COVID-19: Teaching now requires patience, empathy

By Opiyo OloyaTeaching in a pandemic requires patience, ingenuity, and empathy.

That was my assessment when I walked into a classroom of 11-year-old children last Friday.

I was in the school for a visit to see how things were working out.  A few days earlier, we had revamped our previous plan that created a dual learning mode — one for students who wanted to learn online and another for students who wanted to do so face to face.

We had reasoned that parents anxious about COVID-19 could keep their children at home. We also thought that those who choose to come face to face would stay committed to that mode of learning. In reality, this worked well for some students, but not for all.

Fear of the pandemic soon drove many students, who were attending face to face to request, to move online. The problem was how to respond quickly by creating online classes when the teachers needed to run them were still stuck in the real classrooms.

We needed to be creative. That is when we decided to work on a hybrid model, where the same teacher was responsible for online learning as well as for face to face. A teacher with 20 children using this model, for example, could have 15 of them in the physical class and five online.

The students whether at home or in school learn the same material in real-time. All the teachers needed was a laptop, camera, and microphone to pipe the lesson to the students learning from their kitchen tables at home.

So when I stepped into the classroom, the students were busy working on maths. The teacher stopped the students and prompted them to acknowledge me. They put down their pens to pay attention to.

But before I could open my mouth to greet the class, the teacher informed me that six of her students were at that moment following the live lesson online.

She gestured to the laptop perched on top of a bookshelf in the corner. The blinking green light on the screen of the laptop told me what I needed to know — I was on live-video and the students online were watching my every move.

I quickly walked over to the laptop to see who the students were, noting their names. I greeted them with — Hi guys online, are you all good? The answer came back over the computer, "Yes, we are."

Then I turned to say hello to the students seated in front of me. I wanted to address the issue of bullying.  It had been brought to my attention earlier that several students were not being nice to classmates.

As I launched into the discussion, I addressed the students listening online as well as those in front of me. From time to time, I called on a student online to see, if he or she was following.Yes, the student would respond, he or she was following what I was saying.

Bullying was not acceptable. We needed to treat each other with respect. Then I put the question I often throw out in those situations — How many people are on planet earth?A student in the room answered, three billion. Then his peer online shouted out the answer over the computer.

Seven and half billion! Yes, that was the number I said."So, if I travel around the world will I find the exact carbon copy of you anywhere on the face of the planet? They thought through that one; maybe it was a trick question.

It was not.No, someone answered, there is only one of us on earth. Precisely, I said.  What that means is that we should celebrate each other rather than hurt each other.

Everyone is unique among the seven and half billion on earth.With so many people around, it is a miracle we run into each other at all.

What I found amazing as I went through the discussion was how quickly I adjusted my notion of the classroom.

The traditional classroom in front of me expanded to the one online. The students, especially those in the physical classroom, needed to show patience for those online.There was a certain lag as those online responded to questions or added to the ongoing discussion.

Often, their tiny voices coming through the loudspeakers required both sides to speak up.Then there was the question of ingenuity. The teacher had set up the laptop with the camera at such an angle that it gave the students learning remotely the opportunity to see just about everything she was doing including the work on the blackboard.

But because many of the parents of those attending face to face did not want the live images of their children relayed over the Internet, the angle of the camera avoided capturing the entire classroom. That was not all. There was the question of empathy. It is difficult to connect with a person whose voice you can hear, but who is not in the same physical space.

There was an added effort to keep the students online just as engaged as those in the physical classroom. The old teaching trick of calling students by name worked well for me. With their names in my head, I was able to call the online students by name, asking a question, and expecting an answer. They knew I was with them and they were with me.

The neat thing with this model is that if all the students have to quarantine because a classmate or the teacher-tested positive for COVID-19, they can continue to learn online. And they can all return when they deem it safe enough to be in the physical classroom.It is flexible, just what parents need in the time of the pandemic.

It is not the same as the traditional desk and chairs classroom, but it is innovative enough to support learning through this pandemic. In the brave new world of viruses, everyone needs to adapt.

Opiyo.oloya@gmail.com

Twitter: @Opiyooloa