I’ve been hearing a lot of people talk about how excited they are for things to go back to “normal” — back to before the pandemic. No masks, no social distancing, dining inside, and all that. In education, that means back to the classroom and no more Zoom.
The pandemic isn’t over yet, but many schools are planning to return to the classroom as early as this fall. My university plans to offer in-person classes alongside remote and hybrid classes for the fall quarter. Even though I’m a bit nervous about attending school in-person, I’m also excited to finally see people and be able to spend my first year of college on campus (zot zot zot!).
I’m expecting a lot of the pre-pandemic aspects of education to return too. Collaborating with our tablemates instead of in awkward breakout rooms; being in the classroom with people instead of at home alone; actually talking without having to press unmute instead of typing in the Zoom chat — those are all “normal,” and I look forward to doing them. But I will miss some aspects of pandemic education.
Don’t get me wrong. I had issues with Zoom school. It was so disconnected and counterproductive most days, but I thrived and there were a few parts that were amazing, like waking up five minutes before class started, cooking in between classes, working asynchronously, and Zooming in bed. I’ll miss that a lot.
There are other things I’ll miss too — the five topics of this post — but, unlike Zooming in bed, I think we can continue doing them when we return to the classroom because the pandemic has given us an opportunity to experiment and re-envision what school is supposed to be: a place to learn.
Flipped classrooms
One of the best education-related aspects of the pandemic for me was having flipped classrooms.
My calculus class was slightly flipped this past school year. Normally, teachers go over the math lesson in class and students take notes. At home, students do practice problems for homework. In a flipped class, the homework is watching a recorded lecture and taking notes before coming to class — essentially learning the content at home. Class time is spent consolidating that material through collaborative review, feedback, discussions, and practice problems or assignments.
I like flipped classrooms because it’s hard to keep up during lessons since I’m bad at math. I appreciate being able to pause the video and go back when I need to. I’ve had two flipped math classes in my K-12 schooling experience, and I’ve noticed that in both classes, students were more willing to ask questions and participate since that’s what class time was dedicated to. I also like being able to do the typical assignments and projects for the course in class because I’m surrounded by my peers and can ask for help immediately.
In my calculus class specifically, our homework was watching the lecture, taking notes, and doing practice problems before coming to class. I have to admit it felt overwhelming because in my previous flipped math class, we did our practice problems in class after reviewing the material. However, due to our pandemic bell schedule and preparing for the AP exam, my calculus class didn’t have too much flexibility.
If possible, the homework in flipped classrooms should be restricted to just preparing for the next day of class — watching lectures, reading, and taking notes along with any major projects or test review. Class time should be dedicated to typical homework activities since the point of the practice problems, worksheets, short answer essays we do is to make sure we understand the content. After all, in flipped classrooms, class time is used to consolidate information.
Ideally, at home preparation should take anywhere between ten to thirty minutes per night; not more than an hour, or else students will feel too overwhelmed. When the lesson is dense, the at-home preparation can span over the course of a few nights or the class could revert to a traditional model for that lesson.
Even if a classroom can’t become fully flipped, there are certainly some nights where preparing at home and doing collaborative review in class are possible and maybe even a more efficient use of class time. Many teachers are probably doing that without even realizing it. My junior year AP Biology class wasn’t flipped, but sometimes my teacher had us read the next chapter we would study and take notes at home, and in class we would review the information by doing activities over the course of several days.
Recorded lectures
On the topic of flipped classrooms, I’m also a fan of more video lessons.
University of California, Irvine Dean of Undergraduate Education and Vice Provost Michael Dennin advocates for more recorded lectures too, among other technology-related advancements in the classroom that we adopted during the pandemic. He writes in his sixth #DenninInsights post that traditional lecture college courses where information is delivered during class and students take notes (which is how many K-12 classrooms operate) don’t always support students’ learning.
“During the information delivery portion, students take notes to study from. This step of engaging with the lecture material at a later date is critical to the learning process… However, there are some students who struggle to process information while taking notes,” Dennin wrote. “While these students might benefit from being more present during a lecture, the design of the course forces them to take notes because it is their only way to save information for later engagement.”
During the pandemic, many educators created video lessons and other online content. Much of this content can be reused as we return to the in-person classroom environment. For example, we can keep delivering content through pre-recorded video lessons, which help students learn at their own pace.
Pre-recorded video lessons can also be made interactive using software such as PlayPosit. PlayPosit lets you add questions in your videos to help students engage with the material as they watch it. The data from students’ responses is useful because it shows teachers which parts of the lesson students had trouble with and need to review in class.
“If we embrace new technologies and encourage the evolution of our courses, we can easily redesign the traditional lecture course to suit a wider range of student needs,” Dennin wrote.
Another way educators can incorporate videos into their courses is by recording their live lectures and posting them after class for students to review.
According to Dennin, this supports students’ learning because they can easily revisit the content. It can also increase student engagement because instead of trying to take notes about everything, Dennin says students can “focus on processing the material in real-time and perhaps engage more fully by asking questions, joining the conversations that naturally arise during class, and so on.”
Modules
Modules are another part of pandemic education that I liked. Even before the pandemic, I was already familiar with modules because I took several online courses. The classes that were the most organized were the ones with modules that have all of the assignments and deadlines from the get-go. Nowadays, high schoolers and college students are involved in a million things at once, so knowing what to expect for the next two weeks or so helps greatly with scheduling. I go more into why modules are so great in this post about distance learning.
Office hours
Office hours aren’t really a thing in K-12 education; students usually ask questions during class, lunch, or after school. Sometimes we never find the time to get additional help because class is over and we’re running late, or we have a club meeting during lunch, or we have sports practice right after school.
So that’s why I loved it when my calculus teacher hosted tutorial sessions. That time was dedicated to help. Whenever we wanted to go, we signed up on a Google spreadsheet. These sessions were after school, but since most of my classmates didn’t have many after-school commitments because of the pandemic, the hours worked well for us. I didn’t go to all of the tutorial sessions, but it was great to have those office hours because that time was when my teacher was the most accessible.
When schools return to in-person instruction, it would be great to include a break time in the bell schedule. This time can be used for office hours, snacking, and resting. At my high school (before the pandemic), we had a ten to fifteen minute break between second and third period, and lunch was after fourth period.
More empathy
This is probably my most important education-related takeaway from the pandemic. Before the pandemic, school was always about grinding through the curriculum, taking tests, and competing with each other. That didn’t change during the pandemic, but I saw empathy being emphasized by my teachers more often. They were more flexible, patient, and forgiving.
I know supporting students has been many educators’ first priority even before the pandemic; I’ve never been in a classroom where my teacher didn’t care about their students and wasn’t willing to provide help.
Online school, however, was the first time in forever that I felt my classrooms put humanity and community first. We started our Zoom calls sharing what our plans were for the week, answering the question of the day, and playing bingo. The disconnected environment made us value connections over all of the tests and grades. Empathy in classrooms is what makes students feel like people, as I discussed in this reflection I wrote after one semester of online school.
Many of us are looking forward to returning back to our “normal” education because of how crazy pandemic education has been. A lot of it was a nightmare, but a lot of it was also valuable and shouldn’t be forgotten when we’re back in person.
We’ve come up with more ways to use technology to support students’ education, for example, and the pandemic has highlighted the glaring inequity students and schools experience across the nation. Moving forward, let’s be serious about the lessons we’ve learned and take action so we can make schools a better place for students to grow and learn.
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