From Disruption To Innovation: Adapting To Unprecedented Schooling Challenges

It was September 2020, and another disrupted school year was about to begin. In many places around the country, pencils and folders were yet again traded for iPads and laptops. Recess and gym class were traded for Zoom breakout rooms and online co-curricular activities. The ominous red pen that teachers use to give students corrections was traded for track changes and live feedback. Students were still showing up excited to learn, but their entire experience as students was fundamentally different from prior years. To say the same about a teacher’s experience during this time and even now is an understatement.

When Brooke Charter Schools opened up their virtual classrooms last school year, I was frustrated by how foreign the new way of teaching and learning felt. As a second grade teacher, it was particularly challenging to adapt to a completely new way of creating classroom culture, grading, participating, socializing, differentiating, and monitoring progress, especially all at once.

While the challenges were endless and daunting, teachers rapidly worked together to find and use innovative tools to keep a virtual classroom of students engaged, learning, and thriving. As with everything we did at that nationally recognized Boston-based charter school network, our school team set out to accomplish several critical goals:

• STUDENT DISCOURSE. Teachers across the nation need to motivate students to learn through discussing their ideas with their peers. A virtual classroom makes it inherently more difficult for organic classroom discussions to occur. With Zoom breakout rooms, teachers can give their students a task, question, or topic to discuss and send them off in partnerships or small groups to collaborate. Teachers can then pop in and out of these rooms to monitor conversations, give feedback, identify misconceptions, and assess student’s knowledge.
• SOCIAL EMOTIONAL LEARNING. The pandemic was, and continues to be, a stressful time for many students. Their world was upended and it is harder for students (especially younger ones) to fully comprehend the changes going on around them. At Brooke Charter School, we discovered that providing students with time and space to have a daily social/emotional check-in helped teachers have a more accurate sense of where students are mentally and emotionally starting their day and how to follow up. Students would answer questions like, “I feel awake and ready to learn” or “I feel like I am able to focus on my assignments today.” Depending on the grade level, students answered these questions through an agree/disagree format, written response, or even smiley/frowny face pictures for younger students. This information gave teachers a critical touch point into how students were feeling, which led to many 1:1 follow-up conversations. This doesn’t have to stop just because students are physically back in school. If kids do not feel socially or emotionally heard and validated, learning is stifled. One byproduct of COVID was the development of new ways to help students navigate and articulate their own emotions, which continues to be a focus area for teachers.
• PARENT COMMUNICATION. There is widespread evidence that strong parent communication is a best practice within any type of school setting and leads to better student performance. Many schools across the country deployed Class Tag during the COVID pandemic. The platform, used by over 25,000 schools, allows teachers to send out full-class messages (the virtual version of a backpack flyer) or individual messages. The best part? Parents can pick their language of preference, and translation is embedded into the program.  That makes communication not only transparent and simple, but accessible and equitable.
• EQUITABLE PARTICIPATION. Another best teaching practice is equitable student participation. It turns out that the Zoom chat feature helped bring forward all student voices rather than hearing from only a select few within a learning block, a common challenge for any classroom and for students not accustomed to participating more vocally. Many educators taught students to use the private chat feature so that they could share answers without the pressure of their answers being visible to their peers. For example, if second graders are working on 3 x 4 = ? in the math multiplication unit, a teacher can ask all students to put their answer into the chat privately. This is a strong assessment tool that allows a teacher to get a picture of how the class is understanding the concept. Teachers can also use the public Zoom chat feature where students can build on each other’s thinking. For example, a teacher can say, “Yesterday, we learned about a few key events that led to the start of World War II. What do you remember from yesterday? Put some thoughts in the chat.”
• CONSISTENT ENVIRONMENT AND ROUTINES. Consistency is essential for strong classroom cultures. In kindergarten, consistency in the morning might look like starting with a structured morning meeting, while in high school, it might look like an advisory block. The goal of these blocks is to welcome students to school, build culture, and start the day on a positive note. What I found is that instead of jumping right into learning, team building activities could occur online. Students could discuss important newsworthy events, participate in movement breaks or dance parties, interview guest speakers or community members, and more. We discovered a powerful resource called Responsive Classroom which highlights many tools teachers can employ to set up a space at the beginning of the day for students to feel known and safe.
• STRONG ASSESSMENT MEASURES. Assessing students virtually was and continues to be extremely challenging for collecting accurate data. Zoom fatigue, reading texts online, and making sure students are taking tests without support or other resources were just a few concerns that teachers considered. Google forms, however, provided an innovative solution. The corresponding Google Excel spreadsheet that stores all of the answers provides a self-created tool for teachers to comb through the data, seek trends, and make a plan for follow-up.

While many of these tools and lessons were used throughout COVID, the best learning environments will continue to deploy the kind of creativity and innovation that was a necessity during the pandemic. The pandemic gave educators a new lens from which to work. A new school year is here, and teachers more than ever play a critical role in ensuring that innovations that drive better outcomes are tested, utilized, and encouraged at all levels of learning.