Majo is a teacher working with primary school students. She relies on her observations in the classroom environment and the personal connections she had formed with her students in order to know and feel she is doing her job well. During the pandemic, her classes abruptly shifted online, and she was no longer able to see students face-to-face. Due to distractions in their home environments, and the reduced attention span of sitting in front of a screen, Majo and her colleagues found that their students were struggling to remain engaged in online learning. The teaching team debated how to handle their new reality with online teaching. Ultimately, they decided to lessen the number of hours that students were spending in online classes with teachers and to provide more suggestions for at-home activities. However, Majo wondered whether her students were being served well by such a decision, or if they might be losing out on learning and community connections that she had worked hard to achieve during the months before the pandemic began.
Majo is an educator who grew up, studied, and became a teacher in Ecuador. She began to engage with formal teaching during her first year as an undergraduate student. Majo first became interested in teaching when leading Sunday School at a church when she was 15 years old. From that experience, she knew she wanted to pursue a career as an educator and know more about how people learn. She pursued the study of education in university because she saw that teachers could help students thrive, not only by facilitating the transmission of knowledge but also by guiding students to grow and become better people.
One of Majo´s first experiences as a teacher was supporting a Pre-K classroom. She was eager to apply theories of knowing and learning that she had encountered in her degree program with her young students.
When Majo began working as a teaching assistant before the pandemic, instruction was based on play and social collaboration, as well as interaction within the environment through various tools. Majo´s role was to provide individual support to students who were struggling to engage, while the homeroom teacher directed the lessons. She was also in charge of creating new materials for the classroom. At Majo’s school, the learning units had different themes for students to explore. Majo and her homeroom teacher changed the theme of the classroom every other month accordingly, along with the associated activities, the classroom decorations, and even the songs they sang with students, in order to create a cohesive and interactive classroom space. The students were always invested and really curious to explore each new theme, which usually built on the previous one. These intentional design choices by Majo and her fellow teachers created a sense of community and belonging for students. The students knew what to expect each day, and every one of them felt that they had an important role in their classrooms and in the progression of their learning.
Then, the COVID pandemic began. Students had to be transitioned to fully online classes, delivered via Zoom. Right before the transition to online schooling, teachers had just prepared the classroom for the last unit of the year, which was focused on helping students discover the Amazon Rainforest. The students had only a week to explore this theme before they had to move completely online.
In the Zoom classes, it was evident that students had difficulty knowing how to behave and what to expect from the lessons that the teachers had planned for them. It was also hard to help students explore ideas related to the Amazon, since students were no longer at the classroom with materials and tools available to allow them to deeply explore the ideas, concepts, and content that teachers had wanted to cover. Furthermore, students’ home habits created a lot of chaos on calls. Students were often screaming, talking over the teacher, playing with their parents instead of following instructions, and many didn’t even connect to classes. Without the physical classroom, students changed the way they behaved, and it affected the learning climate. As much as the teachers tried to evoke routines that were once used in-person at the school, the students were not able to distinguish between these routines and the routines they had at home with their families.
The Pre-K teaching team had an urgent meeting a couple weeks into the COVID quarantine, and they agreed that it was likely that the school year was probably going to end online. They also recognized that they would have to make decisions about what to prioritize from the curriculum and how to engage students online. The teachers all shared the sentiment that students were having a hard time paying attention during Zoom classes, and some were not even connecting because at home they had other schedules and priorities. Overall, the educators were worried that students were going to fall behind with their reading and math skills and have too much exposure to technology and other distractions at home.
Therefore, the teaching team made a difficult decision: they chose to reduce the hours of direct instruction on Zoom and re-design these hours to allow students to practice doing other things at home, including physical activities and family engagement. Since Majo was no longer able to support students one-on-one because they were physically in different spaces, and Zoom classes were conducted by the homeroom teacher, she was put in charge of recording self-guided videos for students. The videos presented activities that students could complete at home at their own pace when not on Zoom, including exercises related to attentive listening, music, and play with family.
Majo reflected that, due to the new approach, she lost her connection with her students before the school year ended. She felt disconnected from her role as a teacher, having essentially no opportunities for direct interaction with students and no option to be in the same physical place like a classroom. She was used to being able to guide her students in their learning process and to actually see results, which was no longer the case. Majo was not able to see the progress, challenges, and accomplishments of students. Her instruction became a one-way delivery, isolating her from the learning process. Sometimes, Majo even felt that, no matter how hard she tried to record instructional videos with fun and easy activities, it wouldn’t make a difference because she wasn´t sure if the students were actually completing them.
At the end of the year, Majo was left feeling that the realities of teaching during the pandemic no longer matched the reasons why she had enjoyed being an educator. She wondered if reducing online instructional hours for the students had been the right choice for her pre-K teaching team. She also continued to think about ways that she could better engage with students in the coming academic year, as the pandemic continued.
Majo struggled with re-exploring what it meant to embody excellence as a teacher while losing her connection to students in virtual learning. How might Majo reconnect with her sense of doing “good work” (excellent, ethical, and engaging) as a teacher during the pandemic?
In what ways did Majo´s responsibilities and perspectives on good work change or not, when her “workplace” was no longer in-person?
Teachers were challenged to balance student engagement between Zoom classes and asynchronous activities, to avoid burning themselves out and to not ask too much of students and their parents. How do you handle tradeoffs in responsibilities to the people you work with? How might you handle a similar situation, and why?