Harvesting Accurate COVID Information

In any given school year, Ms. Hall rotates among teaching environmental chemistry, botany, computer applications, AP Chemistry, and various agriscience classes at a rural high school in Michigan. When her district announced in mid-March 2020 that they would not be returning to school due to COVID, she began preparing worksheets and other written materials for her students to take home. Because her classes rely heavily on hands-on experiences, she modified activities for use with common materials students had at home or materials she could easily send home with them. For example, Ms. Hall had her students create miniature, self-contained ecosystems (known as “bio bottles”).

I do bio bottles with the kids. In school, we do them in two-liter bottles and they do them in a group. But I sent them home with the directions and I modified it so they could go with water bottles or whatever other bottles they could find in their house.

The abrupt change was stressful for students, and they came to Ms. Hall with a lot of questions about how to stay safe. Ms. Hall attempted to alleviate student concerns by relating COVID to a previous situation where their district closed to stop the spread of the flu virus.

All the kids in schools have gone through norovirus before, the stomach flu, and we’ve shut down for it. We had shut down previously for that every other year. It goes through in February. And I’m like, “It’s the same thing. You guys want to make sure that if you have anybody sick at home, you’re washing and cleaning and taking those precautions.”

She also made sure to stay up to date with the most current information about the virus so she could provide scientifically accurate answers to student questions.

That [information] was all coming down from the CDC. And all the information I could get from those sites, I kept on reading to make sure that I knew for the kids. . . . I was giving them all the current information. They had lots of questions for me. Being in science, teaching chemistry and botany with those kids, they felt comfortable asking questions of me. And just [giving them] a health safety protocol—keeping your hands clean, making sure the surfaces are clean. This is before anybody was wearing masks, so the kids were asking about that, and masks were not available.

In addition to providing accurate information, Ms. Hall actively attempted to remedy the spread of misinformation, notably by providing reliable sources for students to refer to.

I was trying to give the kids good websites to get current good information from because throughout this whole thing, even back then, there was a lot of misinformation out. . . . I hope that I made it less scary for them and gave them a little bit of control about the things that they could do and control about the situation and making sure that, like I said, directing them to good information to find good sources to find good information. Kids trust teachers, and it’s good to have somebody that you can trust in giving you the information that you need.

Ms. Hall’s district continued with online learning at the beginning of the next school year (2020–21) before eventually adopting a hybrid model that provided students with the option of attending classes in person or online. During this school year, Ms. Hall used part of her school budget to purchase an online platform, Innovative Creative Educational Videos (iCEV) geared toward virtual agriscience classes. The availability of video lectures, PowerPoint slides, and student assessments through iCEV relieved the burden of having to create these teaching materials from scratch.

I had iCEV. . . .It’s a national resource for agriscience teaching and they have videos, and PowerPoints, and they have self quizzes for the kids. So I could assign a PowerPoint for them, and it had 35 questions for them to answer along with going through the PowerPoint.

Additionally, because Ms. Hall didn’t have to devote as much time to developing online lessons, she was able to focus more attention on ways to make her classes interactive. To this end, she took students on virtual field trips, assigned virtual lab groups through Zoom, and prepared labs for them to complete at home.

For plant biology, I got these little transparent egg cartons, and I gave them each a different packet of seeds. They grew the seeds, and then I put them in lab groups on Zoom, which was nice because when we were all online, you could put them in a breakout room. Then they worked with one another, and they talked about all the different seeds from different plants and compared their growth rates. Then I sent them home with a leaf collection. So they all did a leaf collection in their backyards. . . . The other thing I was able to do was field trips with them. I just took them on phone Zoom field trips. So I took them to the greenhouse in town and up to Michigan State University around some of the greenhouses and the gardens out there. . . . And for animal biology, usually we do a lot of dissections. So I dissected seven different animals, I did that as a demo, and then gave them dissection diagrams, and then they had to make the animal with clay.

Ms. Hall also continued to discuss COVID with her students during hybrid instruction, frequently tying it to her required course content.

I taught about different ways that viruses are spread and then about the disease process. And then within those contexts would talk about how COVID would be similar or different to some of these disease processes that we see.

Once COVID vaccines became available, Ms. Hall also talked to her students about the science of vaccines. She did not shy away from discussing vaccines in her science instruction, even though it had become a heavily political topic in her community. Instead, when she received pushback, she made it clear that the topic was related to the standards she was required to cover.

Instantly, [the topic of vaccines] was so political, and a lot of teachers wanted to step away from it. . . . But if I had any questions from parents, I would just be like, “the standards.”

By discussing the COVID vaccine with students, Ms. Hall was able to provide them with a sense of comfort in knowing what was happening, especially when they started to receive their own vaccines.

I had some kids come in at beginning the class and say, “I got my shot today.” Just because they’re happy. Because it gave them a relief because they understood how it worked. So, they felt comfortable talking to me about those kinds of things.

The next school year (2021–22) all students fully returned to campus. Ms. Hall continued to tie COVID into her course content. For example, she related COVID contact tracing to the process of food borne illness tracing that sometimes occurs in restaurants.

If you had listeria in this restaurant and how they track that down, then relating that back to how we do COVID tracing. I would talk to them about the amount of work our secretaries and our principal were putting in doing COVID tracing. . . . So, trying to make those connections back to what we were learning and how those processes work and why it’s important that we have things like health departments and we should listen to them.

Relative to years past, Ms. Hall noted that she was more intentional about discussing COVID with students because she noticed an uptick in the pushback the scientific community was facing. She wanted her students to have the most up-to-date information and appreciate how much work was going into studying the virus.

I think it was a little bit more intentional [about addressing COVID] just because the amount of misinformation was even higher again this year, and more people were pushing against science. . . . And just showing the kids science and understanding the complexities of it and respecting the complexities of it and the people that work really, really hard to keep society going and healthy.

Ms. Hall noted that although there were ups and downs, she was proud to serve as an accurate and trustworthy source of information for her students throughout the pandemic.

I think I shared viable sources with the kids and information at times they needed it. I integrated it into my instruction. My kids trusted me, they asked me questions. . . . . So I was very serious and felt it was my job to make sure that the kids understood why we were doing the things that we were doing and why they were important.