Let’s turn ‘survival mode’ into ‘discovery mode’

It is 11:50 a.m. and my Grade 6 students are just coming in from their lunch break outside —“mask relief,” as they call it.

Their core teacher was working with them earlier in the day and it’s now my turn to migrate our abundance of technology cords over to my laptop, after sanitizing them, of course.

My in-class learners get settled at their desks, spaced exactly six feet apart, while I join a Google Meet with those who are remote.

On this day, after interrupting a friendly conversation about Roblox, I ask them to access Google Classroom and see the post with their learning materials for science. Some students in-class hear this and know to open up the readings in their binders. Others checked the schedule on my Bitmoji classroom and follow suit.

Curiosity runs rampant in the class as I moderate a discussion. This is going well. Next up in the lesson I want to show a video.

But wait. The audio won’t work. Is it the Wi-Fi? Is it an application glitch? How do I fix this? There’s a minute of intense inner stress before my students set me straight: “Ms. Smith, you have to have the video in the same window as your Google Meet and present from there, not your separate screen.”

Duh.

If you had asked me last year whether these would be worries in my teaching (along with many others unique to 2020), I wouldn’t have believed it. But this is our reality now.

I graduated from teacher’s college in July and, a month later, a school hired me as a Grade 6 associate teacher. My schooling had prepared me for leading a traditional classroom but like other educators, I had no idea what pandemic pedagogy would involve.

In a pandemic, all teachers are pretty much at square one. It doesn’t matter if you are a 20-year teaching veteran or a novice like me. I think we’re doing pretty well. We are developing new teaching techniques and technologies, and we will never return to “normal,” nor should we.

My school is incredibly