School has been out for a little over a week now in Northwest Arkansas -- and what a strange end to the school year it was. When Gov. Asa Hutchinson announced plans on March 16 to close Arkansas public schools as a result of the continuing spread of covid-19, it was an announcement that seemed both inevitable and startling: National sports organizations and business conferences had started systematically canceling or postponing events the week before; however, say four area teachers we talked with, the finality of the decision still came as a shock. Closing school buildings did not mean an end to the school year, and school districts around the state scrambled on Thursday and Friday of the week before to assemble Alternate Methods of Instruction (AMI) packets to be sent home with students in the event of a shutdown.
"It was a rush on Friday, getting everything together and sent home, but we were thinking we would still be in school on Monday -- this was 'just in case,'" says Springdale elementary teacher Emma Clay. "Then Monday came, and we didn't come back."
By April 6, Gov. Hutchinson had announced that school buildings would be closed for the remainder of the year. At that point, teachers had pivoted to online teaching -- a transition that required them to upend their regular curriculum, master new technology and find ways to keep socially distant students engaged. The four teachers with whom we spoke discussed their efforts to provide their students with a quality education online and the challenges that accompanied those efforts.
"Our administration took the position early on that this would require a lot of improvisation and problem solving and grace, and that we should all be ready to do the best we can," says Kyle Smith, a Springdale high school math teacher. "And we should share that expectation with our kids. It's a different adjustment for every one. There has been a lot of forgiveness, a triage mentality that we should deal with the things that matter first. Our administration has been very good about understanding and communicating change as it happens."
Greg White
"People are like, 'I don't know what to do!'" says Greg White, a physical education teacher and basketball coach at a Bentonville High School. "Well, no one does. We've never prepared for a global pandemic in education."
For White, whose professional and personal worlds revolve largely around sports, the cancellations on a national scale were a bellwether of things to come.
"For us in athletics, there was no finality this year," he says. "We were in the basketball finals when the word broke that the NBA had canceled. Once that broke on the professional level, it trickled down to collegiate. When they started canceling games, we were shocked, but we thought, 'We'll make it through spring break and come back,' and then that got pushed back. You start thinking about all of the sports that didn't finish, like basketball, and all the sports that didn't get to start. That was the part that was surreal. You start thinking about the senior baseball, softball, track athletes that didn't get their senior year. That was the first time I really felt like something was wrong. I was in a group saying, 'We're overreacting, we'll be back at school in a week,' and then I got to the point of, 'Wait a second, this is real. We've just canceled athletics.' This is the first time any of us have grown up in a life without athletics -- nothing on television, nothing to take part in. It was eye-opening."
White has a college-aged son who returned home to finish his semester online, as well as a high school junior in the Bentonville school system. Watching the latter as he worked through his classwork gave White a unique chance to see how other teachers were reaching their students online.
"I've got a son that's a junior, and he's saying, 'I can't wait to go back to school,'" says White. "And when I was talking to my students online, it became more about relationship and caring than the rigor of the curriculum. I think that's a big thing, that kids are realizing it is more about caring for the individual than about the curriculum right now. All of the teachers are doing a great job of sending work home. You find out how much teachers really care about their students by seeing the work they're putting into this. Some of the videos I've seen are extravagant. Teachers are working more at home than they were [in their classrooms.] It's eye opening for parents about the jobs that teachers do but also for teachers about what we can do better, how we can communicate better. I think there will be a lot of great things to come from education with this."
As a P.E. teacher, White says his first concern was keeping his students active while they were studying from home.
"With P.E., it's hard to monitor it without actually watching them physically do it, but I've shared a lot of resources on things they can do at home," he says. "My concern was that you have to be active -- and not only for their physical needs. They're not even walking to class any more. They can roll over and open their laptop and be in their classroom. I was more concerned with them using exercise as a stress release."
And stress, he acknowledges, was something to which teachers and administration needed to stay attuned. White says that Bentonville schools took special consideration for students who might not have access to the tools they needed to finish their online assignments.
"[Superintendent Dr. Debbie Jones] is one of the ones that really pushed for that, to make sure we had every avenue covered for our students," he notes. "She's really in tune with what's going on in the world. Some of our administrators were doing wellness checks -- if a kid didn't check in for two or three days, we had deans going by their houses. Not to scold them, just to check on them."
White, too, has made sure to check in with his students emotional needs daily.
"I always tag on [to my assignments], 'Hey, tell me how you're feeling, tell me what you're going to tell your kids about covid-19,'" he says. "I had a student respond back that he was worrying about his family, and I was able to pass that on to our school counselors. They did a great job of checking in with the family, and they were in a stressful time. It was eye opening that a young man would have the courage to say, 'I need some help with my family.'"
White says he thinks there have been some good things to come out of the school shutdown: an increase in communication between student and teacher, and, with all activities and sports canceled, a general slowing down of life's normally hectic schedule, allowing for more family time for many of his students and families. Moving forward, he sounds cautiously optimistic.
"I think this is going to be a reset and an awakening and, hopefully, a decluttering of things we do. Our landscape has changed. I don't know what the new normal is. We just got guidance today that we'll be able to start returning to activity June 1. There's excitement but also nervousness. I would say it's a positive nervousness, where you're excited, that butterfly feeling of excitement, but there are still a lot of unanswered questions. I think we're in a place -- not only in the state, but also in the district -- where we feel like we've done our part, and we're getting there. Not that we're trying to rush back, but we've got to get some normalcy back."
Kyle Smith
Kyle Smith's answer to "Is it difficult to teach math online?" is a qualified, "Well yes -- and no."
"I think it depends on your philosophy," says Smith, who teaches geometry in a Springdale high school. He's also a Fayetteville city council member. "There are lots of online math programs, for better or worse, and I've been pretty critical of that. Universities have been systematically moving toward computer-based and online math classes, especially remedial, and those are the kids that need an online version the least. If your goal is to explain a math principle, memorize, it, practice it and then be able to repeat it like a machine, then there's plenty of infrastructure for math instruction on this medium.
"If your goal is mathematical problem-solving where you present novel math problems and expect people to experiment, discuss and learn from each other and build on each others' ideas, that is more difficult to do in an asynchronous environment. Or any environment where you can't talk in small groups and check back in with the big group and share your ideas with each other."
Part of the challenge of Smith's job this semester has been reaching a majority of his students, despite the fact that his school was proactive in making sure their one-to-one ratio of Chromebooks to students meant every student had access to a device. When the possibility of a school shut-down started to circulate around March 11 and 12, his administration started investigating how many of their students were without Wi-Fi connections at home.
"Our school put together a survey of who has internet access and who doesn't, and we had all of the kids take the survey on their Chromebook," says Smith. "So at least then we had a list, and [the school] did some calling and tracked down the ones we didn't hear from. We were able to get some [students] hooked up to internet access through some of the low-income options. And it took a couple of weeks, but they finally got USB drives loaded with work for any kids without access. It was a process of continual modification and improvement on that subject."
Still, despite the best efforts of his school, Smith says he saw maybe 10 of his students sporadically in his Zoom meetings and only two on a regular basis.
"Online learning can be very isolating," Smith notes. "I think that's one of its biggest challenges that can be overcome, but if this is going to persist, teachers have to figure out some best practices. Those two kids that showed up regularly -- one of them had been home schooled previously, and the other one is an only child who was bored out of her mind. Neither have ever had a math question for me, but they show up because they want someone to talk to. I think that's another aspect to this whole thing -- we get wrapped up in the effectiveness of teaching, but there's a social development aspect, as well. I have 15- [and] 16-year-olds who are capable of realizing they can go and talk to their teachers on the computer. If you have kids who are not capable of understanding that, I can't imagine how isolating that would be. If kids are stewing in loneliness, I hope we're prepared to deal with the mental health fallout from this."
Prior to this semester's changes, Smith says he considered himself "pro-classroom" teaching while acknowledging that different methods may work for different students.
"Where I was skeptical before, I know there are tools that exist that can make it happen -- but I'm not equipped to operate efficiently with them," he says. "If this is going to be an ongoing method of education that becomes widely acceptable, there needs to be a sincere retraining effort for teachers. Teachers need to be willing to adapt to it, and we need some of our education academics to dig in and help assess what works and how to work it efficiently so that we're not just throwing things out there that aren't having a positive impact on academic outcomes."
Emma Clay
For Emma Clay, who teaches fifth grade at a Springdale elementary school, those last few days before the notification that her school district would close were full of "just in case" staff meetings intended to prepare the faculty as thoroughly as possible for virtual teaching.
"It was changing so quickly at the district level," she remembers. Over the weekend, she found out she wouldn't be reporting to her job at the school building but instead, teaching from home.
As a relatively new teacher -- Clay has been teaching for four years -- she says she spent the first couple of days figuring out how to make virtual teaching as effective as possible.
"Really, I was just thinking, 'How is this going to look?'" she remembers. "'What are our responsibilities as teachers right now and will we be able to get a hold of everybody? Will we be able to continue to teach the things that we have already started with them?' It was just this unknown, and [there was] a little bit of anxiety at first."
Where Clay teaches, approximately 54 percent of the students live at or below the federal poverty level -- making Clay's concern of whether she would be able to reach her students a very real one. She says her administration set up an expectation that teachers would make contact with all of their students at least once a week, and the school helped some families get connected to services that offered free internet so they could communicate with the teachers. Maintaining some kind of contact with her students was important to both teacher and child, she says.
"I've had a few students who were sending me emails, saying, 'Are we going to come back? Someone told me we wouldn't finish school, ever again,' and 'Am I ever going to see you again?' I could feel the anxiety from those messages. Even up to yesterday, when my co-worker and I delivered celebration packets to those not able to come on Tuesday: We went to a student's apartment, and he's been at home with his little sister, and he was so relieved to see us and upset he hasn't been able to see us and work with us, he just about cried when he saw us. It's hard to talk about it, it makes me so sad for our students. Even students that didn't always express that they liked going to school, those are the ones saying, 'I can't wait to get back; I'm so glad to see you.' To me, that speaks to how important school is for them. Being around us and their relationships with their teachers mean a lot more than you might think at first."
To up the emotional ante even more, as a fifth grade teacher, Clay's students will be moving on to a new school next year, and, she says, watching her students deal with the realization that their fifth grade year would end without the pomp and circumstance they had been expecting was emotionally difficult.
"Most of the kids had been there since kindergarten together," she says. "They're the seniors of the school at that point. When we found out we weren't coming back to school, we had gotten the instruction part and our roles of teachers under control, but this whole thought of, 'How are we going to celebrate these kids and send them off to middle school without seeing them again?' -- that was our biggest question mark. The district came up with a date for us to have an end of the year celebration at the same time as the kindergartners and high school seniors coming back. We had a drive-through celebration from 1 to 3 p.m. I had all but four of my kids show up. The first one that drove through I thought, 'Is this real? Is this how we're really going to send them off?' We would cry, the kids would cry, the parents driving the car would get emotional. I said to the principal that even though it's not the celebration we wanted to give them, it was still really special, because we got to talk to them one-on-one and give them encouragement. It was a pretty special time to get to be able to see them again and wish them well and send them off to the summer before middle school."
Jodie DeRose
As a library media specialist at a Springdale elementary school, Jodie DeRose's first thought when she learned her district would be moving to online learning in March was whether her kids would have access to reading materials.
"The Friday before school shut down, we had a gut feeling that it was coming, so we checked out four library books to every kid on our campus," she says. "I didn't sit down that day; it was crazy. But we got it done, and I'm so glad we did. I also created a video tutorial on how to get books online through our public library. A lot of our kids are lower income, and access to books is hard for them -- they depend so much on the school library for that."
DeRose says she scouted the internet for resources to recommend to teachers and students and helped post the AMI packets to the school website, along with other projects she put together to try and keep the students engaged in this new, virtual world.
"I created an online scavenger hunt," she explains. "I posted a clue every day, and kids would use the World Book Online to figure out where in the world our school mascot was to keep them encouraged to learn about the world while stuck at home. Whoever emailed me with the correct response got a coupon for free items that Sonic donated, and I would send those out in the mail."
DeRose maintained her own job while making sure that her two children -- a 9-year-old and a 5-year-old -- completed their own online school work.
"The first three weeks were really difficult," she says. "My daughter goes to a charter school that's a classical model, so the first two weeks we had paper AMI packets, and we didn't love that. They switched to Google Classroom after two weeks, and after about a week of that, she got to where she could flow through that on her own. With my Pre-K student, he will do well with his teachers at school, but at home, it's not as easy. It was more challenging for him to adjust to not being at school in his normal environment."
DeRose says that her school's teachers worked hard to make sure contact was made with all students during the semester.
"I know there were so many who weren't going to have the resources at home to continue learning at the level they had been at school," she says. "A lot of our teachers took time to make home checks on students if they weren't showing up in Zoom classes. A few teachers were having Zoom sessions after 6 p.m. for kids who couldn't access the internet during the day, because their parents were essential workers or had to use their devices during the day for work."