Teaching in 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has certainly affected every aspect of our lives from how we grocery shop to celebrating holidays over zoom with our relatives to the ability for certain businesses to stay afloat or not.  Education was obviously impacted in the spring as we turned on a dime and transitioned to remote teaching overnight.  Without access to the internet and video conferencing such as Zoom or Google Meets schools would have shut down completely and I am fairly certain we would have been another profession that would have ended up furloughed. Technology allowed us to continue delivering instruction and reaching our students in new ways, but this was by no means equitable.  The curtain was pulled back on all of the roles that schools play in the community and some of the weaknesses in access and funding were shown.  

Three main areas that have been significantly affected have been access to:

Devices

2. In school connectivity

3. At home connectivity

Students come to us with a large range of backgrounds and opportunities and as a school we try our best to meet the needs of every student, but when we suddenly required every student to work digitally the “have” and “have nots”  were either able to participate or not.  I am particularly proud that as part of the Technology Leadership Committee in my district I advocated for the need for every student to be provided with a touch screen device from the district.  This meant that they did not need to share with siblings or parents who were unexpectedly all working and learning from home.  Many students were working off of their phones and this seriously limited their ability to participate and complete their assignments.   

The next area of concern became an issue when we returned to school in the hybrid model in October of 2020.  Suddenly every in person student needed to log onto an LMS to access their classwork, and often required them to work in a digital document and join the Google Meet to work with their classmates that were working remotely.  This poses a new problem of connectivity while in class that we have never experienced before.  My district has gone through several upgrades including increasing bandwidth and upgrading access points and servers.  The most recent upgrade over Spring Break 2021 was achieved through a grant from Entergy (the company that owns Indian Point Power Plant).    

Lastly the biggest challenge has been at home internet access for students.  This is the biggest hurdle and seems to have the most pieces that are out of the district’s control.  When students are not able to log in or stay logged in to class they are essentially absent and miss out on learning.  This can be due to a variety of reasons including not being able to afford internet service, having too many devices pulling from the same modem or router, or living in an area where high speed internet is not available.  My district was able to work towards a solution by placing hot spots in neighborhoods where students were not able to afford internet which was in partnership with our local library.  While this has helped it is not sufficient to provide reliable connection for all students.   

I would like to add that I work in a very affluent district with many resources.  While we have students in need the “haves” far outweigh the “have nots” which allows us to invest in devices, internal infrastructure and community solutions.  

Today marked 2 weeks of distance learning with my students.  It has been an incredible amount of work to train students on how to use the technology to a degree, revamping my lesson plans and creating a balance of collaborative projects with direct instruction and student practice.  Not to mention helping students develop a routine for motivating themselves to do school at home.

Today I found out that we will be losing our spring break,  I was devastated.  These past two weeks have been taxing.  The last time I worked this many hours was my first year teaching.  I was planning on using it to plan, and maybe finish painting my bathroom that I started in October.

Distance Learning means that we have fundamentally changed how school is executed.  All of my skills in classroom management are no longer applicable.  I make it a goal to talk to every single student every day.  I need to know how the learning activity is working for them so I constantly speak to them and elicit responses about how much they understand.  We also talk about their lives and I do my best to know them. A lot of my classroom management is structured around them knowing that I genuinely care about them.  Throw that out the window with this new structure.  

So today I tried something new.  I earned a 66%, so that is a passing grade.  Today I planned on Google Meets with 3 of my 4 classes. (My other class goes tomorrow).  Students have been working on projects and today was presentation day, 45 minutes with time slots already chosen on a collaborative google doc.  2/3 classes were successful so I’ll take it. It turns out that there was an issue with the wifi.  The Hubs and I can’t be on the same extender at the same time and after the video chat crashed for the 5th time my Medical Intervention class bailed and decided that students could opt to record their presentation and post it to the google classroom or try again with the Google Meet on Friday.  

We would call this Habit of Mind thinking flexibly.  I am proud that my students were just happy to see each other and helped me to figure out a solution that works for them and made sense for our goals.  

My student presentations were great! Students had to hear the same content over and over and will have to present on the same, but a requirement was to include a video of each concept.  This allowed me to reinforce the content in lots of different ways and students had ownership over how they presented content.  

Students have been working so hard! They have had to learn in isolation, without their peers or teachers to learn from. Teachers have been working so hard in order to deliver meaningful instruction in this new novel learning environment.  We need a break.  We deserve a mental break.  

For so many teachers across the country within an hour of finding out that we were closing school for two days which turned into two weeks which now likely will turn into the rest of this year and asked to pivot to completely remote learning.  For everyone this pivot has left our heads spinning.  

It took some time to process how I will teach the rest of Chemistry, Medical Interventions and a new course I just designed, Environmental Solutions. completely remotely.  How will I still allow my students to have hands on inquiry based lab investigations that require collaboration with their peers and construction of knowledge when we can’t do any of this together.?? That piece I am still working on... more to come on this...

So for now... I will remember... I love technology, it makes my life easier in so many ways.  So here is how I am currently leveraging technology in order to continue to teach my students remotely:

1. Google Forms as a Quiz. Google Forms can create automatically graded multiple choice quizzes that automatically import grades into the built in gradebook.  Additionally you can add feedback if the student gets the question wrong in the form of text, a picture or a video.  So when they get the question wrong a video of how to solve the problem pops up. I am creating and assigning reviews this way.  They are labeled as HW in my google classroom.    

Pro Tip: I have a subscription to Problem-Attic through my district which allows me to generate a quiz from a bank of Regents Questions.  It exports to a Google Form with key already generated.  It also includes an image of the question which is super nice for Chemistry.  

2.Flexbook 2.0 cK-12 is an online interactive textbook.  It has text with embedded videos and challenges.  It is also totally free! You can also assign problems from the end of the chapter.  I just created a class and assigned the Ecology chapter from the High School Biology Book for my Environmental Solutions Class. 

3. EdPuzzle! EdPuzzle is my favorite! It allows you to embed question into a video, and of course multiple choice grades itself automatically.  You can use any video, and they have a library of already created videos that other teachers have embedded questions into.  I screencast myself and ask leading questions.  There is a no skipping feature so everyone gets the lesson individually at their own pace.  Also I have way more information now than I did live to 28 kids in one room.  

This week it was made quite clear to me as a teacher that during this time of the closure there will be NO GRADES! Students are lost, how will they determine the value of a lesson if there are no grades being given.  Teachers also want to grade, to evaluate.   I, on the other hand, feel free! I feel free from students asking “is this on the test?” and I feel free from tests.  I don’t think I need to evaluate my students in this way.   Plus, I’m certain administering a Chemistry test when there is a global pandemic and kids are stuck in their house doing school work all day may be a form of torture. I love my students, they are under enough stress.  There are no grades, so there are certainly no tests.   What I value is the learning community that I have built this year, I value quality work and well written scientific explanations.  I value data and analysis and well articulated conclusions. I value my students, their interests and helping them to grow.   My alternative... Collaborative projects where students demonstrate understanding and guided practice.   First up: Chemistry: Gas Laws Project. Students create a collaborative presentation where they must find or create a video to explain the four individual gas laws and the combined gas law.   Students present in Google Meet.   Students are able to work with their friends remotely promoting their sense of belonging and ability to learn from each other.   Students get to be creative and can record a demonstration after researching. (I have to work in the option to do a lab at home)  Students get feedback on their work and are able to improve, revise and revisit concepts.