Building Student Knowledge While Attending to Student Health

Mr. Kennedy was a 7th and 8th grades science teacher at a small private middle school in California during the 2019–20 academic year. He reflected on how COVID became an increasingly important component of his classroom instruction as the pandemic unfolded, largely in response to student questions. In his words:

It was a normal year until it wasn’t. I think the first time I mentioned COVID in class, it would have been in January when we first started to see news come out of WHO about the situation. And students asked me about it actually. Science news is something we regularly talk about in class. It’s a part of the curriculum to keep up-to-date with events. And students asked me if I had heard about this virus in China and could we please talk about it. And so I gathered up materials, mostly general knowledge at that time about this is what a virus is, this is how they spread. . . . It was a very general conversation until the news started to get more serious. And it became a regular part of the class that we would talk about. Like the recommendations from the CDC, this is what we should all be doing. Don’t panic, but let’s watch the science carefully.

Mr. Kennedy believed it was important to present his students with scientifically accurate information about the virus, but also recognized that students were likely to be concerned and potentially fearful. Therefore, he attempted to balance multiple priorities within his instruction. As he explained:

For the age group that I teach, it’s really important, I think, to establish some context. I’m a believer that, like, science can be used to clarify—like the approach that I always try to take in classes is “Here’s the evidence.” We can talk about what to do with the evidence after that, but let’s establish the facts first. And also trying to pay attention to our own social and emotional wellness, even as we’re talking about something as dangerous as a pandemic. So I guess the approach was really to balance all of those different metrics of health to establish context, and to try to provide students with some scientific understanding of what they were hearing in the world around them.

Mr. Kennedy also continued to encourage student questions about COVID, providing a discussion board as a platform for them to raise their questions. As he said:

We also had a discussion board. So I would encourage students if they just had a question, if maybe they had heard something they didn’t fully understand, they could put the question on the discussion board and as a class community, we would address it. And I found that that was an especially important way to identify sources of misinformation that students had and to help get those out in the open so that we could again provide some context and evidence.

When his school building closed, Mr. Kennedy continued to prioritize COVID in his online science instruction. Although the topic of viruses wasn’t particularly well aligned with his curriculum, he believed it was important to continue to build student understanding of this important current event as it unfolded. In his words:

As I’m trying to teach them these other things that are more pertinent to the course, you know, I have to help them to stay informed about the world around them. So we spent really a lot of time talking about COVID science.

Mr. Kennedy also continued to emphasize physical and emotional wellness, encouraging his students to reflect on ways to keep themselves and their families healthy. He explained:

Also, one of the activities that we did was building a plan for your family for how you can take care of not just your physical health, in the early days, encouraging them to practice good hygiene and things like that, but also how do you take care of your mental health, your emotional health, your social health, or community health. Trying to create an opportunity to have those conversations in my class has always been really important to me.