The BC government suspended all in-class instruction for K-12 on Tuesday, March 17. This was the second day of spring break for my school and only four days after we held a special staff pro-d. The pro-d was focussed around the COVID-19 pandemic and how it might impact our school, community and families. It was an emotionally charged day where professional and personal interests collided.
Professionally, I focussed my energy on preparing teachers for the three scenarios that could happen. There was a lot of unpredictability at that time with schools in Washington state, Ontario and many other jurisdictions already closed. We were preparing ourselves for BC to follow suit for probably three weeks leading up to March 17. This uncertainty greatly contributed to a dispersion of training and attention to a wider spectrum than I would have preferred.
The first scenario involved no suspension of instruction and schools remaining open. Note that our current suspension only involves in-class instruction and schools are still technically open. This Level 1 scenario could look like:
- School is open, no restrictions on physical gathering or interaction
- Few students or teachers away for prolonged absences due to self-isolation, quarantine, sickness, etc.
- Somewhat predictable dates of returns and departures
This scenario could lead to either greater suspension orders or relaxation. I suggested that if Level 1 were to come into effect that we should treat it as a precautionary exercise in training and practice since the global effect of COVID-19 was increasingly negative. So the educational priority would be:
With unpredictable absences how do teachers keep on top of tracking and monitoring, and avoiding repeating missed instruction, and support returning students?
To address this, we would focus on increasing our digital presence on our learning management systems, specifically Seesaw and Google Classroom. We use Blackbaud K-12 as our SIS and while it does have LMS features, the Junior School sees much more viability out of Seesaw and GClassroom due our constituent's ages.
The Level 2 scenario was the one I did not want to see happen because it would involve a trickier uptake period:
- School is open, some restrictions on physical gathering or interaction
- Increased absences
- Many students or teachers away for prolonged absences due to self-isolation, quarantine, sickness, etc.
- Unpredictable or variable returns and departures
Keep in mind that these scenarios would have bearing on teachers as well as our student families. So teachers that see perhaps half of their class staying at home due to sickness or purposeful distancing would probably be experiencing that in their personal life as well. This would make training and consistency very difficult for myself and administration. The educational priority would look like:
Ensuring continuity of learning with larger numbers of active, but physically away, students
Continuity would come from a consistent distribution of learning materials. The simplest solution would be to record in-class instruction and provide it online for at-home students. This could be a camera recording the entirety of the lesson, or a screen recording of instructional slides and audio, or posting of learning materials. In any of these processes teachers would need to feel comfortable recording their teaching in some format. They would be creating mixed-learning environments where virtual and physical students are together simultaneously.
Level 3 was the most severe closure scenario and the one that we find ourselves in now:
- School is closed, restrictions on physical gathering or interaction (ie no off-site campus alternative)
- No physical attendance
- 100% distance learning
For my role, the educational priority was to support teachers in a transition to a fully virtual environment and establish processes to maintain community well-being. It's this last portion that proved to be the trickiest since we would have to remain flexible in the first few days to make adjustments. All stakeholders would be understandably stressed and anxious and we didn't want to make drastic changes in response to knee-jerk reactions. Communication was the key and making as many decisions as transparent as possible.
The education technology side remained steadily consistent. We focussed on delivering fully digital lessons using technology tools that were already in use or extremely simple for our community to use. I created a minisite that listed all the technology tools along with a length embedded GDoc of step-by-step tutorials. This minisite was key since it was our main point of information and made our tools and strategy clear for any teachers to see.
For online meetings I made all teachers use Google Meet for their first student contacts. The reasoning was two-fold: GSuite was embedded in our environment and would be instantly familiar, and our alternative of Zoom was facing severe privacy and security concerns. I did not want to address Zoom issues this early in our transition except to say that Zoom "satisfied our school's and the BC Ministry of Education's data privacy and security policies." The Ministry vetting came via Minister Fleming where he announced licenses had been acquired for all public and independent schools in BC, a shocking proclamation so early in the closures.
Our LMS use was dependent on age: Junior Kindergarten to Grade 4 would use Seesaw and Grades 5-7 would use Google Classroom. This was consistent with the rest of the school year but further illustrated the divide in adoption for Seesaw. This year was supposed to be the first year of mandatory use of Seesaw in Grades 5-7, however to accomplish that with the transition to distance learning would not work. It would simply be too much for teachers and families to pivot to something they hardly used. GClassroom also provided the necessary GSuite integration and communication tools we needed for intermediate grades.
I also knew that teachers would rely heavily on video instruction. It would be too difficult and time-consuming to create PDFs or GSlides for everything. In addition, pastoral care would be critical since students would want to see their teacher. To serve this I emphasized selfie videos and screen recording. More recently, we added interactive whiteboard and document camera recordings. I greatly enjoy Loom but Screencastify has also been offered as an alternative.
The Week 3 period was suggested by schools in Asia that had been closed for many more weeks as a reflection period. By this point, we would have worked out most issues and our community would have settled into a predictably pattern. So far that remains true but with (likely) many more weeks to go I am hoping we are able to hold the front, both physically and mentally.
