Lisa Miller

Lisa Miller

Mary Arp said she can speak for the entire teaching staff of Brookfield Local School District when she says that they miss their students.
“There’s not one teacher that doesn’t want to be in the classroom,” said the high school government teacher and president of the teacher’s union.
They miss the day-to-day interactions with students, whether it’s an informal “Hi” in the hallway as the students hustle to the next class, or detailed classroom instruction with students questioning a concept they don’t understand or looking for more context on a topic.
But, with “distance learning” through Google Classroom the only option because schools are closed, the teachers are trying their best to stay connected with their students in some fashion.
The methods the teachers use differ as much as there are approaches to classroom teaching. Some teachers have sent individual emails, and some have made phone calls. Health and physical education teacher Lynn Pegg sent a card to each of her students.
“It got an overwhelming response,” she said, noting that many students were pleasantly surprised by the gesture.
She also used the Google Meet online platform to chat with the cheerleaders she advises.
“We just kind of talked about what’s going on,” Pegg said. “It was nice to see faces.”
High school math teacher Lisa Henry said she uses a Google program to check up on how her students are doing and try to spread positivity. Henry and sixth-grade math teacher Lisa Miller have regular “office hours,” where they make themselves available for video chats with students.
“It’s been really refreshing,” Henry said. “I think they’re just happy to see familiar faces other than the people in their homes.”
Sometimes, students don’t have any questions for her, Miller said; they just seem to want to chat.
“I think they’re really missing school,” she said.
The district’s conversion to distance learning through Google Classroom hasn’t been smooth for some teachers, especially those with little or no experience with the platform, but they have found support from teachers within the ranks who are familiar with it, and from the administration. Adam Lewis, director of teaching, learning and accountability, held several training sessions based on the teachers’ familiarity with Google Classroom, Pegg said.
“The administration has been wonderful dealing with the different technological abilities of their staff,” Arp said.
promoThe teachers have taken that training and applied it in different ways. Pegg noted she had not been a Google Classroom user.
“I love it,” she said.
She asks a question of the day, and she and physical education teacher Keith Joseph developed a bingo game based on physical education activities the students are asked to perform.
Henry said she is using a program called MATHia by Carnegie Learning that offers students guidance when they seem to be having trouble with a concept.
Miller said she creates video lessons that she posts to Google Classroom, and follows that up with practice problems. The video recording sessions have been a challenge.
“Yesterday, I redid my video and I was driving my family crazy,” she said April 14. “All I did all day was retape my video.”
Miller uses a program called Edpuzzle to embed questions for her students within the videos, and she follows the responses to try to gauge how they are comprehending the lesson.
With more time to herself, Miller has done things she wouldn’t have time to do during regular classroom instruction, such as explore Google Classroom, which she said she will use more next year, particularly if the school has enough Google Chromebook computers for every student to use one throughout the day.
“I found some great web sites to use,” Miller added. “You actually have time to sit and check them out. Last week was a lot of experimenting.”
High school English language arts teacher Jessica Gardner said she has had some struggles with the technology, and notes that it doesn’t replace the immediate feedback of classroom interaction, when she can use facial expressions, comments between students and student questions to judge how her students are grasping the concepts she’s introducing.
“It brings to mind how important face-to-face education is,” Gardner said.
The amount of new material being presented to students differs depending on the subject.
“Teaching new content is very, very difficult,” said Arp, the government teacher. “A lot of the focus has been on review.”
She said she is looking for teachable moments within the COVID-19 coronavirus news coverage as examples for concepts she is teaching.
“I’m trying to use things that are currently happening,” she said.
Pegg said she watches Gov. Mike DeWine’s daily news conferences to pick out information to incorporate in her health lessons.
Yet, there are some topics she typically addresses, such as dating violence and mental health, that she has stayed away from, because she does not have one-on-one interaction with her students.
“You can’t judge their reactions,” Pegg said.
Elementary teacher Jay Bodnar said it is difficult to teach to teach physical education over a computer. He said he gave students circuit training assignments, and asked them to send him photos of themselves performing the exercises.
“I had to get a little inventive,” he said.
However, he has not been able to do his other job, helping struggling readers, because it depends on one-to-one interaction.
Henry said she finds distance learning “very wearing mentally, but, it’s the best thing we have in the situation we’re in. I would rather be in front of my class teaching in the regular way. You learn to make it work.”