Education Week - April 21, 2021 - 9

Adjust your expectations about how much
content you'll cover and how quickly.

At the beginning of this school year, Jasara Hines noticed
that her students had trouble completing assignments that
spanned multiple days. Hines, who teaches high school
English/language arts in a suburb of Chicago, was only
seeing each class for two 50-minute blocks a week. Students would lose the thread of a multi-day lesson, or forget
to turn in work. So she switched up her strategy mid-year:
" I really had to hone in on readings and activities that we
could do in a 50-minute time frame, " Hines said.
She's ditched one of the novels that they usually read
for a justice-themed unit-To Kill a Mockingbird-in favor
of shorter articles and excerpts that they can analyze together in class.
Cheryl Manning, a science teacher at Evergreen High
School in Colorado, also cut down on some of the work
she assigned this year. " I've always been a hyper-grader,
grading everything, and I've stopped doing that, " she said.
Instead of always requiring written summaries after labs,
Manning built in more time for oral discussion-a change
that she thinks has boosted her students' science communication skills and given them a chance to connect with
each other through the screen.
Manning's choices reflect a greater trend in pandemicera approaches to assessment and grading. In an EdWeek
Research Center survey asking teachers with remote or
hybrid students how their practice changed from the beginning of the 2020-21 school year to now, 55 percent of
teachers said they increased the amount of flexibility their
students were given when it comes to how they choose
to complete assignments and demonstrate knowledge,
and 59 percent said they decreased the strictness of their
grading policies.
Getting rid of the some of the grades she would normally
give shifted students' focus, from just getting their thoughts
down on paper to deeper reflection on how they got the answers they did. " Why didn't I do that 20 years ago? " Manning said, talking about the change.

" When it comes
down to this
narrative of
lost time, lost
learning, I'm
irate from that.
It's so negating.
I feel like my
students did a
lot of learning
this year. "
CHERYL MANNING

Science teacher,
Evergreen High School, Colo.

Spring Hill High School
theater teacher Sumner
Bender at her school.

amples outside of the physical classroom. But Bender also
appreciated how writing poems gave the teenagers a space
to process the isolation and grief of this year.
Some of the teachers who work with Ericka Mabion, a
K-8 STEM coordinator in the Kansas City Public Schools
in Missouri, also brought in a new project. All of the K-6
students started studying computer science. The subject
gave students a creative outlet, Mabion said, and it also
was a good fit for multiple-sibling households that might
all be doing remote school in the same space. The problemsolving inherent in coding lends itself to collaboration. " If
you have siblings, they would be able to help each other.
They would be able to celebrate with each other, " she said.

Use collaborative, digital workspaces to
better understand student thinking.

In a normal year, Hines, the Chicago area ELA teacher,
would ask her students to annotate passages as they read.
This fall, she tried to digitize that process, asking students
to mark up PDF files. But the editing tools were too cumbersome for the process to work well, so Hines moved to
programs like Pear Deck that allowed students to write
their thoughts on a shared set of slides.
The solution has two big benefits, Hines said. First, because she's the owner of the slide set, she knows she'll have
a record of all students' work at the end of the period-unlike with the PDFs, which she has to rely on students to submit. Secondly, she can respond to students' contributions in
real time, as the slides update live.
Samantha Wiley, a 4th grade math and science teacher at
Haywood County Schools' Virtual Academy in Brownsville,
Tenn., also highlighted the value of collaborative digital
workspaces that show teachers how students are figuring
their way through problems. " Sometimes when they get off
track, you can stop at that point and correct, " Wiley said, be-

Don't try to recreate your in-person
lessons over Zoom. Try a new approach
if you feel stuck.

Manning remodeled all of her in-class labs into experiments that the high schoolers could do at home, assembling kits filled with baking soda, vinegar, balloons, and
pH paper that remote students could pick up at the school
building. " It was still mathematically rigorous, it was still
good chemistry, but it was simpler, " Manning said-and,
she added, more environmentally friendly, as it omitted
some of the chemicals that students would normally handle in the classroom.
Sumner Bender, a theater teacher at Spring Hill High
School in Chapin, S.C., used an entirely new curriculum
unit with her online students this year: slam poetry. She
chose it in part because videos of performances abound
online, meaning students would have easy access to ex-

Technology Counts 2021 | 9

Education Week - April 21, 2021

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