Many teachers ill-prepared for distance learning

They were forced to go online or learn from others to get ready, according to state survey

“The places that are less successful are using the old pedagogies. The kids read and answer questions from the back of the book.” — Linda Darling-Hammond, president of the State Board of Education

Many California school districts offered a variety of training over the summer to prepa re tea chers for distance learning in the fall, but some struggled to offer enough to meet the needs of all teachers, leav ing many to find training on their own.

Many districts offered in-house trainers or hired teaching consultants. But in many places, training focused only on teleconferencing tools like Zoom and educational platforms like Google Classroom. In other districts, teachers were largely on their own to convert lessons from inperson to virtual, according to a recent EdSource survey.

Of the 67 California school super intendents who answered a survey question on the topic, 85% said their districts were offering distance learning instruction. About 40% of the districts offered nine to 16 hours of training, roughly a third offered five to eight hours of training and 16% offered one to four hours. Less than 10% of the school districts offered more than 16 hours of training for teachers.

Lorraine Angel, a chemistry teacher at Calaveras High School, turned to webinars provided by the California Teachers Association, California Department of Education and others after she couldn’t find the training she needed through the Ca lavera s Unified School District. She and other teachers in the district also searched the internet, joined Facebook groups and watched YouTube videos.

“There is a lot of frustration,” said Angel, who also heads the district teacher’s union. “It was so hard just having enough time to be able to learn what you needed to learn. Until you are actually doing it, we all feel like we are putting the plane together while we are flying it.”

Despite the challenges of providing training during a pandemic, the professional development offered by the district over the summer was “robust and multifaceted,” said Mark Campbell, superintendent of Calaveras Unified, which serves 2,875 students in the foothill communities of Calaveras County, southeast of Sacramento.

Calaveras Unified required teachers to attend at least six hours of distance learning preparation and offered classes on teaching math and English strategies online, as well as how to work with Google Classroom and Google G Suite. The district paid for outside training teachers wanted to attend.

Erin Enguero enrolled in K- 12 Online Teaching Academy, which consists of 23 training videos created at San Jose State University’s Connie L. Lurie College of Education, to prepare for remote student teaching. The graduate student is completing her final semester as a student teacher at Azeveda Elementary School in Fremont.

The videos range from teaching tips for sy nchronous ( live teaching) and asynchronous (students working independently) instruction, to writing support for students, to tips on re- engaging multilingual students. They cover approaches to teaching various subjects through distance learning, including computer science, math, reading and writing.

“I can see myself going back to the San Jose State University webinar academy to brush up on some things,” Eng uero said. “Even though the webinars are over, I feel like it’s helping contribute to this very important conversation about what it means to do distance learning.”

With training and the skills teachers learned from their experiences in the spring and summer, the quality of instruction has increased in many places, said Linda Darling-Hammond, president of the State Board of Education in an interview. She is also president of the Learning Policy Institute, a nonprofit education policy research organization.

To meet the demands of distance learning, there has been a greater focus on lesson planning, she said. Teachers have not only needed instruction on using Zoom and online video platforms effectively, they’ve also learned to organize instruction and curriculum in ways that are constructive, she said.

The teachers who are effectively teaching this fall semester have adjusted their teaching methods to distance learning, rather than using old teaching methods in an online format, said Darling- Hammond, who recently coauthored the report “Restarting and Reinventing School: Learning in the Time of COVID and Beyond.”

“There are people who are learning how to use time in more productive ways. The places that are less successful are using the old pedagogies,” she said. “The kids read and answer questions from the back of the book.”

At Calaveras Unified, Angel took advantage of a partnership between the district and the San Joaquin County Office of Education to learn to effectively use Google Classroom, but found most of what she needed outside the district.

The district paid for a class on how to teach science remotely through the Bureau of Education Research, and she took free virtual classes from the California Teachers Association, some taught by teachers from the California Virtual Academy, a distance learning charter school.

“Those were great, and it really gave you a lot of perspective on what to expect,” Angel said.

Information on using educational platforms like Zoom and Google Classroom, as well as training on how to teach specific student groups and subjects online can be found by searching the internet, YouTube channels like Going The Distance and Facebook teacher groups like Teaching during Coronavirus.

Teachers also have done their best to share training oppor tunities w ith one another at the school site level, union level and across the state, A ngel said.

Mike Albiani, a teacher at Elk Grove High School near Sacramento, said he learned most of what he knows from other teachers.

“I’ll be honest, the majority of my training came from the millennials that I work with,” said Albiani, who has worked in his district for 36 years.

Albiani, an agriculture teacher and career technical education coordinator for the school, couldn’t attend all the voluntary training offered because of scheduling conflicts. Spots in the work shops also filled up fast, he said. To make sure everyone benefited from the training, teachers who attended the training later shared the information with their colleagues, he said.

Washington Union Elementary School in Salinas didn’t have enough resources to offer its teachers more than just a few days of training right before school started this fall. The teachers largely depended on tra ining the district offered in the spring or training they sought out on their own.

Much of the training from the district has been technolog y- ba sed: how to set up Zoom and use it while also monitoring the chat box, for example, said Gina Uccelli, superintendent.

The district of almost 900 students is small, and funding for training is limited. But if funding opportunities were available, the district would have offered training during the summer, Uccelli said.

Regardless of the limitations, she said that teachers in the district were better equipped to teach this fall than they were in the spring, despite the new challenges.

“T here’s more confidence in the classroom,” Uccelli said. “But there’s an added layer of anxiety and stress right now. I think teachers want it to be perfect and the amount of pressure they put on themselves to be there for their students weighs heavily on them as professionals.”