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By: Andrew Larson, High School PBL Facilitator
Columbus Signature Academy New Tech High School
Columbus, IN
The good news for 2020 is that we made it through the school year. I say that at the risk of sounding flippant because the reality is that some of us didn’t make it. The COVID- 19 Pandemic of 2020 will surely become the launchpad for educational innovation simply because during March, April and May we had to, as they say, build a plane whilst flying that very same plane. And now that the plane has landed, we can pause, reflect, and plan our next flight.
Teaching from home was messy, emotional, boring, stressful, and crude. But also, it was rich in certain ways; it underlined the importance of human connections and interactions. It forced us to get out of our comfort zones. It forced us to get better. It wasn’t all bad. Here are five mindsets and strategies that I feel must carry over as we resume our Project Based Learning classes in the fall.
1. (Extra, extra) Flexibility. I made more parent contacts in the fourth quarter during shutdown than in the previous three quarters combined last year, and each time, it left me with more empathy than I had before. Students were in so many crazy situations that were totally out of their control. Some parents clearly had the wrong idea about expectations for students to actually do school during that time. Even though most kids cared and wanted the stay caught up, they could not due to extra responsibilities that were placed on them by others. It was heartbreaking. So when we would talk, the conversations with them were usually something like, “Don’t freak out, it’s ok, let’s prioritize and figure out what you can do to get back on track.” Basically, it was a lot of damage control. Not unlike the economy, health care system, and society as a whole.
How students, in these impossible situations, reacted to our uber- flexible mindset with them was mostly with relief. They are likely to rise to the challenge of meeting our expectations if we take a more compassionate and less regimented position on work being done at a certain time, and in a certain way. The pandemic is far from over and as we work in what will surely be a highly modified way for at least another year, we know that students will continue to need us to be their educational shepherds more than drill sergeants. It remains clear that we must be flexible in our instruction and be prepared to work with students who are inevitably behind after the shutdown this spring, or who are distracted due to the ongoing health crisis.
2. Asynchronous Learning. It became clear to all of us based on the timestamps on work submitted electronically that a whole lot of our kids were quite happy to work third shift during the shutdown. Many of them were thrilled to be given permission to do so, and they did quality work in return.
At the time of this writing we still do not know which days of the week, or how many days we will be in the physical school building, but it seems unlikely that it will be five. So given the very real possibility we will likely have to continue eLearning in some form, we have a busy summer ahead of us. As a teacher of 22 years, I have felt relatively comfortable showing up to school with little more than a plan in my head and cranking out the structure before school starts (I get there pretty early.) That approach will not work if students have the ability to work as far ahead as they are able. Just as projects themselves involve a lot of front- loaded work and creation, our curriculum and assessments will need to be batch- created. I am steeling myself for that prospect, knowing that it will be a big change to the modus operandus I’ve held for the last several years.
I love the physical act of teaching. The acted- out, wacky, spontaneous and engaging sort of delivery is the first thing I loved about teaching and remains my favorite. That’s one of the reasons why the shutdown period was tough for me-- it was just so…. boring. I resisted being one of those teachers that produced highly polished and fancy videos in part because I lack those skills but also because I lack the time and drive to spend the hours creating that content. What I can do, though, is press record on my screen via Screencastify and deliver instruction in a rough- cut, moment by moment (yes, I use notes) approach. During the shutdown I came to enjoy creating recorded content for the first time in my career simply because it was done in a way that was doable for me. It also seemed necessary for students to see my scraggly, bearded face.
Nonetheless, for all of the various tech tools that are out there for capturing lessons, lectures and discussions, none of them stuck for me until I started just making short videos in very few takes. Having those archives forever makes pedagogical sense, holds kids accountable for having access to instruction, and allows for asynchronous learning.
3. Virtual Collaboration. For years we have been making kids share their contact info on group contracts so that in the event of illness, family emergency, global pandemic… they could reach each other. What started out as sharing email addresses morphed into SnapChat handles and let’s be honest here: how much good collaboration happens in this format? Now, though, the doors for online collaboration via Google Meet, Zoom, and the rest have been flung wide open and video meetings are as normal as an assigned textbook section. It seems comical now that back in February my students did virtual presentations of cell models to biologists and that all seemed weirdly fancy, somehow. One month later, it was the only way we had to see each other’s faces.
Virtual collaboration will become a permanent fixture in our PBL structure. It will also be tool that we have to maintain social distancing and limit the immense risk we are all taking by going back to school in the short term; over the long term, it will help us stretch our classroom minutes for instruction and other PBL process pieces and show students what the future of the workplace will likely be. It’s not all bad.
4. Paper?!? Who needs paper??? It’s somewhat unbelievable to me that I went for an entire quarter without printing a single handout. Did a single person suffer for that? I do not know, but I should ask them!
I heard about the districts across the country that are not as fortunate as mine, where packets of homework were printed by the bushel and distributed to students and then returned to teachers to be graded. That can not have been fun for anyone. If you were in that situation please leave a comment and share the takeaways from that experience.
I am sure that the clear and present need for a learning management system such as Google Classroom in every district has been amplified by the pandemic and that there must be a spike in demand for them, and for the subsequent professional development. Providers of online content such as ActivelyLearn were gracious in offering free and often unlimited trials of their curricular material. Hopefully, that grace can be extended for the rest of the calendar year for the benefit of students all over the world.
5. Connected staff. Man, I miss my people!! Weirdly enough, though, I do not feel like I am out of the loop on any of their lives. Given the frequency of our virtual meetings, I feel like I have seen them a good deal as well. Would I love some hugs? For sure. But for now, at least I know that everyone is OK and I can see what is going on with their facial hair and style choices.
About a week into the pandemic, after a particularly stinging series of “reply all” emails, one of our facilitators suggested that we move the non- curricular conversations over to Slack. We did, and because we did, we are all in the know on all matters of each others’ lives. I think that having such a forum that is separated from both social media and also traditional workplace tools such as email was important and that we will continue to use this platform for staying in each others’ business.
We still do not know the shape that school will take in the fall. At the moment it doesn’t really matter to me because I am, like teachers everywhere, creating a new course and revising others. We will handle the “why” and the “what” of teaching now, while we await further guidance from our leadership. The “why” remains as it always has been: students need us, now more than ever, to help them realize their dreams. “What” we do remains tied to standards and skills for living a full and productive life. The “how” will never be the same. We might as well embrace it!
Andrew Larson is a science facilitator at the Columbus Signature Academy New Tech High School and an experienced Magnify Learning workshop facilitator. He writes for our regularly updated blog about Project Based Learning. When he’s not doing awesome PBL work, you can find him mountain biking, spending time with his family, or digging around in the garden.
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