How can you teach a class of five-year-olds when you’re not in the same room? When you might not be speaking to them in person every day?
Take it a day at a time, and know we’re living in strange times.
“Kids can learn anywhere,” said Courtney Lambert, one of the kindergarten teachers at Rindge Memorial School. “They can learn in their day-to-day interactions with the world.”
As much as students’ school days have changed, so have their teachers’.
Lambert’s day starts at 6 a.m., when she goes through her regular morning routine. Except, when it’s time for her to leave for work, she doesn’t head out to Rindge Memorial School. She has set aside one room as her “classroom” and her husband, also a teacher. has another, and they retreat to their separate spaces to start their day.
At 7:45 a.m., she does her preparation – preparing her schedule of group and individual chats, and teacher collaboration meetings. At 8:30, she begins her morning check-ins with her students.
Lambert said she begins her mornings with individual chats with small groups of two or three students, for a half an hour each, where they might play games, go over comprehension questions, or sometimes, just to check in and chat.
“It’s the social interaction between themselves and their teachers that they’re really missing, and I think it’s the hardest thing for students, whether they’re 5 or 15. Sometimes you have to abandon best-laid plans and go where the kids are,” Lambert said. “And sometimes that’s them running around showing us their cat or their new bike.”
There are not enough hours in the morning for her to meet with her entire class like that, so students are assigned individual days for their in-person check-ins. On Friday, the whole class gathers for a group chat and are given time to catch up on things they need to review.
In the afternoon, it’s more one-to-one check-ins, and time for Lambert to complete her own classes for her post-Master’s degree leadership academy.
On the other end of the spectrum, at the high school level, the classes are a bit more structured, Conant Spanish teacher Patricia McCarthy said. Students meet at set times for their classes, starting at 8:30 a.m. They meet as a group through a video sharing platform on Google.
The class begins as it would in school, McCarthy said: They recite the pledge in Spanish, as they do first thing every morning, explain the days assignments and check in with students. She’s given mini-lectures, such as using command phrases to go over quarantine protocols such as “wash your hands.” That takes about 15 minutes. The majority of the class has students working individually, using resources McCarthy has uploaded.
Since integrated technology had already become in the classroom, setting students up with an advantage to what teachers admit is a less-than-ideal situation.
Even Lambert’s class of kindergartners had already been introduced to Chromebooks and their use, had used online phonics games and navigating a web browser.
Video chatting and email are new concepts for her students, Lambert said, but most of her students are at least passingly familiar with the process.
McCarthy said a lot of the online resources that are being used are helpful to students, because they can replay them as much as they need to in order to understand the lesson.
“Your peers don’t need to know that you needed to watch it three times to get it,” McCarthy said. “In that way, it allows students to work at their own pace.” She’s also found some games through resources that are currently available for free to teachers, that are useful for quick vocabulary lessons and drills.
There is also a lot of creativity blooming in the “classroom,” Lambert said.
“Once I put activities out there, I can’t control how they’re doing it, and sometimes, it’s very cool to see how they approach things,” Lambert said. When kindergartners had to build and label a diagram of a plant, for example, students came back with “plants” made of Lego, vegetables, or live plants taken from nature.
The technology gap has been showing through more than ever with the current situation, teachers said. Students with slow internet connections, or large families all trying to use the internet at the same time have resulted in many issues.
Lambert said her classes are structured in a way that except for certain check ins, students are able to go at their own pace, when the internet might be available to them.
“When you have a family with two – or eight – kids, plus working parents, it might be impossible to have all the people on at once,” Lambert said.
“The availability of computers and computer time, when you might have a family of six, sometimes it means it just can’t be done,” McCarthy said. “I think that’s challenging for families.”
Lambert said teachers have been forced to get creative, and not every aspect of that creativity needs to go away when normal schooling resumes.
There are certain online tools that she has access to that she’ll continue using, Lambert said, but she’s also seen some benefits of the current looser schooling environment.
She’s been able to arrange virtual field trips, and has her children watching a live camera at a zoo, giving children an insight into the lives of the zoo’s giraffes. These are things that the kids have loved, and she might continue, she said.
“Being outside the classroom a little more, trying to see what we can do to make these experiences a little more flexible, I think that’s what I’m taking away,” Lambert said.