The school system is prepared to follow that up in the fall with a powered-up tutoring program. “We’re employing more interventionists,” Campbell says, “so we’ll have the ability to work with students one-on-one and in small groups, during the school day and after school. We’re going to teach at grade level—if they were a third grader last year, we’re going to put fourth grade material in front of them, and our tutoring programs will accelerate their learning as opposed to doing remediation.” the internet is here to stay Schools are, by nature, institutions of stability and repetition. At the same time, every school year is a whirlwind. Maybe because of all that, schools have been among the last environments permeated by newfangled digital technologies. What a difference a pandemic makes. Mon County Schools was better prepared than many districts for a surprise school year on the internet. Students in most grades were assigned Chromebooks several years ago, leaving only the lowest grades to be supplied in fall 2020. And for the previous three summers, the district had offered a technology professional development camp for teachers—although the new skills hadn’t all made their way into classrooms. “It’s difficult. I’ve experienced this myself as an educator,” Campbell says. “You have professional development activities, and you get excited about it and want to try it in the classroom, and sometimes the practicality isn’t there and the learning goes by the wayside.” But last year, he says, teachers were forced to put new resources and software platforms into practice. It was a lot to take on all at once. Morgantown High School visual arts teacher Sam Brunett is thoughtful on the topic. “Teachers had to remain what they already were, which was classroom teachers, while also becoming their own little multimedia production studios.” As an art teacher, Brunett does a lot of demonstration. “So I would teach at my desk, which I usually don’t do, with a document camera.” These mounted cameras that point straight down to capture a document or activity on a work surface, like the old overhead projectors, were the go-to tool during COVID. “So I was able to livestream for the kids at home, and a big-screen TV set showed it to the kids in the classroom. Then, if you can imagine teaching kids who are raising their hands and other kids who are writing you questions online at the same time you’re answering questions in the classroom—it became juggling.” Trial and error took delightful turns. “I met with my homeroom for 20 minutes every morning, even when we were remote,” Brunett says. “There’s this thing I did for a while that was interesting. You can put up this blank white screen, and everybody has a chance to write something on that screen. I didn’t say anything. It took about five days for kids to see that they could draw. One girl, every homeroom, would do a drawing, and other kids would watch or comment. It was kind of a visual social experiment.” More than one teacher told us they were scared, going into the school year, about teaching online, but soon realized they were able to do it. And a lot of them got creative. One augmented a civil rights unit with a civil rights–oriented “road trip” and had students listen to Motown songs online and write about the themes in the lyrics. Teachers took advantage of virtual tours of museums around the world. “It’s pretty nice to sit in your classroom in Blacksville, West Virginia, and do a virtual tour of the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.,” Principal
students ran with tech , too When COVID-19 shut schools down in March 2020, Lauren Shen was an 8th grader at Suncrest Middle School. “I began to feel really isolated,” Shen recalls. So she initiated daily “study hall” meetings on Zoom with a few friends. “We bonded a lot, and we helped each other out if we had questions about how school was going. It just became a regular thing, to the end of that semester.” In May, the usual Step-Up Day high school tour for rising 9th graders was just some online information. “We were kind of in the dark about how high school was going to go,” Shen says. “So I called one of my friends, she had just finished her sophomore year, to come to the study hall meeting. I moderated and asked her questions about high school—What is the schedule? How do lunches work? How do you study for classes? It was a really valuable experience for us.” So in the fall of 2020, Shen started a Discord server— that’s a user-friendly group chat, audio, and video app for building communities. She called it Students Connect, and she invited a wider circle, “people who are passionate about school, into extracurriculars, people I’d known in middle school. Some people invited their friends.” A few days in advance of a meeting—most took place at 4 p.m. on Thursdays—Shen would send out a Zoom link with a topic. Early meetings revolved around remote learning and the transition to high school. Later meetings were sometimes study halls for common AP classes or, occasionally, a speaker invited from another club. Around 30 people were participating in Students Connect when the spring semester ended, most of them 9th graders with a few older students and one rising freshman. Shen plans to continue the Students Connect Discord server in the fall, even if school is entirely in person and club meetings could happen in a classroom. “I am really, really looking forward to going back to school and having that in-person experience again,” she says. “But we learned last year that things don’t have to be one-dimensional. I think that continuing this virtual aspect will
give a lot more flexibility to the club, even if we do have in-person meetings. The main purpose is still to connect, whether it’s in person or online.”
42 MORGANTOWN FALL 2021
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