How I adapted my teaching and landed on my feet when COVID turned classrooms upside down
The pandemic did not destroy education. It just challenged us to succeed
This First Person article is the experience of Edmonton junior high educator Joseph Filiplic, as part of a special CBC initiative to find out how teachers are doing after two years of the pandemic.
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There are moments that stick out in an educator's career. The degree, the first interview, the first job and the first class. And, of course, the first time classes move to online learning because of a global pandemic.
In Alberta, that began on Sunday, March 15, 2020, when our Chief Medical Officer of Health, Dr. Deena Hinshaw, announced that all schools would pivot online for the foreseeable future.
That night, my phone was beeping nonstop. As a teacher and technology coach with the Edmonton Catholic School Division, I was getting questions from fellow teachers who wanted to know what we were going to do. Questions from students and families wondering what would happen to the rest of the school year. Questions from me wondering if I can do this.
It was an evening of fear, anxiety, desperation.
And, eventually, confidence.
Plan, adjust, adapt
I brainstormed ideas for new ways to reach our students: Twitter and Instagram posts, Google Classroom to post materials, Microsoft Teams meetings and up-to-date websites. The list grew larger as the night moved on.
The next day, my colleagues at J.J. Bowlen junior high met to begin discussions of how we wanted our online environment to look. We are a fortunate school, belonging to a technology-leading division focused on student advocacy and developing future leaders. We had the technology and curriculum tools, the leadership skills, and the inclusion opportunities to help our students succeed.
So we adapted and began moving toward a successful end to the 2019-20 school year.
But COVID was new. And nothing could have prepared us for how it would turn education upside down.
In a few months, it was August and I was trusted with teaching Grade 7 and Grade 8 sections of online social studies classes for the 2020-21 school year. Excited for this new opportunity, I got to work. How could I build on the successes of the initial move to online? What didn't work for me?
But it wasn't only education that had been turned upside down.
Flipping the script
Students were being pulled into new roles, like caregivers and cooks. Some viewed being online as a holiday. And many households had their own technical issues, with parents working from home and multiple siblings in each household all learning online. Many families did not have enough devices and even if they did, they did not have the bandwidth capacity to have multiple jobs and classrooms online at once.
Suddenly, turning things upside down seemed like a solution, not a problem.
I started flipping my lessons, so that students consumed the content for "homework" and we used class time to apply what's been learned. A flipped learning environment included recorded lessons housed on YouTube. It also meant finding time to record the lessons — late at night when my kids went to bed, Saturday afternoon in the car waiting for ski lessons to end, Sunday morning when the house was quiet.
And it worked.
I had a higher retention rate compared to just teaching in person. Students could review when they felt ready to learn, not when some school bell told them to. Students touched base with me at various hours of the day, and I replied to many messages in the evenings, on weekends and holidays. I even held some mini-lessons on Saturdays because that worked best for some students.
I was reaching students when they were ready to learn.
Then the emails began filling my inbox. The first were from families thanking me for my video lessons on Canadian history and these inspired me to keep plugging away at this flipped learning environment.
Next came emails from other educators requesting a file share or sending a note about my posts that they've come upon online. I was beginning to feel that first-year-teacher energy again. And it felt great.
Reinventing the classroom
These days, we're all back in the classroom but I haven't let go of all my technology tricks. I have continued to offer lessons through YouTube and I still use all those Microsoft tools that made for a successful online year. I have not slowed down.
Education has not slowed down.
I am sharing resources more than ever and working with educators around North America to help them with challenges. The constraints of a four-walled classroom have been broken down and the classroom is being reinvented.
COVID has not destroyed education, COVID has not destroyed student learning and COVID has not destroyed teachers.
What it has done is challenge teachers to do what they do best — respond, adapt, change and succeed in the current times. It's what we do.
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