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Educators discuss how the pandemic forced education online and the struggles they faced. Many teachers were unprepared and had to learn how to teach online themselves. Students struggled socially and academically, with a focus on math and social-emotional development. The pandemic disrupted academic instruction for millions of students. Post-pandemic, educators are finding new ways to engage students. Some are implementing universal design for learning, offering options for assignments and activities. Creative options and hybrid programs are being used to provide a more well-rounded education. Despite challenges, some students have shown remarkable growth. The transition back to in-person learning has been difficult with social skills and lack of support. Educators reflect on the stressful and dynamic nature of the pandemic but still find value in their careers. The educational system has faced challenges, but both students and teachers have persevered. It was online. It was online. It was online. Everything was online. It was online. It was online. It was online. This is Phoenix Group, and today we will be talking about how the pandemic forced education to move to strictly online. What struggles are educators facing post-pandemic as we've transitioned back to the traditional classroom? My name is May Scroggs. I'm the principal of Lincoln High School and Seaview Academy. Hi. I'm Mark Harris. So I've been the principal at Squin Middle School. This is starting my, well, now in the middle of my fourth year. My name is David Jones. I am the head of the music department, and I teach the history of rock music, I teach music appreciation, I direct the jazz band, I teach music theory, and I've been teaching here since 2008. My name's Kesa Dabb. I've been teaching for nine years now. So right now, I'm a general education teacher at an elementary school, and I teach second grade. I'm Angela Tammes. I am a teacher at the Port Angeles School District, and I have a master's in education, and I'm almost done with a master's in history. When the pandemic hit, many educators struggled with their new role when the entire education system went completely online. During the pandemic, we had to almost overnight shift everything to an online curriculum, and that was really difficult. We didn't have any training on it. It was a steep learning curve. I mean, imagine your old-fashioned PE teacher, and now you're telling him or her, hey, you're going to teach online. Mm-hmm. They didn't have the technical capacity to do it. I had never taught online, so I taught myself how to teach online. My frustrations weren't with the kids or the families. My frustrations were that teachers were working as hard as they possibly could, and it didn't feel like society was recognizing that, and there was a lot of criticism, and that was, I felt, very hurtful. According to one online source, many teachers indicated that they were not prepared to teach online, and many students did not log in to complete assignments. We spoke with a variety of educators, from elementary through to college professors. When asked where they felt children struggled the most, they all agreed on one similar deficit. However, they still faced a variety of other challenges. But I think the biggest problem with COVID wasn't academic. I think it was more social-emotional. Students were missing basic social skills. So there are struggles socially. A pause in that emotional-social development. I think it's different in math. I know that the math departments are having more of a challenge because it's kind of more linear, like the knowledge acquisition is more linear. Even being able to hold a pencil was difficult for students, so, you know, in my perspective, I'm getting second graders, and they're actually kindergarten level. And so I'm having to fill those gaps, and, you know, all within a one-year time span. Their ability to write formally, yeah, that definitely dropped off, but that was, that's always been the case anyway, since texting came into being. Trying to teach kids, okay, this is formal, so now you have to write this way. So there's a little bit of that. Mathematics has struggled more so, because as a parent, you might read, you might write with your kid, you can definitely talk with your kid, you create an environment where there is communication happening all the time. But parents don't really create math environments. You know, there's a huge discrepancy on student learning, depending on kind of the support systems that they have in place at home, and what was going on during the pandemic, you know, if they had those supports to really push the kids through learning the material that they needed, or if they were in a situation where the kids kind of had to, kind of had to fend for themselves. According to online sources, school closures resulted in disruption to academic instruction for about 124,000 public and private schools, affecting approximately 55.1 million students nationwide. Post-pandemic, educators are finding new and innovative ways to teach their students and keep them engaged. And the other one that we are now implementing is what's called universal design for learning. That is, every teacher goes in every task or assignment that they would ask kids to do with the mindset that they have to provide options. They have to provide options like the reading a book, reading a tablet, or having it read to you. You have that choice. Or when it comes to the production of how they show that they've learned. So do I have to write a paper, do I have to record a video, can I do a podcast? Those are all options for kids now, and the teachers will present them with at least two, so they get to work from multiple choices, but they don't give them every choice in the world. So for example, like CBU Academy, we have our online component, but we were also able to secure some different types of grant funding to create some more creative options for families. So we do a hybrid program where students are able to, we have a K-4 group that's able to do a nature school one day a week, and then they come in to do person learning, either kind of extension activities or getting more one-on-one tutoring with their academic subjects. They're able to do things with music and art and stuff that is kind of hard to deliver in an online-only program. So we're able to get creative in that way. The interesting thing with academics, I am noticing whether they were censored or not academically, they are making intellectual growth at a much quicker pace, but with ELA and world history, it's not as based on previous knowledge, so they're making this amazing intellectual growth. Like in my world history class, they went from not even being able to write a topic sentence to just in 12 weeks being able to write a five-paragraph essay. I've never seen growth like this in my life. Not all educators are finding it to be a smooth transition back. And then coming back, it's made it really hard, too, because of the social skills and lack of parent support and things like that. So it's had a complete shift of teaching in general, and so everything's kind of marked now before the pandemic and then post-pandemic. Because even now that we're on year three of the pandemic, students still have huge gaps in social skills, and so we're just really struggling to fill those gaps and also fill the academic gaps. So did this rapidly changing education system caused by the pandemic have educators reconsidering their careers? I felt like our role during the pandemic, it was extremely stressful because things were changing so quickly. There were so many not only concerns with the health of students and staff, and then there were the mandates by the state to consider and what was going on in the county. So I never thought about changing my career because of that, but I did look at it as a situation that was extremely dynamic that could lead to different ways to approach education once we got to the other side of it. I've always wanted to be a teacher since I was like eight years old. It was my dream career. And after the pandemic, it's made me really reconsider, you know, do I really want to do this for the next 15 years? It's become extremely stressful. There's huge pressures for, you know, testing. We're constantly testing students. There's pressure for test scores, data on top of, you know, parents and their requests and what they want. And now teaching has become more of like customer service towards parents, which has been a huge shift where with public school, you know, it really wasn't that. And so now it's more catering to what parents want and those kinds of things. So it's getting harder and so it's definitely making me reconsider where, you know, pre pandemic, I didn't really consider having a different career. I really enjoyed it. So did the pandemic make the educational system or did it break it? You might be surprised to hear what our educators had to say about that. Thank you for listening and remember to appreciate your teachers. It's been quite the journey. The roads have been rough, but through it all, both students and teachers persevered and made it through. They continue to pass unseen obstacles and do things they wouldn't have thought possible, going places they'd only imagined.
