Balancing Act: Test Prep and COVID Instruction

Mr. Taylor has over 15 years’ experience as a high school biology and environmental science teacher at a Career Technological Center in rural Ohio. In the spring of 2020, the state governor decided that spring break would last for three weeks while COVID “calmed down.” However, it soon became apparent that COVID was not going to calm down anytime soon, and the decision to keep students at home was extended for the remainder of the school year.

The schools in Ohio went on spring break, right before Easter, somewhere around in there. The governor told us that spring break was going to be three weeks just to try and get things under control. Most of us figured out we’d probably have to alter things and started looking at online options and other things. But as the spring break dragged out, they kept extending the deadline. So, we had to convert most of our stuff to online learning, which ended up being the rest of the school year.

The transition to online learning was difficult for teachers and students in this rural district. Mr. Taylor explained that most students did not have internet service or a device they could use to access and complete online assignments (e.g., a computer or tablet). In addition, many students had to find ways to provide supplemental income for their families due to financial hardships caused by COVID, which took time away from their schoolwork.

With people getting quarantined and parents being out of work, a lot of kids had to go and help out. . . . We’re kind of in Appalachia here, just on the outskirts of it. There’s a lot of poverty, and a lot of kids just didn’t have a choice to sit and do schoolwork all day.

Mr. Taylor also struggled with how to transition his lab-based science courses into an online format. Although many hands-on experiences went by the wayside, he was able to replace some with virtual options.

You couldn’t do lab work, which is a good chunk of my stuff. We had a couple of online virtual simulation things we could do to get the point across, which it helped a little bit.

Adding to the challenge of preparing and delivering online instruction, the school district delayed making a decision about whether or not final exams would be administered at the end of the semester. Mr. Taylor devoted a great deal of time and energy to preparing students for these exams which, in the end, didn’t happen.

They kept changing the rules on us. Some of my kids have to take end-of-course exams, and we were trying to get them ready for that in case they ended up taking them, which they ultimately didn’t. And just the regular exams for our other students, which they didn’t tell us in time to not worry about it, so we were still trying to get them ready for a bunch of tests that ultimately didn’t happen.

Because Mr. Taylor spent so much of the semester focused on exams, he was not able to address COVID to the extent he would have wanted to. Yet, he did carve out class time to discuss broader COVID-focused topics when he could, including characteristics of the virus, the purpose of quarantining, and what constitutes a pandemic.

I didn’t really go beyond the basics of [COVID], “This is a virus. This is what’s going on. This is what a pandemic is, what it means.” And stuff that they’d heard of in the news, but probably didn’t have explained to them. Why we were quarantining the way we were, that sort of thing. And hopefully, a vaccine. It was kind of a crash course in what a pandemic actually means, because they’ve never seen anything like this before.

Although Mr. Taylor was glad for the opportunity to share accurate scientific information with his students, he wished he could have had a broader impact in his community in this way. He noted that COVID became a heavily politicized subject in his town, and a majority of individuals did not trust what scientists were saying about the pandemic.

We live in an area where science isn’t a major priority for a lot of people. And plus, I hate to get political, but we live in a pretty red state area, too. So if [community members] heard something on a news conference from a certain somebody, it was
going to trump every scientist in the world, regardless of the evidence.

The following school year (2020–21) was held with a hybrid schedule that alternated groups of students. All students were provided with devices and hotspots as means to increase student participation, academic performance, and to make access to schoolwork more equitable.

We went 1 to 1 with devices. We also got a whole bunch of those [hotspots]. . . .That worked for most of our students. Most of them had some kind of device and ahot spot if they needed it.

The 2020–21 school year also brought about the return of end-of-semester exams. Mr. Taylor focused all of his science instruction on topics that would be represented on these exams. This meant that he was not able to continue addressing COVID in his biology instruction because it was not aligned with required course content. However, he did teach about COVID in his environmental science class because the curriculum has a unit focused on
the spread of diseases. He noted that he was able to use COVID as a real-life example that students could relate to.

We’ve talked a little bit about [COVID] in my environmental science class because there’s a section there on human health and disease spreading. . . . So we just took what we were doing already, which was how viruses spread. So it was stuff we were already covering. It’s just now we had a very obvious, real-life example to tie it to.

Mr. Taylor also noticed that integrating COVID into his instruction increased student interest in discussing protocols to reduce transmission and influenced some positive behavioral choices. However, he also observed that the political nature of the topic ensured that many students would not accept the seriousness of the situation.

Some of them, I think, did get something out of it now that they’re really actually seeing some real-life consequences. You can’t sit with your friends, you’re wearing a mask all the time, you have to stay seated, stay away. . . . Some of them did get something out of it. I did have students asking me about masking and social distancing and that. And then of course, some of them are just going to dig their heels in and not listen, no matter what. But that’s a danger of almost any science topic around here.

During the following school year (2021–22), students returned fully back to campus. Mr. Taylor continued to address COVID with students in his environmental science class as he had done the year prior. However, some parents began to pushback on science teachers discussing the virus in class. Mr. Taylor attempted to resolve this by reminding his community members of his background.

A bunch of parents complained they didn’t want us to say anything about COVID at all, because it was a conspiracy or wasn’t real, or nonsense like that. . . . I’m like, “Buddy, I’ve got a degree in evolutionary biology. Why don’t you leave the pandemic stuff to me?”

Reflecting on his COVID-focused teaching throughout the pandemic, Mr. Taylor hoped that he was able to help his students better understand the situation and accept the validity of rapidly changing information as scientific knowledge expanded.

We tried to tell kids, “Here’s what’s going on,” to be up front. “Here’s what we know, here’s what don’t know. Things are going to change as we know more.” I tried to be very clear on that. “Here’s why we’re doing this.” So even if they didn’t buy it, we’d at least try to understand it, or help them understand.