Addressing COVID as an Extension of the Life Science Curriculum

Ms. Anderson taught high school biology and chemistry at a small high school located in a large city in Colorado. Because the topic of viruses was included in her content standards, it was not difficult for her to integrate COVID into her biology instruction before her school building closed. As she explained:

The pandemic started right when we were talking about mitosis. And so, part of that section is discussing viruses and bacteria. And so it actually was a very easy gateway to get to speak about this particular virus and what was known at the time.

There was limited information available about COVID at that time, so Ms. Anderson focused her instruction on viruses in general, comparing what was known about this new virus to other viruses that have been around for much longer. In her words:

Since this was a novel virus, since it was new, there wasn’t a lot of information. So I presented it more in the general family of other viruses that were similar to it and what that indicated.

Ms. Anderson also used instructional time to address common misconceptions her students had about COVID. As she said:

I actually did bring in information as to why this particular virus was more concerning than influenza, because that was a pretty common misconception, and one that exists still to this day. And so I was hoping to present information to them that allowed them to see that this was a concerning virus and why we should take it seriously.

When her school building closed in March of 2020, Ms. Anderson continued to devote a significant portion of her instruction to COVID, focusing particularly on what was known about how to prevent the spread of the virus in efforts to keep her students safe. She explained:

My school, for a multitude of reasons but predominantly because of the size, it’s a very close-knit group of individuals. And being told that they were not supposed to be spending time with each other was really, really, really challenging. I mean, it was challenging for all teenagers, right? But, I would say the smaller the group, the bigger the challenge it was to keep them away from each other. And so we actually would discuss why that was important and why they needed to follow it and why we needed to wear masks. I remember there was one day that we spent about half of our class period discussing how and why masks work and involving the droplets and what that looked like. . . . There were days where it was really important. Like, it was clear that they needed to talk about it and they needed to ask me questions. And so those days, if we needed to dedicate the whole class period to it, I dedicated the whole class period to it.