Campus News
FINDING THE SILVER LININGS Teaching and Learning Remotely in Spring 2020 By Brooke A. Depelteau, Dean of Academics
In our hurry to live our lives, we often forget to pause and take note of what is going on around us. The emergence of COVID-19 necessitated that our community stop, take note, and prioritize while recognizing that we are, quite literally, living history. Younger generations will ask our children what it was like to live through a global pandemic. As a mother, I hope my youngest child remembers that he learned to ride a bike, and I hope my oldest remembers that we baked (too much) banana bread. As an educator, I hope our students remember that we found strength in each other and that their teachers met their concerns and frustrations with patience, compassion, and understanding. Berkshire Bears are a strong lot who care fiercely for each other and their school, and the faculty and staff felt their absence keenly during the spring quarter. Teaching and learning looked differently at Berkshire this spring, as
they did in most of the world. As cases of COVID-19 grew, we found ourselves planning to deliver our academic content in a manner completely new to us as an institution. The method of delivery we used has since acquired a name: emergency distance learning. While none of us would have labeled it as such at the time, we now recognize it for what it was, and we have taken with us lessons from the experience. As we moved our world from beneath the Mountain to “The Brady Bunch” boxes of Zoom, we found ourselves thinking more creatively about how to recreate our community in a virtual world. We also had to consider that we were asking our students to continue their learning in a variety of different circumstances, some more challenging than others. Realizing that we could not account for the unexpected obstacles our students would face, we decided to move fourthquarter courses to a pass/fail model
and to utilize both synchronous and asynchronous classes. In our virtual world we learned lessons about patience and flexibility; we also learned about waiting rooms and passwords and to joke with each other when someone inevitably spoke without turning on their microphone. We learned that our students missed us and each other, just as we missed them. Within this experience some silver linings have emerged. We have embraced Zoom’s ability to connect with those both near and far. We have had more time to think about what we teach and how we teach it. We have become more comfortable in a digital environment. When school begins in the fall and we move into our next normal, these lessons will stay with us, and we will remember that our students have been our teachers just as much as we have been theirs. Brooke A. Depelteau just completed her first year as Berkshire’s dean of academics. See her bio on page 7.
Summer 2020
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