Lost in (Cyber) Space

Mr. Stephenson teaches high school astronomy, geology, environmental science, and physics courses in a suburban school in Utah. In March of 2020, his district received news that they would need to create a plan for finishing the remainder of the school year online.

It was about the third week of March . . . all of our districts in Utah said, “Okay, everybody’s going to have to stay at home until we figure out what’s going on.” And the state of Utah gave a lot of the autonomy to the district, saying, “You guys know best. You make a plan to figure out how you guys are going to do this.”

The district immediately began training all teachers on how to use either Google Classroom or Canvas, relying on instructional technologists to assist teachers with this transition and quick three-day turnaround. Mr. Stephenson was proud of the way his district handled this abrupt change.

I felt like they immediately said, “Okay, we got to do something, make a plan. We got to get everybody online, either Google Classroom or Canvas.” They gave everybody about three days off to prepare themselves for online teaching . . . and they just said, “Teachers, come to school. Do training on Google Classrooms or on Canvas. Find somebody in your building that can train on that.” There’s about five tech people that kind of bounced to the different schools, the geographic areas of the district. And they were assigned to go to those schools and help the teachers start putting things online and learning how to record webcasts and how to hold Zoom meetings. . . . We just plowed forward, at least in our district. I was really proud to see how we handled it.

Throughout the remainder of the school year, Mr. Stephenson delivered virtual, asynchronous instruction by recording his lectures and posting them online. However, he quickly realized that this method of instruction no longer afforded a means to engage his students in hands-on activities or respond to their questions quickly and efficiently.

I recorded my lesson and said, “I assume you’re going to watch this just like you’re listening to me in class and then do the assignment as directed.” But we couldn’t have that in-person communication, that immediate question-and-answer feedback, as well as the hands-on lab assignments or activities. So I had to look for digital, virtual labs to supplement what we would’ve done in the classroom. . . . And then instructions on the assignments. It was hard to clarify the instructions. If I thought it was clear and the students didn’t understand, there’s that delay when trying to email your teacher and then get that feedback.

In addition, the lack of real-time communication with students made it challenging for Mr. Stephenson to gauge how his students were doing with virtual learning, leading him to feel disconnected from them.

I think the most difficult thing for me was not knowing where my students were at. There was a really strong disconnect. I didn’t have that communication with the students, and I felt very disconnected from them, and didn’t realize how lost they were, how burnt out they were, how unmotivated they were.

The district decided to bring students back on campus for the 2020–21 school year, while still offering an online option for students who preferred to stay at home. Mr. Stephenson felt that bringing students back was helpful for rebuilding relationships and communication that were lost during virtual instruction.

Starting the fall of 2020, our district decided to have everybody come back to school but required wearing masks. If a parent wanted to opt out of allowing their child to come to school in person, they could do online classes. The vast majority of us were back in person. I think made a huge difference, where you had that teacher-student communication and connection in person. I think that made it a lot better.

With students back in the classroom, Mr. Stephenson took multiple opportunities to discuss COVID, including measures to prevent its spread. He explained that these lessons were valuable for introducing students to the importance of basing science on evidence and not opinion.

We were able to have a lot of conversations about COVID during that time. . . . There’s people debating already whether masks work or not, the cloth works or not.  And so, we watched another video from Be Smart, hosted by Joe Hanson. . . . He recorded in slow motion, using the Schlieren effect, what happens when you sneeze or cough without a mask and then with a mask. And he did cloth versus N-95. . . . Then we had this conversation about masks and where’s the evidence that shows that they work and where’s the data. And trying to pull out those science principles, saying, “We need to make conclusions based upon evidence rather than just our opinion.”

Mr. Stephenson also used the topic of COVID to reinforce students’ use of the science practices. For instance, he would periodically show COVID case numbers in Utah as a context for reading and interpreting graphs.

Periodically throughout the year, I would pull up the COVID numbers that were recorded by the state of Utah, and we’d just watch the graph. And it was a great opportunity to focus on graph reading, . . . and you need to get familiar with reading graphs. And just talk about cause and effect. How we saw numbers going up around Halloween and then Thanksgiving and Christmas. We saw these big peaks during that time, so “What would you infer would be the cause? People going out? Family getting together?” Throughout the year, we would still have these conversations about what’s going on and talk about their opinions and their thoughts, and we need science to help quantify the how much and the how bad.

During the 2021–22 academic year Mr. Stephenson felt that school was truly getting back to pre-COVID conditions, and he was happy to be able to provide students with normalcy in school. He continued to address COVID with students as conditions improved, noting the effectiveness of this strategy for helping students examine data. He also expressed feelings of pride when he witnessed students applying the data analysis skills he had been teaching.

As we started talking about these new variants that were coming out and how contagious some were, . . . I said, “Okay, let’s look at our peak here in March when we shut down.” I think 32 people in Utah tested positive, and we shut down. And then we come back to school, and we have 1,500 active cases. . . . And yet in the 2021–22 school year, we did away with the mask. It was optional, and the district didn’t shut anything down.” But one student said, “Well, let’s look at the hospitalization rate.” The deaths did not spike. They stayed flat, and the hospital enrollments stayed flat as well. And so he said, “Well, with that data point, it seems like what we’re doing is just fine. We don’t need to shut down. We don’t need to require masks again because of these data points.” And I thought that was a very powerful application of what I was trying to teach students.

Reflecting on his science teaching during the pandemic, Mr. Stephenson felt that he was able to move student learning forward, despite a challenging set of circumstances. In particular, he was able to instill in his students the importance of data-driven decision making.

As a science educator, I feel it is my duty to teach and help the students think critically, logically, use data to come to these conclusions, know how to research information. . . . There’s so much information out there, and I said, “Well, let’s look at the data,” and tried to teach the kids about what is healthy. It was like, “The writing is on the wall. Do we need to debate this anymore? Look at the data. Take your emotion out of it, set it on the shelf, and think logically and say, ‘Are these people with the vaccine and the booster, are there as many people getting sick?’ Answer’s no. Are there people getting sick? Sure, but not as many.” Where I could, I felt like I tried to do my best to inform them of what is real by using those science principles.