How the Abbey successfully repositioned its curriculum to virtual learning, and why they hope never to do it again By Annie Sherman ’95 The waterfront campus in Portsmouth was still for the first time in months. Students had abandoned their Houses, classrooms sat silent of instruction, athletics fields and the Stillman Dining Hall were bare. This was the immediate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic that wreaked havoc across the world this past spring, emptying schools while filling hospitals. At Portsmouth Abbey School, most students left campus for March break as if they would return in a few weeks, leaving behind clothes, textbooks and laptops. They stayed home, of course, and for the rest of the semester, campus remained devoid of the academic, athletic, social, and spiritual activities that make it a home for hundreds of students, faculty and monks during the school year. But teaching and learning continued, as teachers and administrators quickly changed tack to create a distance learning program that resembled their in-person curriculum, and that their global student body could absorb. Zoom meetings replaced classrooms, digital reading and homework supplanted physical books, and virtual conversa-
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tions superseded personal connections. Though computers make poor substitute teachers and Zoom fatigue became a surprising new challenge, the sense of what they all accomplished is mighty tangible. “In order to make this whole thing work, we needed buyin. We needed them to trust that we were going to work together to bring this online in a very short timeframe, that we would be supportive and available, and we would guide our students to port,” says Dean of Faculty Kale Zelden. Adds Assistant Headmaster for Academics Nick Micheletti, “and there were times when we had to patiently figure out what worked and didn’t work, but everyone – teachers and students – worked together and made the most out of a bad situation.” Nick, Kale and the faculty needed to ask many existential questions to get liftoff. Do they try to fit as much of their typical term’s worth of material into the virtual medium, or do they take it very slowly and simply and be grateful that
P ORTSM O U T H A BB E Y S C HO OL
