Teaching During the Pandemic: Provide Choices and Options

It’s time to get ready for going back to school. With the pandemic, no teacher or district is certain how the school year will play out. Some will start with a physical presence and may later move to online learning. Some will start online and may later move back into school buildings. Another possibility is hybrid learning with students physically in school two days a week and learning at home the other days. It is likely than any plans may switch with little notice.

What’s a teacher to do?

While no one has the answer to how this all works and what is most effective, one thing is for certain. Teaching is going to look different than it ever has.

We are going to need to be flexible.

None of the proposed plans teachers and districts have come up with is perfect. None of them will make all parents, all teachers and all students happy. It is a challenge like none we have ever seen before. We know there are no easy solutions.

And yet, at our most optimistic, we see arising from this time and place an opportunity to improve some forms of learning. One of our mentors always asks of challenges, “What does this make possible?”

What does the pandemic make possible for education that could not or did not happen before?

We have always been somewhat frustrated by whole group, lockstep education. We understand that students have different needs and work at different levels and learn in different time frames. This will be true now more than ever. Yet much of education has been offered in a large group, walking through the same basic curriculum at roughly the same time. This is the way the school system in the United States was conceived and created: mass education for all.

It the next months or even years, it is going to be very difficult to give all students the same exact things at the same time. We know that equity issues will deny some students what other students enjoy in terms of support and resources. Parents have different comfort levels in teaching their children. Teachers will work hard to adapt and help all students, but they will have less time with each student. Whole group time, if it even exists, will be at a premium. Synchronous time will also be difficult to come by.

We are going to need to do more differentiating.

Educators have always understood the need for differentiating. Our education system has not made differentiating easy. State standards dictate what is taught in each grade level. Strict time schedules for each class often force us to use time for whole class instruction at the expense of more individualized options. Some districts even require curriculum pacing. These structures are going to be even more difficult or impossible under pandemic circumstances.

Under normal classroom circumstances differentiating is time consuming. Now we need a different way of thinking about whole class instruction. If ever there was a time for differentiating, this is it.

Over the next months, we will be sharing our ideas for teaching in this new arena. Like everyone else, we are not experienced in teaching during this pandemic, but we have bought taught both in person and online for many years. We will offer our suggestions on what we think are possibilities for new ways of teaching and learning.

Today we are focusing on differentiating.

We think giving students choices offers potential for enhanced learning, especially now. Here are some of the benefits of giving students choice:

individualized instruction for students working at varied levels
increased student motivation
decreased emphasis on everyone doing the same exact thing at the same time
increased opportunities for students and parents to choose things that are workable in their lives and with their family schedules
increased ability to share resources since everyone does not need the same resources at the same time

Here are 3 ways to give students more choice:

Encourage free choice reading.

The more students read, the better they read. Assign free choice reading. Consider it reading skill practice. Help students to identify the types of books they might like to read. Give your best suggestions and use the expertise of librarians. Send LOTS of books home with students or arrange for them to pick them up. Those books are not doing anyone any good sitting on the library shelves unused.

If students are learning from home, help parents see the value of time spent reading. Encourage reading without the follow up of lots of worksheets. Use precious teaching time to have conversations with students, assess comprehension or other skills, and teach needed skills. Students can also work in groups, either online or at a distance, to discuss their books with each other. You can model this process with the whole class.

We are not big fans of book reports, but if you want some creative ways students can share their learning from books check out some ideas here and here.

This might be a great time to implement reading and writing workshops, a method that focuses on individualized reading. For more information about how to implement a workshop, look for works by authors Debbie Diller, Debbie Miller, Gail Boushey and Joan Moser, Nancie Atwell, Donalyn Miller, and Lucy Calkins, all of whom describe in detail how to use workshop methods.

Many teachers have always wished students had more time for reading. Now is the time.

Design projects that students can work on independently at home.

Design projects that give students choices in the topic (perhaps from a list of curriculum content topics), how they learn information (books, web sites, videos etc.) and the types of product they prepare. Here is a simple outline:

Choose one of the following topics that interests you:

List topics related to your curriculum

Learn about your topic. Here are some resources:

Link to appropriate websites, organizations, etc. and offer suggestions of book titles or authors or topics that students could access using school or public libraries.

Chose one of the following ways to demonstrate your learning:

Give students varied fun and age appropriate ways to demonstrate their learning.

Examples:

Create an ABC book of information about your topic.

Create a web slide show to demonstrate what you have learned.

Write a script and make a movie about your topic.

Here is a link to more ideas for ways students can demonstrate learning.

You probably already have projects students do in your physical classroom. Think of ways to adapt these for students learning at home. Send guidelines home for parents. They can supervise or assist students, but aren’t expected to do all of the instructing.

Give students choice boards.

We recently ran across the idea of choice boards on ABC’s Good Morning America. Choice boards offer lots of potential for students and could be set up in many different ways. Teachers could set up a choice board with different activities that students could do, all tied to the curriculum. Students and parents can choose from a menu of activities that are asynchronous and that cover necessary skills. Set up a list of expectations and a timeline so students and parents know the expectations. For example the choice board may be good for two weeks and they must choose ten things to do.

See photos of choice boards and learn more about choice boards here.

We hope these ideas spark some options for your classroom. We would also love to hear your ideas! If you are not already a member, please come and join us on Facebook in our Teacher Warriors group.

Our best,