How to Teach In-Person This Fall
I wasn’t prepared for how frightened my students looked.
While teaching in-person during the past month, I feel like a “first-year” teacher again. Despite a career in classrooms with a variety of students ranging from 2–80 years old, the Covid-era has changed in-person instruction in ways that teachers, parents, and students might not recognize.
The university went dark for in-person classes in mid-March, and the current cohort is the first in-person course back on campus. Each day, I walk into my classroom carrying a plastic tub bursting with hand sanitizer, gloves, masks, disinfectant wipes, and more. My students are incoming college freshmen, all 17- and 18-years old, learning university-level success-habits as a precursor for their fall semester.
After weeks of scrolling through statistics of increasing Covid-19 transmission among people under 25, I was anxious for my first day. My glasses fogged above my cloth mask as the students filed silently into the room, scattering themselves in the 12 chairs strategically placed 6-feet apart at isolated desks.
No one could see my smile, although I attempted to smile reassuringly. They looked at me over their masks. I saw one student tear up as she pulled out her notebook. My students were as scared as I was.
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A teacher’s usual bag of tricks is useless this year. Teaching and instructing through layers of fabric and across social-distance has taught this old dog a thing (or ten) about what in-person challenges and opportunities await students, parents, and teachers this fall:
1.) It’s hard. I’m not going to sugarcoat this. It’s really, really hard. It’s hard to connect with students through masks, it’s hard to hear during muffled discussions, it’s hard to collect quizzes while treating each paper like bio-hazard. It’s personally hard to be the most at-risk individual in our class, and know my students are statistically lower risk. That age-based fact alone will keep thousands of educators out of the classrooms this year. For teachers returning to the in-person classroom this year, it is going to be one of the most challenging years of their careers.
2.) The Students are Different. Perhaps, I expected students to be feral after months of remote teaching and unstructured time at home. Surprisingly, at the mid-term, my students have an unprecedented 100% attendance and not a single missed assignment. My students have been kind, mask-wearing, thoughtful individuals who genuinely want to learn. An overwhelming number of students specifically thank me at the end of each class. In their written reflections on learning, my students have overwhelmingly expressed gratitude on being able to engage in an academic environment to discuss their place in this new world. It’s refreshing to not have to spend nearly as much time on classroom discipline and devote more time teaching content to engaged learners.
3.) Creativity and Innovation are your Friends. Listen to the crazy ideas. Entertain the outrageous ways to break the model. Mentor-ship and leadership this year are going to come from all different angles because teachers aren’t going to be able to teach using the same methods. There are no experts anymore. When the students in my class sat outside in a socially-distanced circle on the lawn for a discussion — the circle was the size of a backyard swimming pool. Across the distance, the challenge to create dialogue between soft-spoken students muffled through layers of fabric was unworkable. This is where creativity comes in. Instead of one large beehive, we’ve divided into small-group components. I’ve been using messaging apps to pose questions during the class. The students are resilient, and quickly learning how to simultaneously stay six-feet apart and engage with each other. We ask each other what is working and what’s not. We’ve become a real-time community of experts.
4.) Teachers are now Lead Consultants. The work around student-centered learning is real, and this year, teachers won’t be able to lecture topics in the same way. Now, I don a plastic face shield for lectures because it allows my voice to carry and for students to see my facial expressions. The downside is that it echoes, I run out of breath, and I have a fishbowl on my head. I switch to a mask for moving around the class and facilitating conversation between small student groups. Both the mask and the face shield leave me gasping for air after any monologue longer than two minutes. The teaching strategy for the fall is going to replace long speeches with mini-lectures that are short, succinct, and student-centered.
5.) The Year of the Wallflower. This year is about learning new things and developing new skills. My teaching style is extremely extroverted. I love icebreakers and team-building, and often foster learning environments through active sharing. This hands-on strategy does not work in a hands-off environment. Moving into fall, the methodology is going to be weighted towards growth mindset and becoming more positive. It has to be. Students cannot work together in the ways they have in the past. The classroom has constraints like never before.
6.) Quality versus quantity. While students will still meet academic standards, we need to re-frame the big goals. This is the year to really saturate each topic slowly, rather than march through a myriad of topics. Depending on the climate, we all need to be prepared for in-person, hybrid and/or remote learning. Instead of doing three-days of icebreakers and team-building this year, I’ve been doing a daily icebreaker for three weeks. It’s going to take a little more time to do each topic well — and doing it well should be the ultimate goal.
7.) It Takes a Village. Educators I respect and trust have become my teachers. How? We ask each other through the Zoom tunnel. How can we do this? How can we do this well? An informal group of colleagues helped me re-frame my traditional in-person class discussions. Historically, I often use a Socratic seminar-style, allowing students to popcorn ideas while I further their inquiry with additional questions. However, with masks, students are unsure who is speaking next. The visual cues of facial expressions are mute, and the class is alarmingly quiet. Each night, I revamp activities for discussion for the following day, trying to creatively understand which strategies work and which strategies fail. We are all learning this together for the first time.
8.) There’s Never been a Better Time to be a Student. My current students didn’t finish high school in the usual fashion. They transitioned to university without the same rites of passage as any previous generation. Society is restructuring itself and the critical-thinking they are learning is going to apply in a world unlike any that previously existed. Unlike other times when people argued about the value of education, there aren’t as many opportunities in the “real world” right now (which is tough for me to acknowledge, because my Master’s thesis was on “Real World Education”). My students are authentically absorbed in academic learning, and know they are fortunate to be in the classroom right now.
9.) Go Outside. Embrace teaching outdoors. It is a joy to have students pull tufts of grass when thinking about a complex idea, and have the sound of wind in the leaves as a backdrop for discussion. Data shows that being outside is safer, and so we’ve been in the sunshine this summer. It means leaving behind PowerPoints and whiteboards, and restructuring discussions in student-directed techniques. At the end of all of this, I hope we keep bringing students outside and to the center. It just makes sense.
10.) Don’t Hate the Players, Hate the Game. Should we be returning to in-person teaching? I don’t honestly know. I’m not a scientist. My expertise is in teaching how to write an argumentative essay, and teaching about the Bill of Rights, and leading a discussion on exercising the right to vote. No teacher enjoys putting on a Star Wars shield and viewing each student as a potential vector for exposure. I support every single educator in making their own decision about whether to return to an in-person environment, and understand the challenge of consensus between the number of people and opinions involved. In-person learning combines a massive economic burden on teachers, students and families; and the interconnected nature of these problems is vast. Let’s hope for a timely and creative solution.
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When things return to “normal,” let’s hope our entire educational system is restructured for the better. It’s really, really hard for a seasoned teacher to become a “first-year” teacher again, but there are some real opportunities in re-learning and re-teaching. We are all learning new ways of teaching and doing backflips to understand how we can support students through this complex time.
Right now, this upcoming generation of students has the expertise. They are experts on remote and online learning. They know more about learning in a pandemic than anyone else in history. If the end result of this is to help us succeed in a brand-new world, it just might be that I learn more from my students than they ever will from me.
Note: Credit to Shannon Jakes for allowing me to reference her groundbreaking work in rethinking “project management” and cultivating an individual’s sense of self within groups/organizations.
This article was originally published to Medium by Gennifre Hartman.
Gennifre Hartman is a Montana-based educator and adventurer, and is currently working on a novel about dating as a single mom called, “Man-tana: Where the Odds are Good, but the Goods are Odd.” You can find her at www.gennifre.com. If you see the Scamp camper on the river this summer, please join her clan around the campfire for a s’more.