Education professors adapt to training teachers during pandemic

For Susan Dougherty, March 12, 2020, was a day unlike any other of her professional career. An associate professor of literacy education in Rider University’s College of Education and Human Services, she was at an elementary school in the West Windsor-Plainsboro school district that day, supervising students who were spending one day a week there as part of their junior practicum.

“That was the day when the teachers found out the school was shutting down,” she says, “so our interns helped them assemble materials and put them in the kids’ backpacks. Initially, it was supposed to be for two weeks, but of course, it ended up being for the rest of the school year.”

Just as it did in nearly every other facet of life, the coronavirus pandemic caused drastic changes in our education system, with schools worldwide abruptly shifting to remote learning formats. This presented a unique set of challenges for those in the field of teacher education, which relies heavily on personal interaction between preservice teachers and students.

At Rider, this required a team effort.

“As a department and a University, we have all certainly made modifications to support students during these unusual times,” says Heather Casey, a professor of literacy education at Rider.

She credits the school’s technology team of Heeyoung Kim, John Gleavy and Kweli Snowden with putting together a suite of options to support Rider’s instructors.

“Having access to them throughout the summer and this fall has made all of the difference for implementing remote and hybrid learning for the students with whom I work,” Casey adds.

One of the biggest adjustments they had to make was finding ways to replicate the experience of teaching in a classroom setting.

“For education students, being in the field is a huge piece of their experience,” Dougherty says. “They love it, and it was really a powerful loss for them to have that end suddenly.  And I had to rethink how they were going to teach lessons and implement the concepts we learned in class when they weren’t in the field and able to connect with students.”

That meant improvising on the fly. She immediately began recording model lessons and demonstrating hands-on activities that her students could view and try from their remote locations.

Another way she substituted for the live interaction was by having her students create videos in which they taught lessons they would have been presenting in the classroom. She posted those videos on a YouTube channel and shared them on social media as a resource for parents and teachers to use when helping young readers with phonics instruction.

She even enlisted the help of her daughter, who was in first grade at the time. “Normally our students give literacy assessments when they’re in the field but obviously they couldn’t do that. So instead, I gave my daughter all the assessments, recorded them, and my students wrote reports using her as the subject.”

In addition to her work with undergraduate interns, Dougherty was also teaching a practicum course for graduate students who were working toward a reading specialist certification. A key component of the course was to tutor a student. The half-semester course began at approximately the same time the shelter-in-place directives went into effect, so her students no longer had in-person access to children.

“We had to switch to virtual tutoring and they were pretty stressed out about it,” Dougherty recalls. “These were experienced teachers who believed very much in the power of face-to-face interaction, but we had to go for it. They experimented with different tools, shared them with each other and found ways for the children to access reading materials online. It worked out incredibly well. They learned a lot and they also made a difference for the children they were working with, even in a condensed 10-week period.”

Having had the benefit of additional planning for the fall semester, Rider’s faculty has been able to further incorporate best practices for the “new normal” into their coursework for this academic year.

“I believe strongly in collaboration, and like most of my colleagues in the College of Education and Human Services, spent the summer engaged in professional development and learning more about how to use digital tools to support our core learning goals,” says Casey. “So, when I try things like breakout rooms for small group discussions or digital collaboration tools such as Padlet or Jamboard, we also talk about what the goal is for engaging in this and how we might translate this into K-12 literacy practices.”

Casey says that she is also helping her students to prepare for the multiple environments in which they may be teaching — including in-person, virtual and hybrid — as well as having a portion of the students in the classroom while others are remote (HyFlex).

Dougherty has also instituted further changes in her instruction. Where she was previously teaching via prerecorded video, she is now meeting with her students synchronously, which she says is important for building relationships and giving them the opportunity to ask questions.

She is also adapting her lessons to introduce techniques that are better suited for remote learning. As an example, she explains that a teacher would read a story to children differently if they were doing it asynchronously rather than in person.

“In an in-person or synchronous situation, you might stop at certain points in the book to ask questions and then listen to student responses. If you’re recording the lesson, you would pause, and then respond to the possible answers that the children might have given. So you could say, ‘Some of you may have thought this...’ or ‘I noticed this…’ and then move on with reading the story.”

While the transition to online learning has had its challenges, Dougherty says that ultimately it could end up being beneficial to students in Rider’s teacher education program.

She believes that every student who graduated from the program last spring is now employed, and says their familiarity and comfort level with online education tools is one of the reasons why they are so in demand. 

“Recent graduates who were doing their student teaching when COVID hit were highly sought after, in part because they had experience with the technology and knew how to incorporate it into their teaching,” Dougherty says.

Casey agrees, adding, “I have shared with my students that they are in a unique position because they are navigating this environment both as a teacher and a student, which allows them to bring a tremendous amount of empathy to their work. We are all learning!”