Dear McCall Parents and Guardians,
Despite all the COVID craziness that comes with being a "COVID Principal", I had a really good week. I saw a lot of cool things that happened in both the in-person and remote classes, and one of the highlights was observing a virtual music class. The class started with the teacher asking students to type into Chat their responses to the question, “What songs gets you through days that feel like a ‘sideways thumb’?” The students came up with ideas such as “Twist and Shout” by the Beatles and “In Summer” from the movie Frozen.
After engaging in short conversations with the students about why they selected those songs, the teacher proceeded to have the students take part in some warm-up exercises. During the first exercise, she presented statements such as “I like to sleep” and “I am left-handed”. Instead of using words to respond to each statement, students were asked to demonstrate different singing postures to show their agreement or disagreement. The next warm-up activity involved the teacher showing the students a lip moving exercise which she described as “like playing a slide whistle". After performing the exercise with her, a student commented, “I learn about slide whistles from watching Spongebob.”
The most creative part of the lesson involved the students practicing singing a round. The teacher presented a slide that included a video of her singing one part of the a round played at the same time as another video of her signing the second part of the round. She used the video to have the students practice singing both parts of the song.
Education is ultimately an endeavor grounded in relationships, because students learn best when they have a positive, trusting relationship with their teachers. Virtual teaching takes a lot of those relationship building strategies teachers have in their toolboxes away. For example, teachers frequently rely on reading the body language of the students as well as many other non-verbal cues expressed by them when assessing their engagement in their lessons. Those tools are gone when students decline to turn on their cameras or are severely limited due to what you can see even when students turn on their cameras.
Throughout this school year, I have seen many teachers engage in outside-of-the-box thinking to compensate for the tried-and-true strategies that are no longer available for them to use. Creative teachers are taking approaches like implementing warm up activities to “prime the pump” and get students to engage in discussions on Zoom because even the most talkative students are often reluctant to speak on Zoom. On the surface those efforts may seem like teachers are wasting valuable instructional time engaging students in pointless chit chat. However, they go a long way in establishing relationships between teachers and students as well as students with other students.
Another approach I see many teachers take to engage students in their lessons is to break up the lesson into different activities. Teachers may begin the lesson by delivering direct instruction with teacher talk, then shifting to small group work, independent work, or multimedia presentations. Bystanders observing the lessons may assume no learning is taking place when students are not interacting directly with teachers, however, that is often not the case. Not a lot of students can sustain attention for an entire 40-minute class listening to an adult talking to them for the entire time especially through Zoom. Relying on lectures and other teacher-centered teaching strategies were not effective prior to COVID, and they will not increase student learning in either the Hybrid or Fully Remote models.
We knew coming into this school year that neither the Hybrid Model nor the Fully Remote model would be as effective educationally as fully in-person teaching. Yet, these were the options that would allow us to deliver instruction and keep everyone as safe and healthy as possible. We could lament the fact that we are not able to do what we could in a “normal” year, but this week I was able to see World Language teachers using animation videos to help students learn vocabulary and remote Math and Science teachers using applications such as Pear Deck to encourage students to participate in class discussions. Despite the barriers created by mask-wearing and social distancing, I saw an in-person science teacher still managing to create opportunities for students to work together and create a scientific model to represent convection currents.
We have a lot to worry and feel pessimistic about these days, but I encourage everyone to zoom out once in a while and think about what McCall teachers and the students have accomplished up to this point - however different those accomplishments may look compared to what “normal” used to be.
Thank you,
James Lin
Principal
McCall Middle School
