The Pandemic Forced Me to Grow as an Educator
How the pivot to remote learning changed my mindset.
When Illinois’ governor mandated last spring that all schools needed to switch to a remote learning model, I was filled with anxiety. I had never completely relied on technology to teach my students, but even more than that, I was worried that the students’ progress would grind to a halt.
And for a while, I was right.
The Illinois State Board of Education mandated that we could “do no harm” and that the students’ grades couldn’t drop below where they had been before the switch to remote learning.
And so time became elastic in the way that only teachers know. Spring was dreary and cold. The final quarter of the school year felt like a slowly deflating helium balloon: just enough air to keep it afloat, but only hovering a few inches above the floor. And with summer came sunshine and days that still flew by, even during a pandemic.
And, just like that, it was time to begin thinking about the new school year. The Illinois State Board of Education announced that they had reversed course and were changing the rules of the game. Grades counted. Student attendance counted. Buckle up, everybody, because this was the real deal now.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was about to embark on the most rewarding period of my teaching career.
Essential Understandings for the Curricula
Based on local covid numbers, my high school district had anticipated that we would probably be starting the school year in a fully remote model. As a result, each academic department was tasked with determining the most important objectives that we would need to address in the first semester.
Via Zoom, we asked each other, “What are the essential understandings that the students need to master?” And, even more importantly, “What do we need to eliminate so that we can reach that goal?”
As it turned out, we needed to trim a lot.
With the adoption of a remote learning model, my district had made some significant changes to our daily schedule. Classes were only held on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. The first ninety minutes of those days were for teacher collaboration. Class sessions had gone from being 50 minutes to 35 minutes long. Wednesdays were non-instructional days and were used for faculty meetings and professional development.
The new schedule addressed the need for teacher training and collaboration, but it resulted in a loss of student instructional time. Each class had gone from having 250 minutes per week to 140 minutes. And that was assuming that a student was present for all four days of instruction.
This adjustment forced the academic departments to trim their curricula. Many bemoaned the loss of objectives that skewed more towards enrichment or that provided an interesting background for the topic. There were deep sighs when we eliminated something that was simply more “fun” to teach.
But were these objectives truly essential to the students’ mastery of the material? No, and, for me, it was liberating. I felt like I did after I cleaned out a closet: like I had lost weight.
The process also yielded some essential understandings about us as a department.
Special Skills
I always chuckle when, after I tell someone that I’m a teacher, they roll their eyes and say, “Oh, I couldn’t imagine dealing with those kids all day. That must be terrible.”
I laugh because, the thing is, the kids are the absolute best part of the job.
The adults? Not so much.
There are too many egos, too many whispers in the lounge about who has been calling in sick, who’s slacking off with cafeteria supervision, who isn’t mentoring their student-teacher properly.
But forcing the teachers to hash through what the kids truly needed to master led to us developing some essential understandings about each other. Each of us had at least one unique skill and these discussions helped reveal them.
Some of us were exceptionally good at using technology to — gasp! — simplify aspects of teaching. Others were deeply knowledgeable about less developed topics and recommended, without judgment, good sources for getting caught up.
For me, I am good at developing a positive rapport with students who claim to hate school. It was a pleasant surprise to see actual heads nodding with interest when I shared my strategies for connecting with these kids. I also appreciated the follow-up sidebars like, “Hey — so what do you do when a kid keeps ditching your class?”
Via Zoom, I learned an astonishing amount about people I had worked with for over a decade. It was wonderful.
Professional Learning Communities
Simply put, teachers work in a box all day with other people’s children. And these boxes become their own complex environments of instruction, feedback, and reflection. Faces brighten with comprehension and mini-epiphanies occur. New levels of mastery are attained. It’s an endless and personally rewarding process.
But it has its drawbacks.
Before the transition to remote learning, I had one or two real conversations a day with other adults at my school. Maybe I would step across the hall to my partner’s classroom to share an instructional strategy I had recently tried. Or stop by the school social worker’s office to discuss a student concern. But other than saying hello to colleagues in the hall, I spent the entire day doing what I was supposed to do: interacting with my students.
The upside was that this supported my maybe not-so-secret identity as an introvert. The job didn’t require much small talk and it was usually fine to just listen during faculty meetings. The downside was that I knew I was missing out on a lot of good ideas that my colleagues were trying out in their classrooms.
Thanks to the new remote learning schedule in our district, teachers suddenly had a daily block of time to collaborate in Professional Learning Communities. The concept of Professional Learning Communities (PLCs) had been around for a while, but this was my first experience with one that I found useful. The key was that it had a new element of pressure.
Four mornings a week, I logged onto Zoom and worked for about half an hour with two other teachers who taught the same course. Our task was to look at the current unit’s essential understandings and create materials that addressed them. The expectation was that we would load all of these instructional and assessment materials onto the distract intranet so that our colleagues could use them.
In short, we needed to create daily lesson plans that were fully “grab and go.”
Our PLC team became ruthlessly efficient with our thirty minutes. There was no need for a tedious discussion about meeting norms. We skipped the small talk — thankfully — and simply jumped back into where we had left off the day before. There was a lot to do in a limited time.
Most of our discussions centered on how to increase student engagement as part of the daily lesson objective. Our students were spending 5–6 hours every day staring at their screens and, understandably, a lot of them were glazing over by the end of the day. Content mastery was suffering, yes, but so were the personal connections that enriched classroom communities.
We discussed whether or not a particular app could help increase understanding and engagement. After trying it, we gave each other a safe space to return and say, “It crashed and burned with my group. What can I change to make it go better next time?”
Our collective mindset became more resilient and accommodating. We permitted ourselves to disagree, sometimes heatedly, and learned to table a topic until the next day. As our colleagues provided constructive feedback about the materials we had posted, we discussed necessary adjustments without taking their critiques personally.
We met for half an hour and then had an hour to work on, well, everything else. We assigned each other tasks to complete for the next day. “Okay, I’ll use Pear Deck to develop the formative assessment for this topic. Can you start working on the Quizlet we’ll need for the vocab practice? And can you double-check my links when I post everything to the shared calendar?”
For the first time in my teaching career, I was in a PLC that worked.
Dealing with the $#%&! Cell Phones
Two years ago, I thought I had found the perfect solution for the cell phone addicts in my classroom. If a student was using their phone in class, I would approach their table and very quietly ask them to put it away. No fuss, no calling them out in front of the class. Sometimes I just walked by and gently tapped their table as a reminder.
Most of the time, this approach worked beautifully.
However, if I saw a student using their phone again in class, I would again discreetly approach and quietly ask them to hand me their phone. The understanding was that they would get their phone back at the end of class and that I would not report the incident to their guardian or the dean.
I would also place their phone in an elementary pocket chart I had hanging off to the side of my desk. If I had a playful rapport with the student, I would make a joke out of it and say, “Hey, I’ll even let you pick which number slot you need to put it in!” Usually, the kid would laugh, and sometimes the kids nearby would make jokes like, “I think that 23 looks like a lucky one today! Do it for Jordan!”
For whatever reason, the pocket chart approach was the most effective classroom management tool I had for cell phones. The kids h-a-t-e-d having their phones out of their possession, even if they could see them hanging safely nearby. Nonetheless, I still mentally rolled my eyes at how much time it took during class.
Once I started teaching remotely, my mindset completely changed. I realized how little control I had over, well, everything and I allowed myself to focus on teaching without concerning myself with student cell phone usage. Why? Because it was none of my business.
I know that a lot of educators will disagree with my position here and that’s fine. I am choosing to acknowledge the loneliness and anxiety that a lot of our students are experiencing when learning remotely.
What if I asked a student to get off her phone, but she was using her phone to supplement her work on her school-issued iPad? Or what if she was on her phone because her mom had texted that she needed to get her little brother off the school bus at 3:30? What if a student was struggling emotionally and needed to reach out to someone for help? Really and truly, it was none of my business.
Late Work
With that said, I have to disclose that I permitted late work to be turned in. Yes, I’m talking about all late work from any point in the semester. And, yes, it is a controversial policy. I’m sure there are many who, again, will criticize me for allowing this. I can just hear the cries of, “But you’re not preparing them for the real world!”
But do you know what? This isn’t the real world. This, so far, has been an eight-month Giant Pause. This has been a hanging-on-by-our-fingernails version of the real world. Nothing is normal about this life right now and, thus, I’m choosing to provide flexibility and grace to my students.
In terms of whether or not the students abused my cell phone and late work policies, I did see a little slump in engagement and work completion. But then things returned to normal. The students have access to my electronic grade book and I’m sure that helped. Every few days, they could see how their grade had fluctuated based on their degree of effort. Within a week or so, they were emailing me with apologies for their missing work and thanking me for grading it when I had time.
So what now?
There is a selfish part of me that wants remote learning and teaching to go on for as long as possible. No doubt I’m alone in that wish, but I have appreciated how this period has pushed me to change long-held beliefs. After twenty-four years in education, I’m humbled by how much I still need to learn. I can only hope that this journey will lead to better outcomes for my students as well.
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