Middle school aged students crave the attention of their teachers.
And the COVID-19 pandemic has created a void that school districts and their teachers are doing everything they can to cover.
Montgomery County students and teachers last saw the inside of a classroom March 13 — forcing teachers to utilize resources like Canvas and Zoom to still connect with their students and give them that interaction they desire.
“I love being able to see the kids,” Northridge Middle School teacher Jodi Webster said. “I think that’s one of the biggest things is them being able to have a face-to-face with the teacher.”
Webster, who teaches social studies, uses Zoom to teach a weekly lesson for each of her classes, and to meet with her advisory class. She has also had to turn to virtual platforms for class projects.
“We’ve been doing projects,” she said. “It’s just different. If they make something they have to send me pictures or a video. If they do it digitally, they just share it with me. It has to have meaning, and has to have substance, and it’s got to connect.”
Crawfordsville family and consumer science teacher Allison Archer was dealt an almost impossible task to continue her hands-on learning, but has tried to make the best of the situation.
“My class has a lot of hands-on activities so I am relying on parents to help check how they are doing,” she said.
While her nutrition and wellness class was entering the cooking portion of the semester, she has assigned tasks like laundry and dish-washing to her students. She also says she has taken advantage of online resources such as spent.org to teach the value of saving an being prepared for unexpected expenses for her advanced students which have started their college and career unit.
“This is a great one to do before high school so they know which direction they want to go and what classes to take,” she said. “We made it through and I hope most kids learned something about themselves. This week we started our financial unit. Understanding money and the importance of savings is relevant for what we are going through right now across the globe. Kids are most likely hearing about financial stresses from the news and or their parents.”
Archer believes contact with parents has been positive, and that they are holding their kids accountable. She tips her cap to the entire school corporation for acting pro-actively when schools were initially shutdown the week before spring break, and for the remainder of the school year on April 2.
“I am amazed at how well Crawfordsville School Corporation got everything up and running,” she said. “They worked their magic to get everyone a way to complete their work and help lower the parents anxieties.”
While the high school already had a 1:1 device ratio, many Crawfordsville Middle School students were without a laptop until the technology team quickly stepped up back in March.
“We knew there would be families that would need devices for e-learning,” principal Brent Bokhart said. “Our technology team did a great job of being proactive and having devices ready to be handed out to families by March 13, our last day of in person instruction. The middle school has been the hub of the technology piece of the pandemic and in upper elementary and middle school our technology team has been able to get more than 200 devices out to our students for e-learning. They have worked hard to meet the needs of our students.”
Many days Webster parks her car in the North Montgomery parking lot to access free internet from WinTek and has turned her car into her virtual classroom due to inadequate internet access at home.
She’s not alone.
“It’s posed a whole new set of challenges,” she said. “Some people don’t have any technology at home, some people have spotty WiFi. Some students have parents helping them and some not. You don’t have all those variables in your classroom, because you can control them, and you can’t control those things right now for a lot of our students.”
At Southmont Jr. High, special education teacher Shane Davis has been presented with the unique challenge of continuing to keep tabs on his students throughout all of their classes. Each day he joins classes of different subjects during the morning, and then has an afternoon Zoom session with his students for tutoring and a check-in.
“I have been using Zoom everyday for that face-to-face communication,” he said. “Teachers around our building are using Google classroom as a place where parents and students have access to student assignments.”
Davis said the biggest challenge is the face-to-face interaction.
“The biggest obstacles that I have faced during the transition, is the face-to-face interaction on a daily basis, actually seeing the students do the work,” he said. “A lot of our information, we as educators, get from students is when they are doing the work with us face to face, we can see exactly where they are struggling. With the virtual learning that we are doing, we can not see exactly what the students get and what they don’t get. We use informal assessments normally face to face to see what the students understand, now we have to wait normally for the student to turn in assignments to see what they get and what they don’t get.”
He said though it’s important to continue giving constant positive feedback.
“I check on all my students as much as I can. When students turn things in, I do my best to give positive feedback to the students on their hard work,” he said. “I know this is a difficult time for our students, and we want to continually provide positive feedback to keep them interested in learning. I have offered that if students are having issues, to please reach out to myself, and that I would reach out to our guidance counselor.”
While North Montgomery and Southmont had e-learning or distance learning in place before the pandemic, Crawfordsville didn’t. Bokhart believes schools around the state and country will all be able to work together moving forward.
“Given that all students across Indiana and the country are in the same boat it will help that schools will be able to collaborate and work as a team to formulate plans to work at closing that learning gap when we return to in person instruction,” he said.
Bokhart also realizes that support and constant communication is key while schools navigate these uncharted waters.
“This pandemic certainly causes not just an academic strain, but certainly a mental, social and emotional strain as well,” he said. “All families and homes are going through their unique challenges. Maintaining some sort of normalcy and contact has been our focus as a result. Teachers are able to connect virtually through our online platform, Canvas and the guidance department is routinely making points of contact through phone calls as well. Maintaining resources of mental health agencies for families is also key whether it be through our school staff or outside agencies we continue to work together to support our students and families.”
With fifth-graders making the jump to the middle school and eighth-graders moving onto high school next fall, Bokhart said Crawfordsville will look at ways to still hold that transition programming, whether it’s virtually or toward the end of the summer just before school starts.
Schools around the state are adapting the best they can to the situation — and the three Montgomery County middle schools are no exception — but the synopsis is all the same.
“Overall this is not ideal,” Archer said. “I think that the majority of students and parents are doing their best and trying to make the best of the situation. I as well as the other teachers at CMS miss our students and wish we were back in our classrooms finishing up the year. I miss seeing them everyday and hearing all their crazy stories. I know I personally will never take that for granted again.”
