Oh, 2020-2021 school year. I do not miss you, but I did learn a lot last year and one of my goals for the upcoming school year is to use what I learned going forward. As of this writing, I’m not 100% sure what the 2021-2022 school year will look like (even though school starts is 2 weeks lol), but I’m doubting that virtual and hybrid learning is going to be on the table for us. However, there are still some things I want to pull from last year that I think will make my in-person teaching better.

1. Daily Slides – I got this idea from Megan at Too Cool for Middle School. She uses this with her middle schoolers, but I think it also worked great for a year when clear communication was so important. Basically, daily slides are just a Google slide you make for each day your class meets that includes what you are doing for that day and what their homework is. That’s it. You just update this every day and put it somewhere your students will see it. If this had been a normal year, you might put this up on the board at the beginning of every class, but for me, I just embedded the slide presentation into our LMS so it was the first thing students saw when they opened up the page for our class. It’s super easy and it’s just another way to communicate with your students about what is upcoming and when due dates are. My students said they appreciated this when I had a student who was struggling to complete homework, I was able to send her parents this slide deck so that they were informed about due dates. Even though virtual/hybrid learning is likely over for my school this year, this is something I’ll probably keep doing on my LMS pages for my classes just so that students feel like they are in the loop about what is going on each day.

2. Digital Absent Binder – In the ‘before COVID times’ I used to keep a binder in my classroom that had a form I filled out whenever a student was absent and then there were folders that I would place work they needed to make up in. This year I made a digital version and it works SO MUCH BETTER. I just made a Google Slide presentation of the form that was in the binder and linked on our LMS page for our class so students had access to it. Students can get access to the work they missed right away (they don’t have to wait till they come back to school to look in a binder) and it cut down on emails from absent students asking for what they missed. This will definitely be something I continue into the new year. 

3. Social Issues/Current Event Discussions – This is something new I did in anatomy last year and I really liked how it worked. For certain units I brainstormed some topics that were connected to what we were learning about but weren’t also directly tied to science (if that makes sense). I’ve put an example of the topics I chose for our skeletal system unit below. Each topic linked to an article and students could choose any topic that interested them. After reading the article, students created a discussion post on our LMS that included a short summary of their article and their reaction to what they read. They then responded to another classmate’s post. After creating a discussion post, we would have a short discussion as a class about what they read. This gave students a chance to ask questions of each other about what they read. We had some really good conversations about the topics and I think students appreciated the connection between our topics in anatomy and real-world events/current issues. 

4. Less Paper! – I never realized how much paper I use until last year. With all our learning moving online, I think we were all pretty much forced to stop using paper for everything. As we move back into normal, in-class learning, I want to continue to use less paper when I can. I think it’s less wasteful, make copies of everything is time consuming for me, and I teach in a one-to-one school so using paper isn’t really necessary. However, I will probably go back to using paper for tests and quizzes and some class work. For example, sometimes I think filling out something like a concept map is easier with paper and pencil. But for the most part I want to continue to use less paper from this point forward. 

5. Alternative Assessments – I taught two semester electives this year and for both I used projects to assess student learning instead of tests for the entire semester. I’m really proud of this, because using alternative assessments is something I’ve always wanted to get better at. For assessments we did a variety of projects, presentations, short papers, and small portfolios. Not all of the projects were perfect in my opinion, but I can tweak them in the future and overall I feel like they were authentic assessments of what students learned in each unit. I also felt like most of the projects I assigned weren’t too taxing to grade. (In the past I have dreading grading projects and papers; mostly I think because it feels so much more subjective than grading a test and it takes longer) When I was creating directions for these projects I made sure to ask myself, ‘Is this something that is going to take me forever to read and grade?’. If it seemed like too much, I was tweak it to make it manageable. This is something I want to continue in the future even in my content-heavy classes like anatomy. Even if I mostly give tests as summative assessments, I can assign projects, once a semester for example, to break it up a little bit. 

6. Not coming to school sick! – Can we normalize this forever? I really think that in this pandemic we have learned that it’s kind of rude to be out in public when you are sick and potentially giving that sickness to other people. I think we should stress to students and teachers that it is good to stay home when you are sick so that you don’t infect other people. (Can we get rid of perfect attendance awards please?) So, I encourage you to do the same. STAY HOME IF YOU ARE SICK. (Unless you are like me and have to use your sick days for your maternity leave in which case you want to save them all up. But I digress…)

Last year was one heck of a year, but I think that there were some positives to come out of all of this too. Honestly, I hope schools reflect on this year and try some new and innovative things. This is a great opportunity to kind of ‘blow things up’ and start new with fresh ideas for what schools can do for students. I’m a little disappointed that so many schools are determined to go back to ‘business as usual’ without thinking about how we could fix things that weren’t so good in the ‘before times’. However, as teachers, we do have some control over what we do in our classrooms, and even if we can’t change everything, we can change some things about the way we teach and manage our classrooms. What are your thoughts? I would love to hear about what you want to keep from the craziest year ever! 

Take Care!