16 minute read
Experimental Spring
BY Christine Coyle | PHOTOS BY Jessica Ravenelle
Forced by the pandemic to teach remotely this spring, Loomis Chaffee’s faculty rose to the challenge by adapting, collaborating, and innovating. Their discoveries helped them to prepare for the year ahead, when learning will blend in-person instruction and structured independent student work.
Loomis Chaffee plunged into an education experiment when the COVID-19 health crisis abruptly ended in-person classes this spring on the Island and at schools around the world. With little lead time, the Loomis teaching faculty and administration modified classes to a remote-learning model using online conference platforms and other tools for teaching from a distance, and the faculty adapted their teaching methods and course content in order to continue engaging Loomis students in different times zones, countries, and home situations. Although the school experience was dramatically different than under normal circumstances, teachers continued to work with their students to advance their learning, provide structure to the day, and maintain a sense of community. Along the way and at the term’s conclusion, the faculty looked History teacher Molly Pond
at what they and other educators had discovered through remote teaching that could help them in the year ahead, whether instruction is in person or from a distance. Forced by circumstances to adapt and innovate, the school made some surprising discoveries about what works, and what doesn’t.
Immediately clear in the distance learning experiment were the advantages of an on-campus learning environment, and teachers and students yearned for a return to in-person classes and regular daily life on the Island. The absence of these givens underlined the educational importance of discussions around a table, serendipitous daily interactions, and face-to-face collaborations between students and teachers and among students themselves. And yet the unexpected shift away from the norm also confirmed the importance of adaptability in an oft-changing world as both teachers and
students had to call on their abilities to adjust, and even rise, to changing circumstances. The necessity of developing nimbleness was one of the overarching discoveries of the spring’s experiment.
Many teachers, and the school itself, modeled this adaptability.
“I was especially impressed with the spirit of innovation that permeated the spring term,” says Associate Head of School Webster Trenchard. “Our faculty quickly embraced this spring as a watershed moment that was likely to usher in some changes in education.”
In order to move the school’s entire academic program — some 370 classes — from face-to-face to remote learning, a lot of decisions had to be made in just a few weeks. With the understanding that the transition to online learning would be stressful for all students and that individual students might face challenges related to their home situations or locations, the academic subcommittee of the school’s COVID-19 Task Force hammered out a workable daily schedule and decided that classes would be pass/fail rather than graded to ease student anxiety.
Student needs were central to the school’s approach. “Learning is not just taking an empty vessel and filling it with information,” Webb says. Rather, it is a dynamic and collaborative process between an inspired teacher and a student who wants to learn, and the task force hoped to maintain that collaboration as much as possible.
To equip teachers for their charge, the school’s Information Technology staff and Pearse Hub for Innovation (PHI) faculty recorded tutorials for the use of Zoom online video conferencing software and provided other technical assistance, the Kravis Center for Excellence in Teaching shared expert advice for online instruction, and all teaching faculty took part in two days of training before the start of spring term classes.
History teacher J.R. Zavisza
When the term began, some faculty conducted online classes from computers in their campus classrooms, and others connected from their homes. Some of their classes took place in scheduled, real-time sessions, known as “synchronous” classes, and teachers recorded or assigned “asynchronous” lessons outside the class schedule for students to view and complete independently. Depending on the teachers, the type of course, and the location of students, some teachers didn’t have to make major modifications to their courses, and others had to find ways to approach their subject in wholly different ways.
This was true for Jennifer McCandless, ceramics teacher and Visual Arts Department head. “Well, we’re creative people, so we’re going to figure this
out,” said Jen at the beginning of the term. She instructed her students to obtain five pounds of clay — available for purchase online — and taught them to use tools found at home to sculpt. She filmed step-by-step instructions from her home so that students could complete projects at their own pace in their own homes. For a few students who were unable to obtain clay, Jen created art history lessons that focused on sculpture and suggested online museum tours to follow. In adapting her instruction for remote learning, Jen found that the experience of creating, learning, teaching, and sharing art remained enriching and sustaining for her and her students even though the process was different. Similarly, art teacher Mark Zunino shipped paint supplies to his students and filmed lessons in painting and drawing in his studio in the Richmond Art Center.
Without in-studio guidance and collaboration, art courses that already focused on digital media also required adjustments. Using the Adobe Design Cloud suite of software purchased by the school, students in Digital Media Art & Design, taught by Stacy-Ann “Ro” Rowe ’97, and Christian Ryan’s Digital Photography, Digital Animation, and Video Production classes continued to grow their skills at home with their teachers’ online instruction and feedback. And the department showcased student art as it does every term, but this time with an online gallery, including an end-of-year show for students in the College-Level Art Seminar.
Distance learning presented an unexpected silver lining when Spanish teacher Andrea Rodas was forced to teach from Guayaquil, Ecuador, where she had been attending a family celebration during March Break. Unable to return to the United States when Ecuador placed swift and strict limitations on movement due to the pandemic, Andrea used her home base to add dimension to her language classes. She enlisted her bilingual family members to engage in level-appropriate conversations with her students, and she took her Spanish II students on a virtual tour of her home for an “about the house” vocabulary lesson. Andrea says she tried to keep the classroom experience as “normal” as possible, but she hoped that conducting class from a Spanish-speaking locale could keep the experience fresh and engaging for her students.
In all disciplines, teachers learned as they went what approaches worked best for their students, lending credence to a common refrain among Loomis teachers this spring: “Every teacher is a first-year teacher.” Teachers discovered the benefits of “breakout rooms” within the Zoom platform, allowing smaller subsets of a class to talk about a reading or other subject matter. The smaller groups gave more space for reticent students to contribute and for all to engage in the discussions. Many teachers and their classes noticed that students, especially freshmen, could make more astute contributions to class discussions when the conversation took place on an online discussion board, where members of the class had more time to think about and express their ideas than in a real-time discussion on Zoom. As with the discussion boards, teachers and students learned the value of some technological tools that already were available to them but they hadn’t previously explored, such as the file-sharing, calendering, and assignment-scheduling aspects of the class website portals. Now familiar with these tools, many teachers plan to continue to use them even when classes are back on campus.
To keep lessons fresh, several teachers invited guests into online discussions and lessons. Parent Tina Saunders joined Rachel Nisselson’s French IV class for a video conference discussion of the book Persepolis, a graphic novel written in French by Iranian author Marjane Satrapi, who shares stories about growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. Tina, an Iranian émigré, shared her own memories of living in Iran and moving to the United States as a fourth-grader, and she and the students discussed similarities between her experiences and those portrayed in the graphic novel. Mat DeNunzio’s Applied Economics students paired with alumni in various fields for a lesson on resume-writing and cover letters, which led to further discussions among the pairings about professions and career paths.
In addition to individual discoveries and anecdotal evidence, a survey of students, parents, and faculty midway through the term helped to identify broader patterns of what was working well in classes and where improvements were needed, and teachers engaged in a two-day workshop to share ideas and collaborate. For example, many students and parents described the amount of screen time as overwhelming when most classes were synchronous. In response, teachers offered more asynchronous
lessons in the second half of the term alongside fewer but more focused “in-class” sessions. Teachers also adjusted their expectations for homework loads in consideration of students’ time spent doing asynchronous classwork.
For the Music Department, especially ensemble classes, working simultaneously is at the core of the endeavor, presenting particular challenges when the group is scattered around the globe and when even the latest technology isn’t perfectly in synch. Thus, innovation defined Loomis music teachers’ approach to the spring term. “This is about keeping kids engaged,” said Susan Chrzanowski, the Thomas Benedict Carter Instructor of Music and head of the Music Department, as she considered the department’s work halfway through the term.
With their ensembles unable to practice or perform together in one place, Sue, who teaches vocal music, and instrumental teachers Ken Fischer, Jim Rickevicius, David Winer, and Netta Hadari agreed upon some basic goals for their students at the start of the term, and they looked for creative ways to help students achieve the learning objectives. Sue says they focused on keeping each student musically active — vocalizing or practicing an instrument if it was accessible at home — with an eye to advancing each student’s musicianship. Students who did not have instruments available pursued guided study of an aspect of music history or music theory. Ken, who directs the school’s jazz ensembles, shared some history of jazz music with his classes, something he often does not have time for in his performance-based classes, and he invited guest musicians for online interactions with his students. Vocal students individually and in ensemble groups recorded videos of their performances, which were shared as “Living Room Concerts” with the Loomis community. The Loomis Chaffee Orchestra and Chamber Music students, led by Netta, continued their year-long efforts to write musical melodies and reflections based on the year’s school theme, “Belonging.” They showcased their combined work in a compilation audio/video recording near the end of the term. The Chamber Singers, under Sue’s direction, performed the traditional hymn “How Can I Keep From Singing?” as an ensemble through Zoom and clever editing. Each singer recorded his or her individual part, and the assembled performance was dedicated to the Class of 2020 and played during a webinar in the seniors’ honor on what would have been Commencement Day.
“I feel really good that we’ve done more than we thought we could under the circumstances, and the kids have been truly amazing,” Sue says. She and her colleagues empathized with the students as they coped with the stress and disruptions of the pandemic, and they did their best to make interactions engaging, comforting, and fun.
In the PHI, teachers Jen Solomon and Tim Helfrich ’96 re-imagined the Innovation Trimester (I-Tri), the signature spring term course of the PHI. They enlisted the seven seniors in the course to create a collaborative design-thinking project that worked in a distance-learning environment. The students worked with UConn senior Batouly Camara, a player on the Huskies basketball team, to help her expand the reach of her nonprofit organization, Women and Kids Empowerment (WAKE). Ms. Camara started WAKE to help girls and young women in her home country of Guinea in West Africa gain access to education and connect to broader opportunities through basketball clinics and workshops. The I-Tri students explored and proposed ways that WAKE could continue to expand its visibility and build an online audience as it prepared to launch a youth basketball program and other
initiatives while stay-at-home restrictions were in place. Working in two teams and with direction from Jen and Tim, the seniors collaborated on their projects online. Both teams identified social media as a useful tool for WAKE’s efforts during the pandemic. They presented their recommendations to Ms. Camara in May, and she said she planned to incorporate their suggestions into her work.
The experience was vastly different than last year’s inaugural I-Tri course, Jen acknowledges. Working in separate places is not optimal for learning how to solve problems using design-thinking concepts, which typically involve site visits and physical group activities in the PHI’s flexible learning space. But, she says, the students worked well together and gained many practical skills they can use in their future educational, professional, and life experiences. Tim characterizes the COVID-19 crisis as a “design thinking challenge for the whole world.” The skills that the students learned this spring will help them become effective problem-solvers in the wake of the pandemic and during other future disruptions, he says.
Seniors taking part in programs through the Alvord Center for Global & Environmental Studies, including Guided Research Projects in Environmental Sustainability and the Global & Environmental Studies Certificate program, adjusted their independent inquiries and certificate requirements to fit the distance-learning environment. Some were able to adapt without much disruption while others had to reconsider their final projects, with some surprising pivots. Senior Portia Inzone had been examining the economics of sustainable business practices through a pop-up gourmet coffee shop, The Green Bean, which she had set up in the Scanlan Campus Center in January. Because of the campus closure this spring, Portia’s project did not generate enough data for analysis, so she moved the coffee shop experience online. Her blogsite, “She Brews & Blogs,” welcomes environmental sustainability discussions for coffee lovers. Senior Madison Redmond set up an indoor hydroponic garden in the Clark Center for Science & Mathematics and grew several varieties of lettuce without soil as part of her guided research project. For her end-of-year share-out, she created a series of “how-to” videos for setting up a hydroponic garden at home.
Although the Alvord Center had to cancel several planned initiatives, including all educational travel, the center adapted as much programming as it could to virtual experiences, explains Marley Matlack, the Christopher H. Lutz director of the Alvord Center. The center converted Earth Week programming into a virtual offering of environmental activities and partnered with the Norton Family Center for the Common Good to engage the community through the COVID-19 Speakers Series, a sixpart webinar series featuring expert speakers from among the Loomis community addressing topics related to the pandemic. The center also contributed to a reimagined Cultural Outburst, an annual multicultural celebration at Loomis that the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion set up as an online forum of shared stories and experiences this spring.
Teachers across disciplines were challenged to maintain the connections they had built with their students on campus in the fall and winter and to keep their classes engaged. Building and maintaining rapport and a classroom culture is much easier and more natural in person, they observe.
“We learned early on the importance of staying connected to our students,” says Sara Deveaux, director of the Kravis Center, who works with faculty in developing teaching strategies and identifying professional resources. Interaction between a student and a teacher is what nudges students to go beyond simply absorbing data to thinking about, analyzing, and making connections with the material, which is where the deepest learning happens, she says.
Sara commends the Loomis faculty for the effort they invested in thinking creatively and continuing to advance student learning under the extraordinary circumstances this spring. But online learning has its limitations, she acknowledges. On campus, everyone in the school community plays an integral part in students’ learning experience, she says.
Fostering community beyond the academic realm is a crucial aspect of learning at Loomis, and this area demanded some of the most creative approaches throughout the spring. “Creating community during lockdown and social distancing is really hard,” says Eric LaForest, the Kelly Family Director of the Norton Family Center for the Common Good, which counts community-building on and off the Loomis campus as one of its key objectives. Among its adaptations, the center reached out to students and faculty involved in community service to suggest ways individuals could reach out to neighbors and lend support to local service organizations during the pandemic —
from a safe distance — and partnered with the Alvord Center to present the COVID-19 Speakers Series. And in a wildly popular move, Student Council leaders created “In the Loop,” an entertaining weekly video presen- tation anchored by students and Eric that helped to keep students, faculty, and families connected.
From their spring of teaching, supporting, and connecting with students remotely, Loomis teachers learned “that the best practices of teaching and learning that permeate the hallways of Loomis Chaffee can be replicated in an online format,” Webb says. “It takes a lot of effort and determination as well as some technological proficiency, and it is not quite the same as face-to-face instruction, but it still equated to a robust educational experience for our students.”
Professional development was, and continues to be, key for faculty to make optimal use of educational and technological resources, according to Sara. The Academic, Dean of Stu- dents, Dean of Faculty, Information Technology, Communications, and other administrative offices, as well as the faculty of the PHI and the Kravis Center, supported teachers in their transition to a distance model. The midterm survey of students, parents, and faculty and another survey at the close of the term helped to identify best practices and areas for further improvement.
With the pandemic continuing, Loomis is preparing to teach both in-person and online classes in the 2020–21 school year, and all classes, whether on campus or online, will blend synchronous instruction and structured independent work. The school-year calendar will be split into six intensive five-week terms instead of the usual three 10-week terms, and students will take two or three courses per term rather than five or five-and-a-half. In anticipation of this model, the faculty is engaged in extensive additional professional development and planning this summer, and Webb says this work and the experience of the spring term will prepare the school well for the year ahead.
The grand and unexpected experiment that began in March also is likely to usher in longer-lasting changes in education, Webb says. Will Zoom become the standard approach to evening extra-help sessions, he wonders. Will the ability to connect virtually mean an end to snow days? Will students who miss classes because of an extended illness be able to keep up with their academics more easily? Will students and teachers discover that they prefer fewer, more intensive courses each term? “As the saying goes, necessity is the mother of invention,” he says, “and so I am excited to see what we take away from this experience.”
To watch a video on online learning with Webb and Sara; to see episodes of “In the Loop,” a faculty Zoom music video, and recordings of the COVID-19 Speakers Series webinars; and to access two online student art exhibits, visit www.loomischaffee.org/magazine.
English teacher Jeffrey Scanlon ’79 “zooms” with his students from his Hubbard Hall classroom.
From her desk in the Norton Family Center for the Common Good, history teacher and Norton Center faculty member Molly Pond conducts a synchronous class.
