It was during spring break when Laura Claybrook knew she was going to have to get creative.
The Vanston Middle School teacher learned she wouldn’t go back to teaching in person the next week as planned. With the coronavirus spreading, Mesquite ISD extended its spring break to include March 16-20 and said distance learning would be required when school was back in session March 23.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott announced this week that schools statewide will be closed for in-person learning through May 4.
That means teachers have needed to get creative, drawing up lesson plans that not only will be educational for students but also can keep them engaged outside the traditional classroom environment.
“That looks different for every teacher,” Claybrook said. “Some teachers did slides the kids can guide themselves through, some teachers did videos of themselves teaching, and what I decided to do was create realistic websites for the students."
The English and Language Arts teacher said the idea for “web quests” came to her while doing work for her master’s degree program.
The first one, an exploration of a graphic novel about Lewis and Clark, went live the first week of distance learning, and a Cinderella-esque story called “The Anklet” and an excerpt from a mythology-inspired text followed.
Claybrook said she sought to make the sites immersive, rather than having them feel simply like worksheets converted to a digital format.
Her sixth-graders are more tech-savvy than younger students, so other educators face different challenges. Terry Godwin, a first-grade teacher at Shaw Elementary School, also went straight to work when it was apparent students wouldn’t be in classrooms.
She sent a survey to parents in her class asking if they’d rather their child receive assignments via an online tool or printouts. There was a mix of responses, so Godwin started with both.
“Sometimes people think because they have internet or a computer in the home that every home has that, when indeed many of the students don’t,” she said. “They use computers on campus, but when they go home they don’t have that. If the only thing we had was Google Classroom, we would knock out 10 to 12 students because they don’t have access to computers. The survey was important so we could allow them continue learning with the paper packets.”
Mesquite ISD now has distributed Chromebook computers and internet hot spots to students who need them, but initially Godwin was careful to keep online work and the paper worksheets identical.
She’s also been teaching parents how to use the online systems. She said many parents are better understanding the role of teachers and appreciating the learning process.
“The feedback has been very positive. A lot of them did not realize what all teachers actually did in a day,” she said. “They know they drop their kids off at school, we teach, and they come home, but they weren’t aware of what actually goes into a day of learning, when they’re switching from math, to reading, to science, to social studies, to language.”
Although teachers say they have adapted as well as possible, they’re eager for their jobs to return to something resembling normal.
“It’s exciting for me because it’s a new form of education, but the main thing is that we as educators would really, really prefer to be back in the classroom,” Claybrook said. “It happens to be a smoother transition for me because I do technology a lot, but I would rather be with my kids. We miss them.”
