TEAM is central to my philsophy of teaching and learning. Through 18 years of teaching, I have found TEAM supports learners develop a sense of belonging to their learning community, which is essential for their social, emotional, and cognitive flourishing.

During the COVID-19 crisis maintaining TEAM has been an essential aspect of ensuring ongoing education provision.

TEAM at a Distance

Professional Community Connection

With the onset of the COVID-19 crisis school staff were quick to mobilize. It was an ‘all hands on deck’ approach to support the transition to distance learning. In the first instance, all children were issued Chrome books to take home for the duration of the crisis, and staff development sessions enabled teachers to make the transition to online learning using Google Classroom. These sessions began in a face-to-face environment and transitioned to online as the ‘Stay at Home’ orders were issued. The strength of our professional community emerged in these early days, as colleagues supported one another making the transition, learning new instructional tools, and discussing how to support learning at a distance. From the Suite of Google Apps, teachers adopted Google Classroom, Google Meet, and JamBoard. Within Google Classroom, Google forms are used for quizzes; videos and interactive online activities from Educational support sites like EdPuzzle, Legends of Learning, ABCYa, and YouTube support learners engage with content.

Weekly Google Meet staff meetings have been an asset – promoting teacher and staff well-being, through opportunity to de-stress, share worries and successes, get Education updates, and to reboot for the week to come. These have highlighted for me, the importance of maintaining a strong professional community connection in order to ensure continued teaching and learning.

Professional development (PD) has been available in-school and at district level. Our school Director of Technology and Media, and the district level Technology Integration Specialist have provided 1:1 and small group instructional support on various technologies via ZOOM and Google MEET. I have benefitted directly, learning how to use Flipgrid, Screencastify, and Google Slides to integrate stop animation into my programming.

A strength of this PD support has been the openness to individual interests. My interest in establishing a District-wide Professional Learning Community Forum has been readily embraced by the District Tech., who acted immediately, setting it up for elementary teachers. Teachers can access the space to support one another through professional discussion and shared practice-related experiences.

Building Community through Parental Connection

I have used technology to develop TEAM-like connections with parents. A key part of TEAM has been working with parents to help them become comfortable and connected with the new learning environment. ‘Google Class tours’ using Google Meet, regular emails, and timely Google Meet drop-in sessions allow parents to connect with me to provide feedback, ask questions, and to troubleshoot dilemmas. Parents have become ‘class members’ to Google Classroom and ClassDojo, where they can track their children’s activity and see a portfolio of  their children’s work. Strong parent-teacher-child partnerships have been a tremendous asset to the success of online learning.

Nothing Like Routine: Keeping Students Connected

Developing an online TEAM with the children has been essential to ensure their ongoing learning. Routine has been an important element. Children use Google Classroom to access their daily schedule, and lesson activities. We meet every morning for our Morning Meeting, which involves many of the same routines that defined our first 30 minutes of ‘normal’ in-class activity.  Adding to this, ClassDojo has been an invaluable resource to maintain a focus on working together. I can take attendance, share videos that support Social Emotional Learning topics; use positive incentives; and create student portfolios. All of these features mirror routines the children had in the classroom, which has supported maintaining their class-connectedness.

As a school, we have developed a Daily News programme, written and hosted by our P.E. teacher. This program continues the routines that defined the beginning of our in-school, school day including birthday announcements, certificate awards, prayers and Pledge lead by 6th Graders via video recording.  The Daily News hosts photos that children send in, showcasing activities they have participated in and work that they have completed. It is a valuable sharing time that consolidates our connectedness as a community.

A Different Way to Teach

This crisis has certainly challenged my creativity, innovation, and flexible approaches to practice. It has underscored the importance of continued professional learning. Adopting a distance learning approach with children has demanded complex thinking – trying to ensure the social, emotional aspects are included; trying to be sure the children are connected as learners; and trying to introduce new concepts with tools that don’t always support practices essential for children’s learning, takes resilience, constant reflection, and a willingness to ‘have another go’!

Wendee White

5Th Grade Elementary School Teacher, Syracuse, NY, USA

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This piece is part of the Teacher Task Force’s #TeachersVoices campaign, created to bring forward the experiences of teachers working every day to ensure their students continue to benefit from a quality education despite the COVID-19 pandemic. To participate, go to our dedicated webpage.

As a head teacher, I have always felt that teaching means not only getting the curricular content right and imparting that knowledge. It also means encouraging children to think for themselves by making them mindful of their lives and giving them the skills they need to go about various things. I have always felt that the usual school processes should not be so rigid. Until children spend some extra time sitting idle, how will they realize the power of discipline and commitment?

The Covid-19 lockdown measures have really helped me find the answer to a question that has been nudging me for a long time: “Is it really necessary that learning and teaching should be confined to the four walls of the classroom? The new answer in this situation comes out to be “Absolutely not”. Technology has really made this big globe local to us. Physical presence hardly matters. What really matters is the right tools and the pertinent approach to use them.

 In 2008 I read that there is a lot of work going on to make things e-accessible and that the future will bring user-friendly and self-teaching devices. I didn’t realize this until this lockdown that that world has arrived. Within a few days I had learnt to use and operate Zoom, Jitsy, Microsoft Team, Google Hangouts and many other platforms. The e-world has become the new reality!

Within a week I was teaching my students through an app. I received formal training from agencies but I learned most things by testing and trying. At first it wasn’t an easy to survive on e-mode (electronic/virtual/online mode) but after a few days I could see that technology does work most of the time, despite occasional disturbances, virtual distractions and audio-video problems. Initially I thought teaching through this new delivery mode was one-way communication but soon I realized that the sessions can be made lively by adding polls, surveys and videos sandwiched in between the sessions. The technology stunned me because in rural schools we just cannot afford to build in so much variety.

In the first few days, it was more a kind of game and the attendance of the students was also high but soon I realized that attendance was dropping and the joy of a new game was over. The reasons could be many: maybe a network problem, maybe the voice wasn’t audible for the students, maybe they were so busy helping the fathers harvest and mothers to cook, maybe my screen wasn’t visible or – the worst one! –  perhaps my class wasn’t interesting. When I checked the chat box, however, suddenly the conversations became two-way – the children had been on mute. They started to share their problems in the chat box.

As for myself, I was feeling distracted due to various noises but soon I realized that I needed to stop multitasking and be mindful and convey the same to my students. I finally taught them a HOTS (high order thinking skill) of mindfulness.

Whenever you feel that response is weak and attendance is poor, students are just a phone call away. Good communication and effectively convincing students why they need to study comes handy. And my country, India, has a family-oriented culture so it is always easy to make calls to parents and get the folks back to classes.

However, bad networks, high charges for data and high costs for devices are a real challenge. These could be removed by providing a free, subsidized network. Village and city libraries could be converted into virtual rooms with laptops, tablets and internet connections. If learning is free, anybody has the power to become anything.

Dr Neeru Arora

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This piece is part of the Teacher Task Force’s #TeachersVoices campaign, created to bring forward the experiences of teachers working every day to ensure their students continue to benefit from a quality education despite the COVID-19 pandemic. To participate, go to our dedicated webpage.

Greetings to you all from Turkey. My name is Nurten Akkuş. I am a Global Teacher Prize Top 10 Finalist. I am a preschool teacher –my students are between the ages of 3 and 6. I work in a socio-economically disadvantaged area, where I seek to change and improve people’s lives with education. I attach great importance to paying attention to the individual characteristics of my students. We have made our class and school suitable for the development of my students. We enjoy education by having fun and discovering together. Before the coronavirus entered our lives, we had a great school environment. However, suddenly we had to move this educational environment that we created to digital media.

The virus first reached our country in early March. Everyone was in panic as the world woke up to the epidemic and thousands of people died. Our health ministry and state administrators gave out information about precautions to take. The schools were on vacation. People in our country were called on to “stay home” to try to prevent the spread of the epidemic.

Around the world, we are having a very difficult time. Schools are closed in many countries. We cannot teach face to face. But we are teachers. Our students and their families are always very important to us. It was very difficult to explain this situation to all our students, because we loved learning and school with our students. Families and children were very worried about the virus. I wanted to reduce anxiety before we began teaching online. I had to increase their motivation.

First of all, I talked to the families. I told them that although we need to pay attention to the news, excessive anxiety will be negative in children. I did family education online. We constantly communicate with the groups we have created with them.

Then I spoke to my students online. It was a different experience for them. I told them how we should pay attention to cleaning, and what the virus is, in a simple way suitable for age groups. I asked the children to make part of their home an activity centre. They made their home environment fun.

A great system was made by our Ministry of National Education. Distance education was supported with TV channels. Online training content, game activities and books were prepared. We have set up an online classroom with this system. We share our daily activities there. We also share the daily education flow with the families and enable them to participate in these activities. We carry out many activities with our students such as art, science, plant breeding, vital skills training, free activities, drama, design, mathematics and language education. Through this process, psychological support has been provided for students and families in our country.  

All teachers are constantly communicating with their students in Turkey. Distance education methods and educational content are further developed by our Ministry of National Education. Despite the fact that my students are young, they are obliged to learn via distance learning methods. Families and teachers take an active role in the distance education process. I have given lectures in Turkey and many different countries. But I am giving online conferences right now. Teachers always believe that face-to-face education is very important. This is absolutely true, however, teachers now think that given the critical situation in the world, opportunities for distance education should be well known.

The Varkey Foundation, which works to build the capacity of teachers, offers a great chance for teachers to meet online to discuss methods in different countries of the world.

In a very short time, we have become used to living with digital life and learning. Of course, we miss being with our students and our school. They also miss us. However, my students’ health is very important. And they should not miss out on their education. I hope this epidemic ends as soon as possible in both my country and the rest of the world, so that all people in the world are healthy and that all children can go back to school.

Nurten Akkuş

Nurten Akkuş was one of the finalists of the Varkey Foundation's Global Teacher Prize.

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This piece is part of the Teacher Task Force’s #TeachersVoices campaign, created to bring forward the experiences of teachers working every day to ensure their students continue to benefit from a quality education despite the COVID-19 pandemic. To participate, go to our dedicated webpage.