Teachers in training learn remotely then stream into local classrooms
Third-graders at Tomball ISD’s Grand Oaks Elementary School balked when student teacher Grace Neal first joined their class. They thought she might be a robot.
That smiling face on the laptop, who would wave and say hello to any student who passed by, is a real person, teacher Sara Dvorak told the kids. She just is not physically in the room with them.
Neal joins the class from her College Station apartment and streams into the classroom about twice a week.
“Now I’ll ask, ‘Can you bring Ms. Neal to me please?’ ” Dvorak said, and a student will walk the laptop streaming Neal’s face over to her desk. “They love working with her, and she’s already built some relationships with them, which is so important.”
Neal is one of about 120 Texas A&M students doing some of their student-teaching hours in Tomball ISD remotely because of the coronavirus pandemic. While much has been written about K-12 teachers overhauling how they deliver instruction to both in-person and remote students this school year, colleges across Texas and the country also have had to reinvent
how to teach aspiring teachers virtually and get them the classroom experience they need to thrive after graduation.
The pandemic has forced colleges to get more creative, especially in states where most schools have been closed for more than a year, said Gloria Ladson-Billings, president of the National Academy of Education and a retired professor of education at the University of Wisconsin. In Madison, for example, LadsonBillings created a tutoring program that benefits lowincome students whose parents work during the day, as well as student teachers who need practicum hours.
Still, Ladson-Billings said, aspiring teachers who are not in actual classrooms are missing out on learning about the “connective tissue” of teaching, including how to manage transitions and how to keep students on task. And tutoring programs such as hers in Wisconsin still do not satisfy many states’ prerequisites for student-teaching hours.
“I think most state departments of education and teacher preparation programs have been scrambling about how to meet these requirements,” Ladson-Billings said.
Texas was one of only four states to require schools to offer in-person instruction last fall, so seniors in teacher preparation programs here have had more access to shadow and work with teachers in faceto-face settings. Many of those students have been spending their final year learning remotely themselves.
The University of Houston’s College of Education, for example, has been remote since the pandemic hit the United States last March.
When what seemed like a temporary switch to virtual classes ended up lasting the rest of the spring 2020 semester, Shea Culpepper, director of teacher education at UH’s College of Education, felt the pangs of panic. She worried the class of 2020 would be unprepared to begin their careers in Zoom chats instead of classrooms. There was no time to go back and instruct them how virtual teaching might work, but she soon realized the core of what her students had learned remained the same in remote settings.
“What we have taught them about what good teaching is has not changed. It’s still about understanding student thinking and building on that,” Culpepper said. “The foundation hasn’t changed, but how you deliver that instruction has changed.”
Limitations to lessons
College students have taken courses online for years, but transitioning to virtual classes entirely also gave instructors an opportunity to demonstrate how it was done, said Robin Rackley, a clinical professor at Texas A&M’s College of Education and Human Development.
She began to show students the content management system she used to grade them and detailed how she posted and planned assignments for their courses.
“I post material a week at a time, so I’ll ask them why they think I do that instead of loading the whole semester at once,” Rackley said. “What am I looking for them to say? It could be overwhelming to students to see the whole semester. What if they’re working on an assignment and you see they need more time? If we haven’t loaded week two, we could add that assignment to week two, or if we already know this concept, we can move ahead.”
Those lessons have limitations, however. Rather than sit in on actual classes, many seniors at UH and A&M had to watch prerecorded videos of teachers giving lessons in different content areas, such as math and social studies. Students could watch but were not able to ask why the teachers decided to use certain techniques or how they were able to recapture a distracted student’s attention.
Some struggles
Justin Burris, a clinical assistant professor who specializes in math education at the University of Houston’s College of Education, said he has been showing his students how to teach concepts, such as counting, by doing it with them over video calls. When his lessons are finished, his students sometimes struggle with how to take what they just learned and apply it to a virtual setting.
“My students will ask, ‘How can I do this online?’ and I’m like, ‘We just did it online,’ ” Burris said. “They don’t always make that connection, but they’re seeing both sides of that coin.”
For Jennifer Martinez and her mentor at Alief ISD’s Outley Elementary, this year has been like inventing a car while driving it. Neither is particularly tech savvy, but they have managed to teach themselves and their students how to use Zoom and the online platform Schoology. When kids returned to school in October, they worked together to establish best practices for teaching in-person students and remote students at the same time.
Eventually, she began to settle into a rhythm, thanks largely to her mentor’s encouragement and lessons in classroom management and pedagogical techniques.
“I feel that if you have taught students remotely and face to face at the same time, it’s possible to achieve anything, because it’s really hard to engage the students online, keep them on track online and face to face,” Martinez said. “It’s just a hassle.”
Neal, the Texas A&M student working remotely in Tomball ISD, is just ready to get into a classroom. She will be able to do that next fall in the Austin area as she finished up her senior year in December. She is eager to learn more classroom management techniques and the little things that cannot be done via video calls — checking students’ work over their shoulders, leading educational games, learning more about their personalities and stories.
“Just being able to be with them every day and to get to know them,” Neal said. “I want the full immersion.”