The promise and pitfalls of online instruction

MOSES LAKE — Joy Fry was looking for a daily writing assignment for her fourth-grade class at Garden Heights Elementary.

One that would speak to them about the situation they all found themselves in, stuck at home, unable to go to school or go out and see friends since Gov. Jay Inslee closed schools across the state on March 17.

So, at the beginning of the school closure, Fry decided to carefully select short passages from Anne Frank’s “Diary of a Young Girl” and read them to her class every morning using a video application called Flipgrid, which allows students to respond with video comments or short essays of their own.

She knows the comparison is inexact, that even under the coronavirus lockdown, her kids know they have it much better than Frank. She was a Jewish teenager whose family lived in cramped seclusion in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands for two years during World War II before being discovered and deported to extermination camps, where most of the family perished in early 1945.

“These kids have it good,” Fry said.

Fry also said she wouldn’t normally use Anne Frank’s diary with fourth-graders. But there is something about the current situation, and the need for her students to understand what they are going through, that makes it work, she said.

“This group is actually living history,” Fry said. “It’s important to know that somebody else went through something horrible,” she said. “That diary became Anne’s best friend.”

“They tell me what’s going on, how they feel, about their friends,” Fry said. “They feel isolated, they really feel stuck.”

The tools the Moses Lake School District has for online education — every student was given a Chromebook laptop and the district has for the last several years used Google Classroom to organize classes, assignments and grading, and also makes extensive use of online tools like Zoom, YouTube, Flipgrid, Screencastify and Edpuzzle — make organizing and doing online instruction at least technically easy.

The MLSD has been held up as a model statewide for doing online education because of that commitment to using technology in the classroom, according to Stefan Troutman, a technology coach at Moses Lake High School.

Because of that, it was fairly easy to make the transition to remote instruction, Troutman explained.

“We are a Google district, and have been for several years at the high school,” Troutman said. “The majority of teachers were using technology before we went to remote learning. Most of the things you can do in a physical classroom, you can do in a digital one.”

For example, Troutman noted that one culinary instructor at Moses Lake High School has posted video cooking lessons online, and another trade class asked students to measure the rooms in their house in order to find out how much it would cost to paint. Even kindergartners were given online assignments to count the number of steps from their bedrooms to various other locations in their homes, he said.

Many of the online tools allow teachers and students to create custom video lessons or prompt video interactions in an attempt to recreate the kind of give-and-take that happens between teachers and students, and among students themselves, in a classroom.

But Troutman was also clear that online learning was going to mean teachers would need to get used to a learning day that was a lot less structured. Because some kids work, care for family members, or just get out between classes.

“It kind of looks different, depending on the situation, but we’re not going to match the school day minute-for-minute. We’re not going to sit in Zoom meetings for seven hours.”

“We can’t require kids be online at a specific time,” he added.

Online instruction allows students to come and go as they please, but that requires teachers to be more flexible and put in more hours. Rita Fryberger, an eighth-grade history teacher and seventh-grade AVID teacher at Chief Moses Middle School, said she discovered that her kids come and go from her online classes, with a few logging on as early as 7 a.m. and at least one student trying to do classwork at midnight.

“I had a student ask me ‘why doesn’t this program work at midnight?’” she said. “And I’m ‘why are you on your computer at midnight?’”

According to Kimber Lybbert, an 11th-grade Advanced Placement Language and AVID teacher at MLHS, online learning has meant focusing on what is essential and being flexible enough to improvise when needed.

“I’ve really had to dial in what is the most essential learning, and how they can demonstrate that in unconventional ways,” she said.

For her AVID classes, it means homing in on online skills, like annotating and signing PDF files. For her language students, it means learning to do research in some new and creative ways and realize that knowledge that isn’t formally academic has value as well.

Lybbert told the story of one student who, pre-COVID closure, wanted to write a research paper on air pollution, but as a result of the closure, ended up studying musicians as he taught himself to play the guitar.

“He said all of the really great artists were self-taught, and I told him, ‘you’re doing research,’” she said. “He did exactly what I wanted but didn’t know it.”

However, many middle and high school teachers and students are discovering that video doesn’t quite cut it, and that they miss being in the classroom making and maintaining that in-person relationship with each other.

“Kids are missing both adults and other kids,” said Eliza Fish, whose son Nolan is one of Joy Fry’s fourth-graders. “People miss the whole community.”

“We don’t have face-to-face discussion or small groups in class,” Fryberger said. “Discussions are a lot more difficult. It’s so hard to have conversation in the computer setting.”

According to Kristi Couch, an American Sign Language instructor at Moses Lake High School, online instruction means it has been very difficult for her to keep track of the students who were working or caring for sick family members.

“Kids have fallen through the cracks,” Couch said. “Of my 140 students, I’ve got six to 10 who I have not made contact with. Some are doing the work, and some weren’t doing fantastic in normal school either.”

“Currently, I have one student who is the only person working in their household,” she added.

There is, however, not much choice right now, given that the governor ordered schools to remain closed for the rest of the school year. Technology coaches like Troutman and Chief Moses Middle School coach Monica McAfee, as well as the district’s numerous teachers, are doing what they can to make it all work.

“We appreciate our families, reaching out with questions and concerns, letting us know how things are going. We’re eager for feedback, to meet their needs,” McAfee said.

Couch also had a message she wanted everyone in the MLSD to hear.

“Tell the kids that school is still in session, and we miss them,” she said.

Charles H. Featherstone can be reached at cfeatherstone@columbiabasinherald.com.