Keep Looking for the Truth
Ms. Davis is a high school science teacher in upstate New York. In early 2020, she was teaching Earth and Environmental science to sophomores and juniors when the New York Department of Education sent everyone home to complete the school year online due to the COVID pandemic. Although this transition was challenging for other staff members, Ms. Davis was able to move forward seamlessly because she had already been using online resources and approaches in her science instruction.
I really had no problem using the online virtual classroom because my kids already used blended learning a bit. Using Google Classroom wasn’t a problem for me.
Ms. Davis had already been discussing COVID with her students prior to the shutdown because it was making headlines on a daily basis. As a science teacher, she recognized the seriousness of the situation and wanted to be proactive in preparing students with strategies to stay safe.
I’d been telling the kids before it started that you have to take precautions, wash your hands and all this. Then introduced to them what is so specific about this pandemic and that type of thing. . . . We talked about different perspectives in terms of taking care of themselves physically and mentally.
Ms. Davis was also aware that the amount of information being spread about COVID was overwhelming and, in some cases, even contradictory. She encouraged students to conduct their own research on aspects of the pandemic they found interesting, hoping that it would help them stay up to date and find answers to their own questions.
I also want the kids to not just listen to the news, but then do some research on their own. Specifically different aspects they may be interested in to keep themselves informed. . . . Because it’s like every day even the experts are telling you different stories or different facts. It was very confusing already. It’s like, “Which message am I going to give them?” I may as well just give them different areas they can think about and then have them look for answers themselves.
Providing students with the skills to seek out information related to COVID and the confidence to voice their concerns provided many with a source of comfort. This was especially helpful given the vast number of students that were dealing with the consequences of COVID in their personal lives.
They are the ones that know how to ask questions if they don’t know about it. They are the ones that will discuss their concerns and let us know what they worry about. Because as time goes on, some kids, they really faced the situations. Like their family got infected or their parents got infected, and there were deaths. For those kids who’ve been getting some information or know where to find information, their coping skills are better.
As online instruction persisted into the 2020–21 school year, Ms. Davis continued to center her lessons around COVID when she could. For example, she and her students used the Johns Hopkins website to access and analyze data about viral transmission worldwide.
We used the website that Johns Hopkins was making to demonstrate exponential growth and then compared the different countries so that they know what’s going on in the world. . . . We used that as a jumping off point to see what they thought, and if they were the ones making the policies, whether the data could help them out.
The pandemic also provided a shared experience all students could relate to and gave Ms. Davis an opportunity to help students learn about the nature of science.
It’s really something that’s affecting them hands-on. So, it’s very intimate because everyone has at least one person in the family or in the school personally being affected by COVID. . . . Then, of course, on top of that, different facts or different news coming up each day. It really gave them the idea how science works. A lot of times the knowledge evolves, and the experiment doesn’t guarantee anything. Then you just have to keep looking for the truth.
Ms. Davis explained that most of her students were very eager to learn about COVID and willing to take measures to prevent transmission. Her students were also generally eager to receive the vaccine once it became available.
They definitely wanted to get the vaccination. The high vaccination rate in our school is really great because they got the knowledge about it. Also, they knew that masking is really helpful for protection [from COVID].
During the 2021–22 school year, instruction largely went back to normal since all students had returned to campus. Although Ms. Davis no longer deliberately integrated COVID into her science instruction, she did continue to receive and answer student questions.
Reflecting on her science instruction during the pandemic, Ms. Davis hopes that her decision to regularly discuss the pandemic helped students take notice of the impacts of this event, both locally and globally. Further, she hopes her students are now better equipped to take a stand and use their voices to influence future public health decisions that will ultimately impact their lives.
I told the kids, “You are the ones that are going to face all these problems. If you let this slide, it’s going to be affecting you. So, it’s your responsibility. What are you going to do? Maybe you need to speak up, but how are you going to speak up? You have to learn it. You have to get the knowledge. You have to know how to use the numbers to justify your conversation so that they don’t look down at you like you are only a kid.”
