I Was Born of Distance Learning
At the beginning of 2020, Mr. Green was student teaching in a 5th grade classroom at an urban elementary school in Minnesota. His semester of student teaching had generally been progressing as planned until he and his mentor teacher found out that their school would be shifting to online instruction due to the COVID pandemic. In preparing for this sudden transition, Mr. Green and his mentor teacher collaborated with the rest of the 5th grade teaching team to put together asynchronous lessons on Schoology6 and Seesaw.7
With my mentor teacher and our grade level team, . . . we just started creating digital content basically and trying to put it in folders and organize it for students.
As the team felt more confident and comfortable with online teaching and learning platforms, they began meeting with their students synchronously. However, even though their school had a 1-to-1 initiative where each student was provided with an iPad, Mr. Green and his mentor teacher had a difficult time contacting their students.
Students had emails, but we weren’t using them regularly before that. So figuring out how to get in touch with them [was difficult]. Lots of calling families to get students online and working through tech problems. Our district is 1-to-1 iPads, so that was pretty helpful that students had a device. It was just getting them used to a schedule that they had to be in charge of. Getting them online and doing the assignments and checking in for the day.
Mr. Green recalled that the limited contact with students made it difficult to get any sense of how engaged they were during remote learning. Although he was not the full-time teacher, Mr. Green still felt very discouraged not knowing if he and his mentor teacher were having any kind of impact on student learning.
Honestly, it was just super disheartening the amount of engagement we were getting from students. . . . It was them going from really having a lot of support in the classroom to potentially being in a home setting where they didn’t have a lot of support throughout the day to keep them on task. It was hard to feel like we were making an impact really at all. Keeping them on track would be one thing, but in a lot of ways felt like we weren’t even meeting and we weren’t even able to check in with them enough to make sure they have a safe place at home and they’re able to do really any schoolwork.
Although the experience was far from typical, Mr. Green completed his student teaching and enthusiastically started his first teaching job in fall 2020 as a PK–5 science specialist at a new school in the same area. However, the continuation of online learning, coupled with significant teacher turnover in the school, led to a very uncertain and chaotic start to his teaching career.
It being my first teaching year, there were lots of different things going on. I didn’t have to set up a classroom, but I did have to set up my curriculum and lessons for the year. And also, because of how hiring shook out with the pandemic, lots of people retiring, and then also people not feeling comfortable starting the year, I really didn’t know I had my job until two weeks before I started, which I think really influenced the first couple weeks in terms of just trying to get anchored. And so a big part of it was learning how many classes I see per day and in what format I see them.
As students settled into another semester of online instruction, Mr. Green’s interaction with them was very limited. As the science specialist, his first weeks of school consisted of developing and sharing pre-recorded lessons as a means of getting acquainted with the students and introducing the science instruction he would be delivering.
For the first two weeks, . . . we did not meet synchronously through Google Meet with the students, only asynchronously. And that was because they needed families to be able to figure out how to get online, learn the agenda for the day, and when they would see us. And then also just to focus on spending time with their classroom teacher. And so I had no in-person contact with students for the first couple weeks. I was mostly producing half-hour lessons of get to know me, get to know you, this is what science is, what do you already know about science, what do you do as a scientist.
He was eventually able to meet with students synchronously during the school day and slowly started to move through his planned curriculum. While the pace was slower than what might be expected in a typical school year, Mr. Green was thankful for the slower pace. As a first-year teacher, it allowed him more time to plan and revise each unit before leading students through them.
Because of how many classes I would see, I really used those lessons for the first six to eight weeks of school because I would only see classes for two weeks at a time. That slowed everything down. I think back on it now as a blessing in some ways. As a new teacher, because of the slow pace starting, I was able to spend a lot of time going through the unit plans for the science standards and building my lesson planning spreadsheet and figuring out units from beginning to end. Whereas I feel like if I was in person, so much more of my time would’ve been spent face-to-face with students that maybe some aspects of that wouldn’t have been as well planned out.
However, as he started doing lessons with students, Mr. Green was disappointed by the lack of hands-on activities that online teaching afforded. Although he could ask students to do some at home activities, the school requested that any lessons that required students to have materials on hand needed to be accessible to all students to ensure the same learning experience.
It would usually be an introduction and then they go and do something, whether it’d be online or whether for some things like “Go outside and observe something” or even build something if they had materials. I think the problem was mostly equity. And that was the language you’re getting from my district as well is “Do not push anything that you think could be unsafe and also anything that potentially could result in some students not having the materials.”
To combat potentially inequitable online instruction, the school gave teachers the option to do two material drop-offs at predetermined times during the year. However, because the beginning of the year was so chaotic for Mr. Green, he missed the first material drop off.
I think we only had two opportunities to get materials to students. Sadly, the first opportunity was the first week of school, and being a new teacher, I had no idea of anything going on. And so I wasn’t able to get them base materials other than what the school got them—paper, crayons, maybe basic science material type stuff—until November. And then I did some take-home stuff that could be more specific to science, like Mystery Science worksheets and pipe cleaners and more hands-on materials.
Teachers and students returned in person for the 2021–22 school year, which was Mr. Green’s first opportunity to teach students face-to-face. Although welcomed, the shift back to in-person instruction brought a whole new set of challenges for Mr. Green, as his previous teaching experiences had been mainly online.
I think because I started in distance learning and then transitioned to in-person, I think it was just really difficult to get back to hands-on science. I felt the residual impacts because I was born of distance learning. It just got hard to get back to basic teaching practices like Think-Pair-Share and special groups and just normal teaching stuff because you couldn’t do any of it online. And then not building the skillsets for how to manage hands-on, that was a huge learning curve this year. . . . I had to learn science safety actually and try to anticipate what could happen with the materials once they’re in the hands of students.
Mr. Green particularly struggled with lesson planning as he transitioned to in-person instruction. He noted that his school required lesson plans well ahead of time, along with regular observations by his assigned mentor to ensure he was on track. Although helpful, these activities were daunting at times.
This year, I had a coach the whole year. That felt hard. I had expectations on having lessons done, which eventually wasn’t a big deal at all. But at the beginning of the year, it felt very daunting having everything done way ahead of time and having someone critique it and then have to take what they said and put it in the lessons for the week.
Classroom management was also a new challenge because his only experience managing classroom behaviors came during the first part of student teaching.
I think the biggest thing was having my own space and relearning, honestly, classroom management. I think when I was student teaching, it felt really daunting the days that I would be alone in the classroom, but I didn’t know any different. So learning that dynamic of them coming to you into a new space and you’re in charge of how the space operates.
Additionally, Mr. Green struggled to figure out how to move away from tried-and-true digital lessons and activities to things that were more engaging and hands-on.
And then how do I authentically change my digital learning lessons? I still want to keep improving, but how do I stop using so many videos and digital assessments and move on from that, and get back to grouping and small group discussions and in-person teaching rather than just lots of independent work?
Looking back, Mr. Green recognizes that the start to his teaching career was much different than he expected and much different than almost every other first-year teachers’ experience previous to the pandemic. Although it was a difficult start, he slowly gained confidence in his own teaching and learned lessons that many new teachers never had the chance to, like the need to balance hands-on work and technology in the classroom and ways to build relationships with students. He expressed confidence that this experience will make him a more effective teacher in the future.
I think there are definitely really hard days and weeks, but overall, I’ve felt really empowered to be a teacher. I think we’ve learned so much with distance learning. And we knew so much before about in-person teaching that now we just need to build a better normal. . . . I think that as a new teacher, I need to build the relationships with students still. And that got better by the end of the year. I think just being open to uncertainty has been difficult, but also I think just really good for everybody. And I think going forward will really help make me and other teachers more effective.
6 Schoology is a website for teachers to use with their students. Student can visit their teacher’s Schoology page for online lessons, videos, peer discussions, and announcements.
7 Seesaw is an interactive learning platform that teachers can use to create tasks and assignments for students to complete while distance learning. Tasks and assignments can be uploaded as instructional lessons, files for students to download, or video instruction previously recorded by the teacher.
