For Such a Time as This? #MTBoSBlaugust

Two days, two blog posts. Wow!

Today I want to look back and reflect a bit on teaching during the quarantine.

When I first learned that we would be teaching remotely and virtually, I thought, "I've got this!" Having been a "flipped" teacher for many years, I was familiar with cranking out videos. My students were familiar with watching instructional videos (although not as many this past year, due to various circumstances).

THIS is the type of situation for which I'm prepared!

Umm...maybe not.

One place where flipped lessons shine is in face-to-face time with students in the classroom. They've watched the video in their personal space, so we do the work in our shared space. They explore. They collaborate. They practice. I circulate, assisting and encouraging and stretching where needed.

This all looked very different in the virtual space.

For one, I allowed my students to have their video off (I would do this differently, now). I was looking at a screen full of names. No facial expressions, no body language to let me know who was or wasn't understanding.

Not every student watched the videos ahead of time, so I had to use the first chunk of our Zoom time reteaching the lesson.

Ways for students to explore and practice material via Zoom were limited.

I felt like our time together (virtually) was a lot of me, me, me, something from which I had gotten away in my flipped classroom transformation.

There was little interaction and no back-and-forth. I missed it so much.

As we moved through the quarter, I got better with ways to make a virtual class more interactive, and that helped. But it still wasn't the same.

The move to virtual instruction in the spring was sudden with little preparation time.

It feels likely we'll have to do at least some of this coming year virtually.

I have a few ideas about how I'll do things differently next time. And I attended a couple of virtual PD sessions that modeled ways to make the most of remote instruction; I will definitely implement those if/when we have to teach from home.

But the learning curve was surprisingly steep for virtual teaching, and - to my dismay - I was not near as prepared as I thought I would have been.

Thankfully it's an opportunity for growth of which I can take advantage the next time around.