When Willow School kindergarten teacher Christina Stevens got her class list for the 2020-2021 school year, she could not help but feel like something was off.
“This is so strange,” she said to herself.
It was the start of her second year as a teacher, but it felt like she had never finished her first. The shutdowns related to the COVID-19 pandemic started happening in mid-March. No one finished the school year inside of Willow’s walls, and that meant the Homewood teacher and her first class missed out on the end-of-the-year things kindergarteners would typically do.
When Willow School kindergarten teacher Christina Stevens got her class list for the 2020-2021 school year, she could not help but feel like something was off.
“This is so strange,” she said to herself.
It was the start of her second year as a teacher, but it felt like she had never finished her first. The shutdowns related to the COVID-19 pandemic started happening in mid-March. No one finished the school year inside of Willow’s walls, and that meant the Homewood teacher and her first class missed out on the end-of-the-year things kindergarteners would typically do.
She also spent the better part of that school year trying to hit her stride. Everything was just starting to click when the floor dropped out from underneath her.
“I feel like last year, I was just as a teacher starting to feel like I was walking rather than sprinting to catch up with everyone else,” she said. “We were just starting to get in our groove. I think, for me, it made it harder.”
Going into the fall, with Homewood School District 153 starting the year entirely remote, she knew teaching kindergarten was going to be particularly hard. The lessons at that level, she said, are as much about learning to line up and be in a class with one another as anything else.
“These new kindergarteners literally have no idea what it’s like to be in a school,” Stevens said. “That’s the most difficult part. … It’s an interesting process to figure out how to help them learn those skills.”
She worries that when school returns to in-person instruction the youngsters will have to “double-adjust” to both lessons and those social aspects.
What has helped Stevens a bit since the start of the school year is just being with a class again, even virtually.
And the children have regularly surpassed Stevens’ expectations for what this year can be. She worried about the types of interactions they would have over Zoom but found that concern mostly unfounded.
“It’s been really surprising to me how well students have been forming relationships together,” Stevens said. “That classroom community is really starting to be built. It just kind of shows how resilient the kids are.”
But the experience is still far from what Stevens expected when she started teaching last year.
“It kind of feels like you’re riding a rollercoaster but you’re also backwards and you’re also blindfolded,” she said.
There is a good attitude among the staff, though, that they need to make the best of the situation and just make this year work, somehow. Stevens worried it would be a completely miserable experience, but it has proven otherwise.
That is thanks, in part, to her “amazing” mentor with whom she checks in a lot. The district has assigned mentors to first- and second-year teachers since long before the pandemic. Even though everyone is facing the same hardships, Stevens said it helps to talk.
“I have someone I can go to and trust with my issues or celebrate my successes with,” Stevens said. “As a second year teacher, it’s almost comforting to know that everyone’s in the same boat right now.”
‘Everyone is learning right now’
Among those helping everyone get through the remote experience is Joe Rusk. In his fifth year, Rusk, too, is a kindergarten teacher at Willow and also serves as a grade level tech leader.
In that role, he helps teachers with the academic tools they utilize to teach remotely. That could mean how to access programs or walking teachers through new processes.
But even Rusk admits he does not have it all figured out. The week leading up to school resuming was “trying” and Rusk said he definitely puts in more hours these days to make sure he’s prepared for whatever lies ahead.
“It’s still a process that’s being figured out every day,” he said. “It doesn’t matter if you’ve been here 20 years. Everyone is learning right now.”
Rusk also said he can relate to Stevens’ concerns about kindergarteners. Normally, he would be teaching children how to hold their pencils and cut paper in class.
“Those will be important skills going forward that cannot be done on a computer,” he said. “We can’t do all those things, all the nonacademic things. We’re plugging away and doing what we can.”
But Rusk said progress is being made, both for the students and teachers.
“Each day gets a little bit better, because you get a little more comfortable with what you’re doing,” he said.
“The parents have been great,” he said, and integral to the experience of remote learning, especially at the younger levels, where they are needed to help make sure the children “treat this like school.”
Rusk spent the first few weeks building relationships between his students. He tried to keep in mind that he still has his best friend from kindergarten. He wants to make sure the children form bonds like that, despite the circumstances.
“It’s an important year for social-emotional stuff,” he said. “What’s been really great is that they’re starting to make more connections.”
Rusk said while remote learning may not be the most ideal thing for everyone, at least it is better than the surprise of last spring’s shutdown. Then, he maintained some Zoom contact with students twice a week, just to check in to make sure they were OK.
“I kept it light,” he said. “It was tough, because we were so unsure with what was happening in the world.”
He recognized then that it was hard to make the same kind of connections he had with students in the classroom. He also realized the expectations could not be the same.
With the summer came more uncertainty, but task forces at District 153 got to work preparing for a number of possibilities. Rusk was on the remote task force.
“I don’t think anyone could be fully prepared for what we were going to do, because no one has been through this,” he said.
‘I don’t know anything different’
Jenna Ryan has been teaching for nine years, but fall 2020 marked the start of her first year as a seventh-grade math teacher at Flossmoor’s Parker Junior High. In her case, a little bit of ignorance to the ways of the junior high may have been bliss.
“It has been really strange,” she said. “I guess it’s kind of nice I don’t know anything different at this school.”
Ryan has a good idea of how to integrate the technology at this point, but the challenge has been teaching “authentically,” and building relationships with and between the students.
“There are times when it’s just crickets,” she said of asking for responses.
But she found some early success in utilizing Zoom’s breakout rooms to get things clicking more between the students in smaller groups.
“Since I’ve been doing that, the conversations they’ve been having have been much better,” Ryan said.
She learned her first period class loves musicals, so they’ll often start the day talking about them, and she’s involved in book club discussions, too.
“It’s nice, even though it’s virtual, to share those interests,” she said.
She also has learned that she cannot rush through lessons at the same pace she might in-person. She said it has been a matter of “learning and adapting on the fly,” but it was starting to come together, heading into the second quarter of the school year.
“I do have my stride a little bit more so,” she said.
Ryan said the remote school year thus far has not been without its pleasant surprises. Among them, she said the lack of social pressure that can come with being inside the walls of a junior high has led to student leaders stepping up in different ways.
“That has been nice to see,” she said.
The math department, in particular, has provided her with a lot of support along the way.
“That has been such a blessing to be able to rely on that,” she said. “They’re more than willing to help…That building of a professional community has been so nice for me entering a new school.”
District 161 plays a big part in the successes, too. Ryan said she has friends who teach elsewhere who say their administrations have put a lot of extra pressure on them, making things even harder. Ryan said she has only felt supported in her efforts this year.
“The district has done a really good job of giving the teachers understanding,” she said.
Ryan finds teachers are in constant communication, trying to remain positive, planning lessons and assisting each other along the way.
“It’s that meticulous busy work that adds up,” she said. “It definitely takes a lot of work, and you have been ‘on’ more than you usually do because you’re always on-screen.”
Ryan said she thinks school is definitely easier and better for everyone in-person, but it needs to be safe. She said she is not too worried about where this year leaves students because everyone will have gone through it together.
‘We just go with the flow’
If there is one major advantage veteran teachers still have in the world of remote learning, it may be the comfort level they have with years of adaptability under their belts, according to Lisa Nicotra, who has been teaching social studies since 2002 at Parker to sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders.
A lesson plan helps guide the year, Nicotra said, but after years of teaching one gets more comfortable with making adjustments to keep students from getting stressed.
“Kids, in general, are the absolutely best at undermining your lesson plans,” she said with a laugh. “I got a lot better at pivoting. That’s one of my greatest assets now with remote learning.”
For the first quarter of the school year exclusively online, that has in large part meant slowing things down, she said.
“We just go with the flow,” Nicotra said. “They understand a lot more and learn a lot more by slowing my pace down.”
Nicotra said when the shutdown hit in the spring, it at first felt like her early years of teaching. It was not a big deal for the students at her grade levels.
“My classes were all paperless anyway,” she said.
She was still live-teaching once a week, but the students were primarily remote learning at that stage. She regularly checked in on them for “status updates.”
Over the summer, she found herself making more PDF files than usual to make materials easily accessible to students. She created content for them that she could not easily find online, and she got to work making videos, many of her reading materials to students.
She estimates she still probably puts in an extra 7 to 8 hours over the weekend to make sure everything is ready to go.
“That takes a lot of time,” she said.
Nicotra has been recognized by the district winning the #AboveAndBeyond award for her efforts in utilizing a Bitmoji classroom and other new techniques to keep her students engaged in history lessons. Nicotra said that district support has been integral to getting through this difficult time. The administration has strived to create some sense of consistency and normalcy, and has been open to new ideas, she said.
“They realize the situation is stressful,” she said. “They know that. They understand that.”
Nicotra said communication is tough, with parents inundated with emails and playing a new role in their children’s education.
“It’s a no-win situation,” she said. “It really is.”
But Nicotra said the good news is students have handled this unique situation well. She sees part of her job as just keeping them positive until everyone comes out on the other side of this.
“They’re still sixth-graders,” she said. “It’s nice to know they’re still kids and I can still have fun with them.
“They’re OK. They’re very resilient. This is definitely difficult. It’s a change. It’s OK, and we’re going to get through it.”