Teachers Find New Ways to Connect With Kids, Each Other
Preschoolers at the Wallingford Co-op Nursery School at separate, outdoor learning stations. Photo: Ashley Drane
What’s one of the hardest things about teaching on Zoom? Getting the kids to laugh, according to middle school teacher Dan Shaffer. Shaffer has been teaching American history at Strath Haven Middle School for 30 years, and humor is part of his playbook.
“I’m drop dead funny,” he maintains. “But it’s not translating well.”
Shaffer is joking, but his joke contains a hard truth. COVID-19 has upended strategies teachers rely on to connect with kids and teach their subjects. In the Wallingford-Swarthmore School District, teachers have had to switch gears several times, going all-virtual last spring, then preparing over the summer for in-person school, only to learn that school would stay virtual after all. Then, in October, most teachers went back to school buildings, teaching cohorts of students in a hybrid of in-person and virtual instruction. “You have to be fast on your feet,” Shaffer observes.
Like teachers at all levels in both public and private schools throughout the community, Shaffer is making the best of a difficult situation. He’s finding new ways to reach kids he only sees on a screen. He’s made funny PowerPoint presentations, discovered interactive online activities to enhance his curriculum, and pitted online versus in-class kids for history-review games of Jeopardy.
Teaching in-person and online simultaneously is a challenge, but Shaffer is managing. “I’m very easy going,” he says. “I can teach anywhere, anytime, and I’m going to make the best of it.” But as head of the school’s teachers union, he sees how much some of his colleagues are struggling. “I’m dealing with a lot of stressed-out teachers, a lot of stressed-out parents, and a lot of stressed-out kids,” he notes.
“There are so many different pieces to juggle simultaneously,” explains Stephanie Lehman, a veteran English teacher at Strath Haven High School. She struggles to accommodate the needs of online and in-person students, digitize and reformat materials daily, and invent new ways to assess student work — all without any models of best practices.
Will Starr, who lives in Swarthmore and teaches fourth grade at Plymouth Meeting Friends School, manages the increased workload of pandemic teaching by getting to work at six a.m. (“I don’t hit any traffic on the Blue Route,” he says.) He heads home around four, then puts in another couple of hours before bed. Every little thing is complicated. For example, “When Leah says, ‘I don’t have my math sheet’ and she’s online, and we’re about to have an hour math class, I can’t just give it to her.”
His priority for now is giving his students “a space to be heard,” Starr says. “Trying to give them all that feeling of, ‘Oh, Will sees me.’”
Cameras Off
How does a teacher make a child feel seen if the teacher can’t see the child? “How do you connect and engage students who hide behind the black screen?” one teacher in WSSD’s Online Academy wonders.
The school district can’t legally require students to keep their cameras on, explains Kristin Dunning, a counselor and former English teacher at Strath Haven High School. She finds it understandable that families want privacy. “If you have four kids around the dining room table, all doing school at the same time, not everybody needs to see what’s happening with those other kids.”
But not seeing kids makes a challenging situation enormously harder. “When a teacher is trying to teach, and all they’re seeing is black boxes, and it’s silent, how do you gauge what’s happening and how to respond to people’s needs?” Dunning asks.
She worries especially about kids who find school hard at the best of times. “They get by in school because they have people — teachers, support staff, counselors, administrators — working them with daily in person to nudge them along.” But now, at the high school, the most time students spend in school is two half-days a week.
Dunning reports that attendance among the in-person cohort at the high school is declining. “We find that on Fridays, and rainy days, a lot of kids don’t show up.”
Younger Children
Younger students have different concerns and priorities than older ones. Lehman’s daughter is in first grade at Swarthmore-Rutledge School, and she adores her in-person days. “She loves her teachers and the cafeteria,” Lehman reports. “She likes the gym. She likes the playgrounds. No pandemic really can alter that for a 6-year-old.”
Cheryl Knox is in her 29th year teaching fourth grade at SRS. She says the students in her class “roll with the punches. If you’re calm, they’re calm.” Knox describes the switch to virtual teaching as initially overwhelming, but she’s learned to manage three monitors and a smartboard simultaneously. And she appreciates the advantages of having so few students in her classroom.
Jodi Dawes is a preschool teacher and the director of the Wallingford Co-op Nursery School. To address safety concerns, her preschool has been held entirely outside this fall. The days are short — an hour and a half — but it takes the staff an hour to get ready. And activities have to be adjusted to the weather. “You can’t cut when paper’s soggy,” Dawes explains. She plans to keep the program going through the winter, with the option of going inside if the temperature dips below 35 degrees.
Canaries in the Coal Mine
Several school district teachers who asked not to be identified said they are troubled by what they view as incomplete and sometimes confusing communication from the district administration about COVID-19 in the schools. “The messaging we get when there are positive cases is very vague and does not do a lot to calm anybody’s apprehension,” one teacher says.
“Teachers are scared and feel unsafe,” reports another. They worry about asymptomatic spread among students and about infection among their colleagues. As of November 15, the district’s “COVID tracker” webpage, which does not differentiate between students and staff, listed 24 cases.
One teacher notes that the Chester County Health Department calls “attending or working at” a school the second-greatest risk for exposure to COVID. (The greatest exposure risk is close contact with an infected person.) Some teachers are living apart from their families to mitigate the risk. “They are having socially distanced visits with their own children,” a teacher reports.
A recent letter from Palmer to the school community addressed the district’s decision to continue in-person instruction despite advice from Dr. David Rubin of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Policy Lab that schools return to all-virtual learning. Rubin has been in close contact with district leaders, and the district followed his recommendations over the summer. But now WSSD schools are continuing to offer in-person instruction, as allowed by the Chester County Health Department, according to Palmer’s letter. “I remind everyone that CCHD serves as our medical authority for guidance and recommendations regarding school operations,” she wrote.
A teacher who characterizes the letter as “saying that we are no longer listening to CHOP” calls it “worrisome.” She says, “It really does feel like we are canaries in the mine.”
Silver Linings
Lehman, the high-school English teacher, is finding some benefits to teaching online. One-on-one conferences with students in Zoom breakout rooms offer more privacy and intimacy than a noisy classroom. And she appreciates the way her colleagues are working together. “We’ve needed to rely heavily on each other to figure things out,” she says, stressing that kids continue to learn in spite of the year’s challenges.
Teachers are also relying on each other for emotional support. After the first day of hybrid instruction, having taught simultaneously in-person and on Zoom for the first time, while wearing masks, “We all staggered out to the hallway, trying to outdo each other with the most awkward moment,” Lehman recalls. “We tried to console each other, but also find some degree of humor in this somewhat absurd reality.”
“Teachers are doing a very good, thorough, conscientious, caring, loving job of taking care of each other in the absence of community support,” says counselor Dunning, who describes teachers as exhausted and demoralized. “People are checking in on each other, giving each other breaks. Validating how they’re feeling, which is sometimes all you need.”
“We’re surviving,” Shaffer, the middle school teacher, concludes. “It’s not perfect. But teachers are killing themselves to try and make it so.”
