Doing Our Quarantime | Episode 1

Remember being a kid and getting a time out for doing something bad? That’s kinda where we’re all at right now. We’re Maggie Simpson, in The Box, doing our collective Quarantime.

And even though we all feel kind of stuck right now, there are beautiful stories happening all around our city of people being innovative and creative in how they offer their services. Stories that will make you smile. Stories that are worth celebrating.

Because I believe that recording the way we are feeling and reacting right now, however ugly or benign, is important. Especially when days and emotions have started to blend together into a darkest timeline version of Groundhog Day, we need something we can reflect on when we’re on the other side of this thing. OR maybe I’m just really bored.

Either way, I’m going to spend the next few months having casual chats with folks in extraordinary circumstances – ie all of us – trying to make the best of it. In the hopes that we can learn from one another, inspire one another and encourage one another to clutch onto our collective sanity. 

Episode One: Teach Me

Nothing like having the kids at home to make us all appreciate the importance of teachers. Their jobs have been transformed catastrophically by quarantine protocol, and will have profound effects on the way our country provides education. Over the past few weeks, I caught up with friends Alana Umphrey, a kindergarten teacher at Fraser Mustard Early Learning Academy, and Anthony Cushman, a Grade 3 teacher at Rolph Road Elementary School, to chat about the challenges they’ve been facing, the creative ways they’ve connected with their students, and their hopes for the future:

I had 15 minutes when the pandemic started here, our principal said you have 15 minutes, run into the classroom, grab any supplies you think might be helpful. So I literally grabbed two massive Ikea bag of stuff while thinking: ‘okay, what will be comforting for kids to see and like helpful for them to keep learning?’ And then I had a week to go up and running online. I basically taught myself how to set up my own classroom and how to upload content, within a week. It was a complete disaster up until maybe four weeks ago. - Alana

I said to my students’ parents, “look, we've got, four weeks left and I want to make sure that it's still really exciting for everyone.” - Anthony

Both Alana and Anthony implemented online classrooms through TDSB approved platforms: Google Classroom and Brightspace. Then, both teachers had to rethink their education models from the ground up. Most importantly, how can you bring some semblance of normalcy for students in an online classroom?

When creating this digital environment, the biggest focus for me was to create a classroom and structures that I thought would bring out the best in the kids, providing a connection for the kids, the ability for them share with one another. - Anthony

Every day I do a prerecorded video of myself doing a circle time, which is identical to the circle time I did it in the classroom. So it's familiar to the kids. - Alana 

As a kindergarten teacher focused on play-based learning, Alana has been trying to provide a variety of activities for her students as a way of replicating their experience in the classroom:

I don't want families going out and having to buy materials, and I don't expect for families to have printers at home. So there's reading programs that I've set up for the kids. I know the levels all of my children are at and I assign weekly books. And there's lots of websites where they can play games that are educational. I created a master list that I sent to families. - Alana

And for Anthony, creating an online schedule with the input of his Grade 3 students helped bring back some structure:

I created a schedule for their day that they had a lot of input into. So every day they need to do independent reading, write in their journal and to do the one content thing, which could be math or something else. We designed the schedule for the day to reflect the schedule that we had at school, even with the bells. - Anthony

Anthony has also used the time to get creative with online activities, like signing up his kids for Outside the March’s Mundane Mysteries program – a made-to-order, live theatre experience that takes place over the phone:

We've been doing it all week. The kids came up with a mystery to solve, from their own life. So we’ve got “the case of the missing winter clothing, the case of the math problems written in the washroom”. It's been so funny. The kids have loved it and it's nice to work in small groups with them. It’s honestly been one of the best things we’ve done all year. And it’s virtual. - Anthony

Both teachers identified that student interaction is key and they’ve have come up with ways to prioritize and mirror that experience for their students: 

They take a picture of their work and post it to our Google classroom. They're still kind of communicating with each other, posting work, videos, saying hi to each other. So they're still learning off each other. - Alana

It's very easy for them not to be motivated, engaged. I think you need to be very creative to keep them excited. And a big part is allowing lots of opportunities for them to interact with each other, because the kids feed off that excitement. So we're doing a recess chat at a certain time, all the kids log in. They all come and chat to each other, and maybe to an adult that seems like somewhat dystopic, but for a kid, it’s a good way of them sort of replicating what they’ve lost. - Anthony

Adapting to virtual teaching has been complex for both teachers. They’re learning, revising and innovating as they go along:

In some ways it's more hours than I was in the regular classroom. It's way more time to describe something when typing it out, then to teach a lesson in-person. - Anthony 

You only have so much creativity from yourself. When you're in the classroom everyone's feeding off each other, and I'm figuring out what the kids want to learn based off their interests and my observations, so I can teach them based on their needs. But it's like here, I literally don't know the next steps. It's really hard to make lessons when you don't have physical kids in front of you showing you what they're learning. When you're talking to yourself in a video camera, it's like you're literally just exhausting all your energy. - Alana

Despite all the challenges they’ve faced these past few months, both Alana and Anthony have high hopes for the future. They know their students are resilient and this experience has open their eyes to what’s possible using tech support in teaching models.

This experience has highlighted a lot of the really productive uses of this technology and blended learning. Some of the coolest things that we've done online, I can definitely find a way of bringing that to the classroom on top of what we usually do. - Anthony

We just need to get through this thing, it’s not the end of the world for the kids, they’re like sponges. They really can pick it all up again in September. - Alana

I don't want the end of the year to be anticlimactic for these kids. There's a lot of limitations that come from this environment, but there's also creative possibilities that emerged. - Anthony

From struggle comes transformation and innovation. Both Alana and Anthony quickly identified one of the major gaps in digital learning (student interaction) and have come up with creative solutions to nurture interaction in an online environment. And although this transformation has required some serious heavy-lifting by our TDSB teachers, they remain optimistic about how this can inform the ways in which we teach our kids in the future.

We might not know when students will be hearing those school bells ring again, but we can be certain that education is safe in the hands of creative teachers like Alana and Anthony.

Has you career transformed extensively during COVID-19? I’d love to talk to you about the creative solutions you’ve come up with during this time. Give me a holler.