Yule Blog Prompt #5: How to Teach in the Midst of a Pandemic
How do we teach in the midst of a pandemic? I'm still trying to figure it all out now. To answer, let's look back at perhaps one of the toughest days of my current long-term assignment -- November 30th.
It was a Monday, and like all Mondays, all classes were online. It was Cyber Monday, the first day after Thanksgiving break -- and I suppose the first day after any long break is difficult. But the reason that this day was particularly difficult can be summarized in a single word -- Benchmarks. I'll definitely be airing my grievances over the Benchmarks this year.
The Benchmarks are the annual district assessments given twice a year in English and math. The second Benchmarks will be in March -- the first tests were obviously in November and December. I discussed with the other Math 7 and Math 8 teachers when to give the Benchmarks. For Math 7 we decided to give the Multiple Choice part before Thanksgiving, while in Math 8 we decided to give the test on the first day back -- the last day of November. Then students in both grades would take the Performance Task portion later that week. (Yes, I was stuck having to grade the Performance Tasks a week later, on my birthday, December 7th.)
Fortunately, November 30th wasn't a minimum day, and so the eighth graders had the full 40 minutes to work on their multiple choice Benchmark. But recall that this was an online day -- all the students were supposed to complete the test at home. Since most students had their cameras off, it's impossible to see how many students were actually taking the test. It wasn't until later that week when I found out that a large group of eighth graders didn't take the Benchmark at all. For some reason, this included most of the cohort that I usually saw in person on Fridays (even though the test was on a Monday.)
As for the seventh graders, the day went much differently. Recall that they already took their test before Thanksgiving, and so this day was used to prepare for the Performance Task. This question was about writing a linear expression to count the wheels on a toy train. And so I showed the students a video about writing linear expressions. Since all the students were online, I only had to set up the video on a tab and then share that tab in Google Meet. After the video, I continued to give more examples of linear expressions, and choose random students to answer questions about the lesson. The students would put their answers in the chat.
Did the students learn much on November 30th. Well, if we're judging by their Benchmark scores, then the answer is no. One eighth grader earned a perfect 10/10 on the Benchmark that day and a few others scored 9/10, but there were also lots of 5's and 6's as well. And the seventh grade Multiple Choice scores were slightly worse than the eighth grade scores.
Moreover, the Benchmarks took time away from the regularly scheduled lessons. As I mentioned in my last post, the eighth graders were solving multi-step equations while the seventh graders were solving their two-step counterparts. The district tests were especially tough on the seventh graders, who were seeing these sorts of equations for the first time.
And of course, the Performance Tasks weren't that much better. The eighth grade Task was about a swim race of 200 yards, with each swimmer completing the race in a certain number of seconds, but the students were asked to find the winner's speed -- in miles per hour.
OK, I aired all my grievances about the Benchmarks. But the question is about pandemic teaching -- were the students learning much from my lessons before the Benchmarks? Ironically, before the Benchmarks, the seventh graders were doing great while the eighth graders struggled. But this can be attributed to the content -- Math 7 was multiplying and dividing signed numbers (relatively easy), while Math 8 was studying linear functions and slope (which are harder, even in the best of times).
A schoolwide problem is a sharp increase of D's and F's in the first quarter. There were interventions to deal with the low grades in the second quarter (having the students come up with personal learning goals), and major changes to our hybrid schedule are in store for the third quarter. I'll be describing these changes on the blog in subsequent posts -- if I wrote all about the changes now, then I'd have nothing to write about during the rest of the Yule Blog Challenge.
Links to Other Challenge Participants
Speaking of the Yule Blog Challenge, let me link to some of the other challenge participants. We begin with Stephen Dull -- he participated in Blaugust as well. And today, he also addresses the prompt "how to teach in the midst of a pandemic":
https://tweakingfornoreason.wordpress.com/2020/12/23/i-coulda-been-better/
And in 2020, in Pandemic Teaching, we are for sure looking to the human dimension of the day as well. Did my kids get what they needed from me today to thrive?
I think I nailed the relationship part (“Grace Before Grades”) during the first four months of school. And I designed all my lessons to get some type of written input from my students, whether through Quizizz or Desmos activity, a hyperdoc, a Which One Doesn’t Belong or Would You Rather warmup, a quick Brain Dump on a Google Docs so I can gauge prior knowledge before we dive into a topic, or a 3-2-1 summary at the end of class.
And by the way, I've used Quizizz and Desmos in my classes as well. Dull explains that his district has been in full distance learning, so he's reliant on these other websites. He writes that he's having trouble getting his online students to participate verbally -- and of course, I have trouble engaging many of my students on online days as well.
The other participant whose blog I'll link to today is Cheryl Leung. Like Dull, she participated in Blaugust, and her topic today is also "how to teach in the midst of a pandemic":
https://matheasyaspi.wordpress.com/2020/12/23/classifying-numbers-card-sort-covid-style/
Instead, I settled on building the card sort on a Jamboard. I sent students into breakout rooms. There was one Jamboard for each breakout room. The students worked together to sort the numbers into the apppropriate classification. The image below shows one of the Jamboards in progress.
Leung is a sixth grade math teacher. As usual, I like to highlight middle school teachers' blogs since I myself am now working in a middle school.
But here she mentions "Jamboard." Only once did I attempt to use Jamboard in a class -- it didn't work too well. Then again, I only used Jamboard that day because the online students had trouble seeing my whiteboard projected on my screen -- so I used Jamboard as a whiteboard. But it was difficult for me to write out all my equations on Jamboard, since I was using one of those Chromebooks with a pad instead of a mouse.
Here Leung uses the full power of Jamboard. Indeed, her Jamboard here isn't a whiteboard substitute at all -- instead, she uses it to replace sorting cards. The lesson was on classifying numbers (natural numbers, integers, etc.), and so instead of having the numbers to be classified on cards, she had the students place numbers into the categories on Jamboard.
I'll always remember Leung as the "Be Kind"/"Be Brave" teacher. Of course, never have those phrases been more important than now -- we should be brave and be kind to each other during the pandemic.
Conclusion
Let's take down the Festivus pole, as we're done airing our grievances about pandemic teaching. In this post, I've shown how we can take something negative (the pandemic) and use it to find new ways to teach and engage our students (Desmos, Quizizz, and Jamboard). Still, it's all just a work in progress -- we see that our students are also struggling with these new methods. I'm still seeing what works and what doesn't, and searching for ways to change the latter into the former.
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