Tips
I was folding socks at the kitchen counter last January when I heard the slam. It was 10:15 a.m., my 11-year-old daughter Lila’s second remote class of the day was supposed to end in 10 more minutes, and she’d already stormed out of her room. “I got nothing done,” she yelled, dropping into a dining chair. “I’ve been staring at the screen for an hour and I can’t even remember what the teacher talked about. My math worksheet is still blank. This is stupid.”
Before that week, when Lila’s middle school shut down for a three-week flu outbreak, my only advice for online learning had been generic: sit up straight, close your extra tabs, focus. I’d hidden her phone once, and she’d cried for 20 minutes and said I was ruining her education. That morning, after she’d calmed down enough to talk, I brought her a glass of lemonade and sat on the floor of her bedroom instead of standing over her desk lecturing. I asked her what was actually different between online school and in-person school, what was hard that no one was talking about.
She ticked off the list slow, like she’d been thinking about it for days: At in-person school, you can’t scroll your texts while the teacher’s talking. Everyone’s looking at you, and your phone’s in your locker anyway. Between classes, you walk down the hall, so you get a break from sitting. When you walk into class, the assignment’s already on the board, so you know what you’re supposed to do right away. None of that happens here. I’m just sitting here with all my stuff around me, and it’s just too easy to zone out.
That’s when I realized I’d been doing it all wrong. I was trying to turn her bedroom into a mini copy of her middle school classroom, when it never would be. Instead of forcing her to fit into a system that didn’t work for her at home, we needed small, specific changes that fixed the actual problems she was having, not the ones I imagined.
The first change we made was the arm’s reach rule for devices. Lila had always kept her phone on her desk for music, which I get — she listens to lo-fi while she works. Instead of taking it away entirely (which, as I’d already learned, starts a fight that takes longer than the whole class period to fix), we agreed: if she wants music, she connects it to her cheap bluetooth speaker, then puts the phone in the junk drawer in the hallway, 12 feet away from her desk. No phone within arm’s reach during class. For her school Chromebook, we added one small step: before the first class of the day, she logs out of all her personal accounts — Snapchat, Gmail, the game she plays at recess — so notifications don’t pop up mid-lesson. It takes 30 seconds, and it cut her distraction rate by more than half in the first week.
Next, we added the 3-minute pre-class prep. Lila had 5 minutes between each class, which she used to scroll or get a snack, then she’d be scrambling to catch up when the next class started. Now, she uses the last 3 minutes of that break to write one specific goal for the upcoming class on a sticky note, right on the edge of her laptop. It’s never big: “Finish first 3 algebra problems” or “Write down the study guide questions for history” or “Ask the teacher about the homework confusion”. One sentence, 20 seconds. It doesn’t sound like much, but it gives her a clear thing to work toward instead of just sitting through 45 minutes of class waiting for it to end. This works for after-school online courses too — when my 10-year-old son takes his weekly online coding class, he writes “get my sprite to jump” on his sticky note before it starts, and stays on track way better than he used to.
The third small change was the 15-minute move break. I used to tell her she had to sit the whole class period, just like she does at school. But at school, she gets up to sharpen pencils or pass out papers every 10 minutes anyway, right? Now she sets a timer on her watch for 15 minutes. When it goes off, she stands up, walks to the end of the hallway and back, stretches her shoulders, and sits back down. It’s 30 seconds, no checking the phone, no getting snacks, just a quick move to get her blood flowing again. She said it keeps her from zoning out so far that she misses the whole lesson. We tried buying a fancy standing desk last year for homework, and it just collects stuffed animals now — this 30-second walk works just as well, for free.
None of these things are fancy. We didn’t set up a whole separate classroom in the basement. We didn’t overhaul her whole schedule. We just changed a few small habits that fit into our normal day.
Last month, Lila did another week of remote school when she had to quarantine after a COVID exposure, and she did all the steps on her own, without me reminding her. She finished all her work by 2:45, and we went for a bike ride before dinner, which never would have happened that first messy week. It’s not perfect. Some days she forgets to put her phone away, she gets distracted by a text, and she falls behind. Some days she writes her sticky note goal then ignores it anyway. Once she took three 15-minute breaks in one class just to get out of doing a presentation she was nervous about, and we had to talk through that after.
For parents who are struggling with their kid’s online learning, whether it’s a few weeks of remote school or a year-long after-school course, I don’t have any big perfect secrets. The best thing I found was to stop lecturing about focus and ask the kid what’s actually hard for them. Then fix those small problems one by one, instead of trying to turn your home into something it’s not. It’s worked for us so far, and we’ll keep tweaking it as we go.
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