National and California Context:
It’s the day after Labor Day, the traditional school opening day for much of the East Coast. In the mid-Atlantic region, some schools opened up after August 26th and the rest will see their students either all in-person or in a hybrid model starting Tuesday, September 8th. Across the country, the test that in person school is safe will come further into focus; if schools can pull off a safe re-entry, pressure will gradually mount on school systems that have instituted Distance Learning as the primary model.
School districts in Georgia, Tennessee, and much of the South have struggled to various extents with students and staff testing positive. The dilemma is firmly entrenched in politics, the shuttering of the economy versus keeping kids and staff safe versus desire for normalcy versus the need/desire to teach high-risk (special ed, low-income, ELD) students in person to avoid enormous achievement gaps. As of early September, no one really knows what is best.
Notre Dame, Michigan State, University of North Carolina and others are joining many universities across the country going to online learning for some period of time, as Covid 19 cases hit their campuses. Since no one can predict an end date to the virus, the time frames are varied, from two weeks to eight weeks to the first semester. Many universities started classes a week or so early with the intention of finishing the first semester at Thanksgiving Break. As of early September, no one really knows what to do.
In California where I work, most school districts are Distance Learning (DL) exclusively. In Petaluma, DL is set to continue through Halloween; a couple of weeks prior to Halloween, the school board intends to weigh the situation to determine whether to return to some in-person classes by November 1st or remain in DL for the duration of the semester.
At Santa Rosa Junior College, a primary post-secondary option for Sonoma County students, President Frank Chong announced last week that they would continue with an almost exclusive DL model for the entire 2020-2021 school year. In a statement, Chong said that it was “clear to me that the current infection and mortality rates in Sonoma County are far too high to consider a full return to face-to-face instruction. Other colleges and universities across the U.S. reopened for in-person classes too early and saw a dramatic increase in COVID infections.”
Teaching in Zoom
As a teacher who has now been Zooming with students for the past four weeks, I wonder how October, November, and December will look. In a crazy environment of trying to plan for every technological contingency, we have also been beset with record-shattering heat and fires all around us. California is burning in the midst of our Zoom experiment.
In my pre-Covid career, before every class I’ve ever taught, in those moments just before the students enter the classroom, I have always had this strange feeling of unrest. I suppose you could call it fear but that might be too strong a word. It’s the unsettled feeling of hopeful preparation for a lesson and class. Am I ready? Materials? Technology? Classroom? Instructional strategies primed? Group task assigned? Ultimately, I wonder if the students will be engaged. Will I need to pivot to something else if the lesson/discussion goes south? Am I ready for that?
It is the frame for most teachers, that unsettled wonder about the next 50 or 70 or 100 minutes of class. I had a great friend and colleague who was a masterful teacher. He left teaching about 15 years ago because he grew tired of feeling unsettled. For him, it was physical. “I would get stomach aches, semi-nauseous before class. Once the kids came, it was fine. It was just the constant worry about being on my toes,” he said. I remember at the time being shocked. His temperament has always been easy going, relaxed, calm. But underneath, he was burning up and eventually burning out.
But again, all this is pre-Covid. This fall, we are practising multiplication. Those feelings of unrest and uncertainty before a class are now amplified times two (three?), much closer to fear, anger, and resentment at what, by necessity, teaching has become. One teacher colleague said she is basically “surviving.” I have heard from many teachers and school staff saying they now plan to exit education earlier than originally planned. In the grocery store, I saw an instructional aide who I’ve worked with. “I love the kids but this (online teaching) just doesn’t work for me. I can’t help the kids the way I know how to.” At 68 years of age, she had intended to go until 70 but will leave at the end of the year.
Some of the added unrest is figuring out how to pull off an effective online experience for students. Planning for an engaging Zoom lesson includes at least some of the following:
- Explicit and practised knowledge of the Zoom interface – settings, chat, mute, shared screen (and its pitfalls), breakout rooms and their settings, viewing the students, and many more.
- Explicit and practised knowledge of extensions and applications that make the lesson engaging. Examples include Flipgrid, a video sharing tool for teachers and students (like TikTok for education); Edpuzzle, where teachers can add assessment to video and post to students; Clever, SeeSaw, Explain Everything, screencasting tools of various types…and trust me, this is a relatively tiny list of a universe of apps and add-ons.
- Understanding what the end-user (student) can see, access, and accomplish. Knowledge of the applications above must include how students log in and navigate, from kindergarteners to 7th graders to seniors.
- Quick prayers that your own technology will function, from internet connectivity, audio feed, Zoom interface, and transitions to video, live links, and remote guest speakers. I have already had a moment where my cursor simply disappeared and I could no longer navigate from the shared screen backwards.
- Ample time for students to interact in whole class discussion. In Zoom, whole class conversation can include “highlight” or focal groups where four students are unmuted and then asked questions about content. The group feels less direct pressure to respond but enough so that someone typically steps into the breach and responds.
- Clear and frequent explanations about etiquette, and respect and trust for one another.
- Humor, patience, and acceptance of The Things That Go Wrong
- Ample time for small group discussion so that students who feel more comfortable in smaller settings can voice opinions and share content. This includes setting up breakout rooms beforehand and including accessible and relevant documents for the breakout rooms. (Sending kids off with instructions from the main screen without links leaves them in what one colleague called a “breakout wilderness.”)
The Break out room is a true trust experiment. The structure is similar to small groups in a classroom. I give the groups some topic of conversation and guidelines for engagement, including some task/product to keep them accountable. In a Zoom world, the typical student struggles to engage with others, at least initially. As I visit breakout roms to check in, I often find silent students or students who have left the screen altogether. I’ve had many wonder exactly where they went! Occasionally, he or she ends up in a breakout room of one, a virtual solitary confinement. Others have reported getting booted from the room and sent back to the Waiting Room. And others don’t know where they’ve been sent. “I thought I was at another school. I don’t really know the other kids in this class so I just thought you sent me to a different place.”
Even my own appearance in a breakout room is jarring for students. I’m an uninvited guest, barging in on conversation. I’m that cherry guy at a party wandering into a group and loudly asking How Are You Guys? Every day, something new…
Where Are We Now? How to predict…
Tracking what’s next with Covid-19 has been almost impossible to predict. Like many, I thought the summer months would cool the spread. Wrong. On September 4th, the worldwide number of new cases topped 300,000 for the first time. Since mid-July, the number of people dying worldwide due to Covid has remained stubbornly above 5000 per day. By the end of this month, more than a million people will have died. And no one has a clear sense of how Covid will react in colder weather.
The US accounts for about one quarter of the worldwide totals. By month’s end, more than 200,000 will have died; more than 7 million infections will have occurred. In this context, school systems will need to tread carefully, weighing the demonstrated needs of students to return to in-person teaching with the safety of the school community and the broader community at large. From the teacher perspective, Covid-19 is no win.
NEXT TIME: A First Grade Teacher’s Perspective
David Stirrat 