Teaching in the time of coronavirus: Finding creative ways to engage students – The San Diego Union-Tribune

Teachers are doing now what theyve always done: pulling out all the stops to spark students interest and imagination. This time, though, theyve had to do it at a distance, and immediately.

Schools had been easing into the digital age before the COVID-19 crisis struck, investing in iPads and Chromebooks, and posting lessons on Google Classroom. After the pandemic hit, however, they hurtled ahead into distance learning, building virtual schools on the fly.

How can you bring engaging experiences to students when youre not all in the same classroom? said Rebecca McKinney, a science teacher at San Pasqual High School in Escondido.

To start, teachers pared down class content to the most essential standards, recognizing that students would not likely log into online classes for seven hours per day. They had to re-engineer their lessons for digital media, and learn a host of new apps and programs to make that happen.

Then came a more elusive task: finding creative ways to grab and hold students attention.

The challenge is for us to make it engaging, high interest, said Dave Peterson, a fifth-grade teacher at Juniper Elementary in Escondido, who created digital badges inspired by gaming rewards, which students could earn for completing assignments. We also have to give them some incentive to show up.

Its perhaps fitting that this generation of students, often referred to as iGen because of their familiarity with digital media, should be the ones to beta test online education on a large scale. For some districts, its hastening changes that were already in the works.

In Vista Unified School District, which began a transition to personalized learning years ago, it was a relatively smooth transition, Superintendent Matt Doyle said. The district had already invested heavily in mobile devices such as Chromebooks and hotspots, and had retooled classrooms so that students could be more active in their own educations.

Its accelerating teachers thinking about whats possible with students at the center, as drivers of their education, he said. Its accelerating the possibilities for student to take control of their learning. It has to be. Theyre at home alone, not in the classroom.

Although most students miss the social and interpersonal aspects of in class education, teachers said some have found a silver lining in school closures, through the flexibility of online learning.

I think that this has worked well in allowing students to work at their pace, said San Pasqual High School teacher Jennifer Medeiros. Its really created these opportunities for students to engage with the content in the way that works best for them.... Now that we have learned the tools that allow that to happen, theres no reason that cant happen in a classroom setting, or an online setting, or a blended learning setting.

Photography students at Carlsbad High documented their experience with social distancing, through a remote learning assignment that used the COVID-19 pandemic as a teachable moment.

(Daisy Liotine)

Recognizing that students might be suffering from cabin fever during the closures, Natalie Smith, a seventh-grade language arts teacher at Del Dios Academy in Escondido, got kids out of their houses, figuratively speaking.

I started doing field trip Friday, she said. Every Friday, I would have somewhere for them to go from their home. We were doing a unit on the ocean, and used webcams from an aquarium. They could choose Georgia Aquarium or the Monterey Bay Aquarium. We used it as a chance for them to work on descriptive writing skills.

Students were to employ vivid language, and use various senses to record their observations.

I was captivated how graceful the fishes were, fishes swam calmly, my hands softly touched the cold glass, mesmerized, one student wrote about those brief moments of escape from life in the time of coronavirus.

Calavera Hills Middle School in Carlsbad took students on a virtual voyage to Africa, working with researchers from the San Diego Zoo Wild Animal Park on a citizen science project. Students and teachers pored over images from camera traps at Kenyan game preserves to quantify animal behavior, human activity and vehicle traffic. Starting around Earth Day, the middle schoolers categorized about 20,000 images, helping scientists track conditions at the preserve, Principal Michael Ecker said.

Especially now, they need eyes on whats happening there, and help with the total count, he said.

At San Pasqual High School in Escondido, language arts teachers brought spoken word performance into students homes. Each year the school hosts a poetry workshop for sophomore students, featuring local artists. They didnt want this years class to miss out, so they held it digitally, inviting Southern California poets to share their work live, online.

We wanted to provide that opportunity for our students, and also support the local artists, who are also struggling right now, Medeiros said."So we worked with them to develop this online poetry slam workshop.

Artists including Gill Sotu, a San Diego musician, writer, and playwright for the Old Globe Theatre, and Kat Magill, a Los Angeles based poet and producer, spent 30 minutes sharing their poems with students. For the next hour, students split into Zoom breakout rooms with a teacher and poet to try writing their own verse, with feedback from the artists. Moving the event online had pros and cons, Medeiros said.

A lot of the spoken word poetry is the feeling in the room, she said. And the audience wasnt able to respond in that teleconferencing format. It was different, but there was the benefit of everyone having the poets right in front of them. Students were able to see their faces. They were able to be closer to them, and see all of the nuances that come with the performance of the poem.

The school held two sessions, and students were asked to participate in one, Medeiros said. Most came back a second time.

Students said they enjoyed it, and it was one of the best things weve done, since we started distance learning, she said.

McKinney said shes always brought an element of performance to her classes, although she teaches science, not language arts. Students look forward to their McKinney time, as they call her class lectures, so she transferred them online, using a social messaging app called Loom, which includes a virtual whiteboard.

Her homepage on the app, titled McKinney LABS, featured a head shot of her, and a portrait of astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson. In her intro, she scooted the photos closer together for a fangirl tribute: Hi Mr. Tyson, how you doing? Thank you for your wisdom. Describing the genetic phenomena of incomplete dominance in snapdragon flowers, she scribbled a rough sketch of a dragon on the screen.

She even met her quaranteens where theyre at, on the popular video app TikTok, challenging them to make TikToks on biology or chemistry topics. Students responded with short science videos inspired by movies, pop music and rap.

The COVID-19 pandemic was a surreal theme for her biology class, she said: first a topic of discussion, and then a life-changing event.

In January and February, we had been talking about this pandemic in my class, weekly, she said. I was showing them the sequences of the RNA virus. I was saying, look how this is mutating.

Other instructors have also used the pandemic as a teachable moment, aligning course assignments with the global outbreak.

Krista King, a photography at teacher Carlsbad High, saw a precedent for todays crisis in iconic Depression-era portraits by photographer Dorothea Lange. She asked students to study those images, and take photos depicting social distancing in their own lives. Students showed their families in masks, on porches and behind windows, capturing the stark, black-and-white reality of isolation.

Its good to compare that, King said. It feels like were going through something scary together.

On a lighter note, they had fun with images of the home-schooling experience, snapping photos of their pets - cats, dogs, lizards and a guinea pig - doing homework for them.

Photography students at Carlsbad High documented their experience with social distancing, through a remote learning assignment that used the COVID-19 pandemic as a teachable moment. On a lighter note, students shot images of their pets doing home-school work for them.

(Jordan Stevens)

Doug Green, the video broadcasting instructor at Carlsbad High and Valley Middle School is guiding students through weekly news segments, recorded remotely from home. Amid the closures, with campus studios empty, students have taught themselves cutting-edge broadcast techniques, including new green-screen systems, and magic camera technology that allows a reporter to swipe through images at a touch. The crisis, he said, has been a lesson in ingenuity and resourcefulness for his students.

Together, as this thing started, we were figuring out, how do you continue telling stories while youre social distancing, Green said. Where do you put the microphone? And how do you set up your home studio?

For educators, Doyle said, it has tested the ability to be nimble and flexible in the face of adversity.

Whenever youre hit with something unexpected, you can view that as a challenge or difficulty, or as an opportunity to move to the next level in a personalized learning environment, he said.

Still, there are aspects of education that teachers say they cant fully recreate online. Worse than any technical obstacle is the emotional challenge; at one of the toughest times in students young lives, teachers cant be there for them in person.

Teachers adore their students, McKinney said. Theyre our kids. So not being able to give them a hug because theyre sad, or make a silly joke to make them smile, that has been the hardest part.

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Teaching in the time of coronavirus: Finding creative ways to engage students - The San Diego Union-Tribune