{"id":4068,"date":"2021-11-08T14:31:17","date_gmt":"2021-11-08T19:31:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/?p=4068"},"modified":"2025-01-28T09:18:21","modified_gmt":"2025-01-28T14:18:21","slug":"teaching-during-a-pandemic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/2021\/11\/teaching-during-a-pandemic\/","title":{"rendered":"Teaching During a Pandemic"},"content":{"rendered":"
The daily routine of educating students has been turned upside-down since early 2020. What did teachers learn during the past year and a half? What new practices will they keep?<\/em> <\/div><\/div>\n

By Kevin Coyne<\/p>\n

First-grade teacher Mrs. Cashin \u2014 Dina Cashin \u201808\/M.A. \u201814 \u2014 misses her rug. It was blue, dotted with big colorful circles, and it covered a corner of her first-grade classroom in the Aldene Elementary School in Roselle Park, the school where she was once a first-grader herself and where she has taught for 13 years, alongside some of the same teachers who once taught her. The rug was where students sat cross-legged around her, peppering her with questions, asking \u201cMrs. Cashin, what about \u2026 ?\u201d during the 15-minute mini-lessons she liked to teach about math or phonics or whatever else they were learning that day.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a lot to ask a first-grader or any elementary school student to stay in their seat at their desk all day,\u201d says Cashin \u201908\/M.A.\u201914. \u201cThey\u2019re meant to move around.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her rug is gone now, along with the shoulder-to-shoulder sessions it enabled, a casualty of the COVID-19 pandemic\u2019s social distancing restrictions, and she doesn\u2019t know when it will be back.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Portrait of teacher Dina Cashin at the Aldene Elementary School in Roselle Park. 9\/7\/21 Photo by John O\u2019Boyle<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In March 2020, the activity at the heart of education \u2014 a cluster of people in a room, talking \u2014 suddenly became perilous. School became computer screens, video sessions, 6-foot tape measures, plastic shields and masks. \u201cDistance\u201d morphed from noun to adjective, as \u201cdistance learning\u201d became the new paradigm. \u201cHybrid\u201d and \u201ccohorts\u201d entered the daily vocabulary. What letter does your last name start with? Let\u2019s see, that means Mondays and Thursdays for you. Please come pick up your Chromebook. Do you need a hot spot for Wi-Fi? Yes, Zoom again.<\/p>\n

Everything about teaching had to be reconceived, re-engineered, redeployed in the pandemic. So how did teachers manage? What did they do without their rugs? We talked to five of them, from different grade levels and different regions, and they had plenty to say. They are teachers, after all, and they have these lessons.<\/p>\n

Just Like Starting Over<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cI felt like a first-year teacher again,\u201d says Ricky Harzula \u201913, who has in fact been teaching for eight years in Detroit, the last six at the Jalen Rose Leadership Academy, a public charter high school founded by the city native who was a basketball star at the University of Michigan and in the NBA. \u201cI felt like I didn\u2019t know what I was doing at all.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTo be honest, I don\u2019t think any of us really knew at all what we were doing,\u201d Cashin says. \u201cWe were all first-year teachers again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Everybody scrambled those first few months, although it helped if you were at a tech-savvy private school in Seattle with close ties to Microsoft, the local computer behemoth. \u201cWe had a lot of training prior to going remote \u2014 we were not only able to train ourselves but also to train the boys,\u201d says Megan Marenco \u201912\/M.S.\u201914 who teaches biology to sophomores at O\u2019Dea High School, a Catholic boys\u2019 school. A snow day before lockdown even gave the school the chance for a dry-run virtual trial day first. \u201cWe knew it was eventually coming, we just didn\u2019t know when.\u201d<\/p>\n

Technology has long been in the classroom, but teachers \u2014 guided by their own interests, philosophies and abilities \u2014 often had a choice about how much to use it. Now they had no choice \u2014 it was virtual or nothing.<\/p>\n

\u201cBreakout rooms, jam boards \u2014 some teachers were hesitant to try these with kids before,\u201d says Desiree Testa \u201912\/M.A. \u201915, who teaches world history to freshmen at Bloomfield High School, which had started issuing a Chromebook laptop to each student several years before the pandemic. The second degree she earned \u2014 a master\u2019s in instructional design and technology, a subject she also now teaches at Seton Hall \u2014 proved especially apt this year. She turned her dining room into her classroom, with two screens open: one for the Google Meet sessions, and one for work on presentations.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m the type of person that jumps right in \u2014 if it works, it works, and if it doesn\u2019t, then we do something new tomorrow,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019ve adapted all my old lesson plans for this abundance of technological resources. I think the hardest part for me is figuring out which activity to use and which not to use, because there\u2019s only so much time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Beyond Zoom<\/strong><\/p>\n

Everybody had to get used to conversing through a screen. \u201cWe were nervous about confidentiality at first,\u201d said Brad Harris \u201907\/ Ed.S.\u201910, a school psychologist at Middlesex County Vocational and Technical School in East Brunswick. \u201cBut you kind of reach a point where they need this support, so how else are you going to give it to them?\u201d<\/p>\n

But there also comes a point where \u2026 enough already. \u201cI can\u2019t sit in front of a computer doing one task for 80 minutes, I don\u2019t know how we expected 14- to 18-year-olds to do the same thing,\u201d Marenco says. Her school ultimately cut its 80-minute classes to 55 minutes. \u201cThe main reason we truncated the school day was student mental health and screen time. The main goal was reducing screen time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Remote sessions were a necessary but not sufficient condition for learning. \u201cSome students excelled and some students struggled, and that was just the reality of it across the board, and it\u2019s just the different types of learners kids are,\u201d Testa says. \u201cSome are more disciplined being home and having the leeway of getting things done on their own time and other students need that direct interaction. But instead of me tapping on their desk and saying, \u2018Focus,\u2019 they were busy playing a video game and I couldn\u2019t stop that.\u201d<\/p>\n

So when Testa got to the Renaissance, she gave her students what she called the Renaissance Art Challenge: Pick a painting (Botticelli\u2019s \u201cBirth of Venus,\u201d say, or Raphael\u2019s \u201cSistine Madonna\u201d) and re-create it with items found in your home. \u201cI was tired of them just looking at a slide show presentation,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

\n

Thursdays were Desiree Testa\u2019s favorite day last year \u2014 the days when, after her school went hybrid, the largest cohort of her students were in the classroom with her. \u201cIt felt a little bit back to normal,\u201d she says. Soon, she hopes, every day will once again feel like Thursday.<\/h2>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Megan Marenco had no biology lab, so she, too, asked her students to scavenge their homes, for items to show how water molecules stick together: tennis balls, yarn, coins, AirPod earphones and computer wires. She also had them make Flipgrid videos of an experiment with a whole hardboiled egg, a small cube cut from one, water and food dye: The small cube, they saw, absorbed more dye than the whole egg. \u201cThey could see that smaller things that have a large surface-area-to-volume ratio can get more material into them faster than something super big, so they learned why we are made of trillions of tiny little cells versus a few big cells,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Slooooow Down<\/strong><\/p>\n

Shorter days and limited in-person class time meant that not everything got covered.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a lot of world history to cover in one school year to begin with,\u201d Testa says, and she had to hurry through World War I and World War II. \u201cI think they got the bigger concepts and themes. They do cover it again in junior year, so I wasn\u2019t too worried.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI was not able to cover as much of my curriculum as I normally would,\u201d Megan Marenco says. \u201cEvolution is my last unit, and I didn\u2019t get to it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cTheir handwriting is way below where they should be,\u201d Cashin says. \u201cIf you weren\u2019t in the classroom you weren\u2019t getting exposure to pencil-and-paper tasks.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Portrait of Desiree Testa, a teacher at Bloomfield High School. . 8\/18\/21 Photo by John O\u2019Boyle<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u201cNo, I didn\u2019t get to everything, but I also had a chance to change my thinking on that a little bit,\u201d Harzula says. \u201cSo when we think about what students need to gather in a year, what the standards are they need to know, I think sometimes that can deprioritize their other needs, their social and emotional health, their physical and mental health, and going through virtual teaching this year highlighted that so much more to me. So there were moments when I could have pushed content, said, \u2018Hey we have to go over this thing,\u2019 but we were all suffering. I was miserable at home, they were miserable at home, so my classes weren\u2019t focused on content every day. A lot of it was just checking in with kids, and being able to sometimes slow things down and not feel that pressure to always press on the gas. That was definitely so important this year, and that has definitely changed my approach to how I\u2019m going to run my classes.\u201d<\/p>\n

What\u2019s Your Dog\u2019s Name?<\/strong><\/p>\n

And peering into your students\u2019 homes, as they peer into yours, can open some doors that a classroom cannot.<\/p>\n

\u201cI got to individually get to know them rather than know them as a group or know them as a table,\u201d Marenco says \u2014 not just their personalities but the ways they learned, and whether their progress was better measured by tests or by an alternate assessment method, like a video. \u201cThey would write a script and then they would try to do it and then start over and do it again and again and then tell me, \u2018I actually know more about this topic after taking my assessment than had I just taken a test.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Harzula often stayed online with students after class to play a game called Among Us. \u201cThat sounds like it\u2019s really not consequential, but I think it was,\u201d he says. \u201cIt was not related to school, but we could play it as a class and it was something we could do together. Those ways of keeping connections going were the biggest thing I took away from last year.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cashin took her students on a virtual tour of her house and introduced them to her two children. They introduced her to their dogs. \u201cI feel like my relationships with my students were just stronger this year, I feel like I talked to each individual student more and got more insight into their lives,\u201d she says. \u201cI definitely think it\u2019s taught me to slow things down. Just because you meet all these data points and everyone\u2019s reading at grade level, sometimes you look back and you might have been a great teacher and you taught them everything and they got 100s on their tests, but have you really gotten to know your students? I feel if we go back in and rush rush rush, and we don\u2019t take time to learn our students and make them feel comfortable and welcome, we\u2019re going to have more mental health issues than anticipated.\u201d<\/p>\n

Easing Back<\/strong><\/p>\n

Everybody in school, everything about school, changed in ways that will take time to absorb and understand.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt just kind of turned the volume up on everything,\u201d says Brad Harris, the school psychologist, who also teaches at Seton Hall. \u201cIf someone had a minor problem it became a bigger problem, because you don\u2019t have your usual coping strategies of just talking with friends about it, or being around people, or getting out of the house and having a routine. So in a way it seemed like there were more issues, but I think those were issues that were here but were being managed.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Poster<\/a><\/p>\n

Just to be around other people again, more and different people than the ones they spent their lockdown days around, will help turn that volume down. \u201cI think we\u2019ve gained an appreciation for what we\u2019ve lost and missed out on,\u201d he says. \u201cThose kids who weren\u2019t in school and used to hate school and then could not wait to get back \u2014 there\u2019s a surprising number of kids who are just, \u2018I can\u2019t wait to get back.\u2019 You saw their recognition that they didn\u2019t realize they missed school, and I think that\u2019s true for a lot of people. They didn\u2019t realize what they were missing.\u201d<\/p>\n

And when they do get back to school, those students will find teachers who are different from the teachers they were before. \u201cIt\u2019s probably the hardest thing I\u2019ve ever had to do, but I definitely think that it has not only made me a better teacher but forced me to examine everything,\u201d Harzula says. \u201cI had to really examine not only the things I was doing but I had to say, \u2018Is this something I want to keep doing? Is it really necessary that I do this?\u2019 It\u2019s definitely made me go back and throw some things out and add some things back in that I will take with me moving forward.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thursdays were Desiree Testa\u2019s favorite day last year \u2014 the days when, after her school went hybrid, the largest cohort of her students were in the classroom with her. \u201cIt felt a little bit back to normal,\u201d she says. Soon, she hopes, every day will once again feel like Thursday.<\/p>\n

Kevin Coyne is a freelance writer based in New Jersey.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The daily routine of educating students has been turned upside-down since early 2020. What did teachers learn during the past year and a half? What new practices will they keep? <\/p>\n

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