You know the feeling you get when you wake up in a hotel room and for the first few seconds of consciousness, you’re very confused about where you are?
That’s been every day of 2020 since March. I don’t use an alarm clock anymore because my baby is the alarm clock, and for those first bleary-eyed moments in the dark as I’m coming up from my dreams, I’ve forgotten when we are until it comes rushing back to me – the pandemic, the isolation, the anxiety, the 57 precautions I now need to take going about my day.
Just one of the ways in which my world has been totally upended was in our shift to virtual learning. I have been in a physical school continuously, in some capacity, for the past three decades.
And yet, changing the form of school in such a fundamental way has been, for me, a largely positive experience. Now that I have the urgency to make them work, I’m delighted and amazed by all of the possibilities offered by the myriad tech tools. Because of our new time constraints, I’m rethinking virtually everything about my role and my work in the classroom.
At the same time, I’m still craving the familiarity and the comfort of life-before-COVID. And upon reflection at the end of our first grading cycle, I think my students are too.
So instead of a list of new ideas, approaches, pieces of technology, etc., here are a few traditional school practices that I have found that have continued to be valuable:
- Calling roll. Do I need to call roll? I do not. I can download a list of everybody who attended our live session in a matter of seconds. It’s time-consuming (taking up 10 of my precious 50 minutes every-other-day) and has no instructional value. But given the universal difficulty of getting students to participate via virtual platforms, I’ve found that there’s a payoff to reminding students at the start of class that they do have a microphone and that it does work. Furthermore (and I can’t take credit for this idea – someone in my PLN came up with it), I’ve been using it as an excuse to ask students to share something that gives me a sense of who they are instead of just saying “here.” Someone suggested asking students to share a piece of good news; I’ve also had luck with asking them to tell me something they’re grateful for or something they’re excited about as well as using one of those silly which-one-are-you? memes.
- Reading out loud. I didn’t even do this prior to The Great Disaster That Is 2020. We didn’t have time. I needed to teach grammar, various genres of writing, vocabulary, test-taking strategies as well as have options for creative expression, incorporate opportunities for group work, build students’ social and emotional skills, form trusting and safe relationships with each individual kid, and oh yeah, actually discuss the literature. But I knew that if it was a struggle to get my students to read at home in 2019, it sure-the-heck would be now. So even though my instructional time has been cut in half, I made similar cuts to my texts, and now a chunk of each day is story time. But this necessity has turned out to be a surprise win because it’s forcing my students to slow down and be present. We’re using “my” time and not “theirs,” so there’s no reason to rush. And I can tell from their responses that they’re catching more than they usually do when reading is primarily silent and independent. I’ve recently started to break the dialogue into roles and ask them to help me while I do the “narration,” and that makes it even more engaging.
- Presentations. Like teachers everywhere, I have been pulling my hair out over how quiet and unresponsive my students were at the beginning of the year. They weren’t responding to my questions, they weren’t reacting to my jokes. But once I ceded the floor in its entirety by telling them that they needed to share something of value with the rest of the class, they started to shine. I think this works for a number of reasons: 1) they get time to prepare exactly what they want to say instead of being put on-the-spot, 2) they get to work with others (and practice talking through their topic in a small, trusted group before doing it in front of everyone), 3) by making it a “grade” (because everyone’s getting a 100, even though I don’t tell them that), it gives them the excuse to try.
- Right-and-wrong answers. This one is kind of a cheat because I’ve primarily doing this through EdPuzzle. I find or create videos that cover some of the content I need students to know, and then I splice in dead-easy multiple choice questions with only two answers (one of which is usually very obviously incorrect). When I asked my students what has been working well for them this year, this is what they’re most enthusiastic about. Why? My hypothesis is because we all need opportunities to do some lower-level thinking (and feel successful and productive in it). Just like grading technology-rich, multi-faceted product of a student’s original design can be both rewarding and exhausting for teachers, creating work like that take a lot out of our students, and doing that everyday, in all your classes, during the apocalypse is too much.
- Lecture. I said it. I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again. Lectures have a place in teaching and learning. Not the only place, not the most important place, but they deserve to be a tool in any skilled educator’s repertoire. But why is lecture a particularly effective strategy in this moment? Because while I think it is always satisfying to have an expert in a particular discipline guide you in an organized and systematic way through an unfamiliar body of knowledge, 2020 is particularly lacking in such encounters with credible authority. An anarchical free-for-all with regard to knowledge is part of what got us into this mess (in terms of the notion that all opinions on science and epidemiology and public health policy are equally valid). I can’t tell my students that everything is going to be okay or that they need to follow this set of steps to stay healthy or that democracy as-we-know-it will continue to exist post-November, but I can tell them about how Ancient Greek ideas about the underworld impacted their cultural values and how we see those dynamics play out in the choices characters make in Classical works of literature.
Using My Teacher Voice 