In the Classroom
Science Classes
During my time at Forest Grove, I taught 5 different remote science classes at 3 academic levels. Each of these classes had their own unique personalities and challenges. All of my classes were held to the same high academic expectations and were taught the same content, however, they each required different levels of scaffolding, pacing, and support to reach these expectations.
I taught three different levels of science classes: college, honors, and inclusion. The college level science classes were comprised of relatively average students. I planned all of my lessons for the classes at this level and then added additional scaffolding for the inclusion level or depth for the honors level.
College Level
My first class of the week, Red, was often the most difficult to engage. However, the students in the class were strongly connected to one another and often worked to support one another in answering questions and understanding the material. Their cooperation and encouragement was always heartwarming to see.
Purple class, my last class of the week, was composed of students passionate about science as well as all of the lower level ELL students I taught. I provided many language supports for this class, which included helping ELL students set up translated captions on the meet and breaking down vocabulary. By the time I completed my student teaching, most of the ELL students were actively participating in the chat, both socially and academically.
Honors Level
My second and third classes, Yellow and Green, were comprised of more academically motivated students. In these classes, we were able to dive more deeply into the material. This being the case, these classes were difficult to keep on task, as their discussions and questions about science would drift far from the topic at hand. Their curiosity about science, however, was inspiring and a joy to work with.
Inclusion Level
My fourth class, Blue, was supposed to be an inclusion class with a combination of college level and special education students. In reality, however, the class was almost entirely comprised of special education students who had an inclusion teacher work with them throughout the day to provide additional support. This class was especially challenging as their lessons required intense scaffolding and detailed step-by-step instructions. Many of these students had relied upon in-class redirection in the past to complete classwork, however, they could not receive the same support in the online environment, making accessing the material even more difficult for them. I quickly had to improve my abilities to meet diverse learners' needs in order to provide the proper support and scaffolding for this class.
Student Feedback
About halfway through my student teaching, the students were given a survey to give feedback about my teaching. This feedback survey demonstrated two major points: that students felt safe in my classroom, yet they also felt disconnected from other students in the class. As I previously described in the Safe Learning Environment section, the majority of students felt that I was positive and supportive in the classroom. However, their responses regarding working with other students were, overall, more negative than their responses to other survey questions.
Even though students felt that the classroom was a safe learning environment, they did not feel as connected to their fellow students. These two pie charts show the results from survey questions regarding student cooperation and engagement with one another in class. Though most students agreed that students in the classes pushed each other to do better or worked together to learn difficult content, a large proportion also disagreed. These results demonstrate the challenge of fostering a community during online learning, as well as the toll it can take on students' relationships with each other.
Classroom Management
Managing an online classroom often comes with unique and unexpected challenges, the first and foremost being monitoring the meet chat. When used as intended, the chat can be an incredibly useful tool for posting directions or links and getting response from students who may be uncomfortable with speaking in front of the rest of the class. However, the chat could quickly become overwhelming as, sometimes, ten conversations would happen at once. This was sometimes a great sign that students were engaged and participating in class. On other occasions, students would send random symbols, emoticons, or blank spaces to use the chat as a distraction to the rest of the class. Sometimes, inappropriate messages in the chat would get lost in the flood of comments and wouldn't be found until long after they had been sent.
I unfortunately found that many students felt emboldened by the online format to act out in ways that less tech-savvy teachers would not be able to notice. Whether through inappropriate profile pictures or comments in the chat, students could easily get away with behaviors that made other students uncomfortable if the teacher was not paying close attention to everything happening both in class and in the chat. One major problem that all classes throughout the district faced were so-called "meet bombings" in which random students, often high schoolers, from outside of the class would enter the meet while playing inappropriate music and using vulgar language. The meet security was ineffective in preventing this.
These challenges taught me to be more vigilant and decisive in the classroom. If an unknown student jumped into the classroom, I had to immediately remove them from the meeting before they could get the class off track. To keep class flowing smoothly, I learned to mentally organize student comments and questions to address them in an order which aided the lesson, rather than impeded it. Before my student teaching experience, I would debate and second-guess every decision I made. However, teaching required me to be confident and assured with my actions so that the students felt safe and class could continue past any obstacles that would arise.
Triumphs + Challenges
In all classes, engagement was by far the greatest challenge. Due to the nature of online learning, students can join a Meet, turn off their microphone and camera, go back to sleep, and still be counted as present for attendance. The inability to redirect students' attention or even ensure that students are present made assigning simple classwork an arduous task. Additionally, the apparent distance from school in combination with the emotional and mental stress of the situation led many students to not recognize their school performance as important. At the end of my student teaching, nearly half of all students received a failure warning on their progress reports for merely not submitting work. These students were often not engaging with school in all of their classes and had been reached out to by teachers and counselors on numerous occasions. Meanwhile, those students who participated in class and completed assignments did extremely well across the board.
This achievement gap was difficult to come to terms with. Remote learning required 7th grade students just out of elementary school to take on more personal responsibility than many of them had ever experienced, and, often, those students who needed the most support in school were unable to receive that same support online. I had to adjust to the fact that, even though I was doing my best to engage students and give them the support they needed, I could not reach through the screen and ensure they were present in class and completing their work.
However, the greatest triumphs were those moments when students were engaged with class, when they were socially communicating with each other as normal middle school students or excitedly asking questions and sharing their knowledge about the material. These moments reminded me of why I wanted to student teach in the first place, and demonstrated the amazing resilience of my students in such a difficult time.
Community + Family Engagement
One of the few beneficial aspects of online learning was the ability to engage with families remotely. Under normal circumstances, scheduling meetings with families would be difficult as many guardians work throughout the day and cannot make it to school. However, the upside to online school is that we could meet with guardians online as well. Rather than having to take time off of work, guardians could videoconference with all of the teachers in our cluster for a few minutes while they were at work to discuss their child. This allowed us to stay in contact with families and understand how to better support their students.
Professional Development
For the two weeks before students began school, I was able to participate in the professional development required for all teachers to prepare for online learning. These full-day professional development sessions provide an immense amount of materials, resources, and skill-development opportunities that teachers could use in the digital learning environment. While some of the sessions covered digital tools which, as a student in the digital age, I was previously familiar with, many of the sessions provided valuable information and ideas which I was able to try out within classroom. Resources such as PearDeck (interactive presentations), Kahoot! (quiz game), Google Forms, and Gizmos (an online lab simulator), which I had learned about through these professional development sessions, became my go-to lesson tools. The ability to learn about some additional teaching strategies and begin working with my mentor teacher before meeting the students helped me prepare more effectively for the classroom.