(upbeat music) - For remote learning, my two teenagers prefer different spots in the house.

My son liked his room while my daughter preferred the kitchen.

- We're fortunate enough that everybody can have their own space, and I know not everybody has that.

- Probably, every month, someone pivots to a new spot in the house to learn.

That might be a different comfy chair or they might just shift for certain subjects to different corners of the house.

- We spent a lot of time thinking about this idea of a dedicated learning environment and looking at successful remote learning from the past, pre-pandemic.

And it seems that when there is a dedicated place to go and learn, students actually learn more because there's, in part, the environment helps us determine our behavior.

And if this little room, this little space here says, this is what you do, you go to school, you learn, you read, you do your work, you log in your laptop, it starts to trigger certain kinds of behaviors.

Just like walking in a physical classroom, that environment triggers certain kinds of behaviors.

Expectations and norms start to happen.

And we're trying to replicate that on a tiny scale.

- One of the things that we've done is to basically designate workspaces specifically for the virtual learning.

So it's all separate, and we know that within those spaces, you have that, that room basically to work, to learn, to grow.

- So some things to consider is make sure the child has an area of the home whether it be the kitchen table, the dining room table, or even their private desk in their room that has as little distractions from other people or even animals, pets or telephones ringing, anything like that, a place where there are very few distraction.

- In that learning space, it is important for the students to have their running tools ready, their pencils, their crayons, their calculator.

You don't want a Zoom call to start and the kid can't participate because they can't find their calculator when everything to do there just as it would in the classroom.

- Adjusting to having four different learners at home, and then, you know, working parents as well, definitely had some challenges and required some adjustments.

As you can imagine, our dining room table has not been any easy place to eat in the last several months.

It's definitely been more of a desk space for multiple people rather than a dining space.

- We decided to put the kids in the kitchen at the kitchen table.

And that immediately, we quickly learned that that was not gonna work because of the different schedules of the Zoom.

It just a constant distraction.

We quickly had to, to adjust.

And so, what we decided to do was to put both kids in their rooms and had, they had desks in their rooms.

Well, that didn't work either.

It definitely took some flexing, you know.

We had to try things a couple of different ways to see which one was going to work and I think we finally found the, the, the layout that works best for everybody.

(upbeat music) - I won't lie, it can get messy.

But once our kids found their space, they really thrive, and that's what matters.

(upbeat music)