For my student teaching time period I was allowed to work with Mr. Steve Vecchio, a physics and earth science teacher at Fossil Ridge High School in Poudre School District in Fort Collins, Colorado. While working with Mr. Vecchio I was fortunate enough to be able to lead the instruction for a variety of classes both individually and working with an extended team of teachers to provide a unified experience across classrooms.
The three different classes that I was most involved with were Introduction to Physics, Advance Placement Physics 1, and Earth Systems Science. Collectively these classes spanned the age range of high school students from mostly younger years in Earth Systems Science to a mixture in Physics, and mostly upper years with AP Physics.
Everything about this experience was enjoyable, from experimenting with pacing and content choice in Physics to working with a team of other educators in Earth Systems Science and co-teaching AP Physics, I experienced a broad range of control and necessary preparation for the courses that I assisted with.
During this time everything was new, both to the other teachers as well as the students. Fossil Ridge created a massive change to their schedule switching from an 8-period day into a block schedule of 4-periods a day and divided the semester into two quarters of four classes each, everyone was fully involved in working through the difficulties of pacing the material and meeting the necessary standards. Accompanying this change in class scheduling was the difference in instruction method, with the first quarter fully remote and the second quarter split between hybrid for the first half and remote for the second.
What stood out to me the most about this was the resiliency and dedication of the students. Despite the massive change, and the vastly increased pacing the comes with it nearly every student was able to keep up with the changes and achieved excellent results despite everything being stacked against them.
Remote education is a complicated concern for me, and it is still early for me to have a fully assessment of my thoughts. Based on my interactions with the students, and the difficulty of maintaining the in-person experience, the response to the two different methods, hybrid versus fully remote, are completely different.
First off the hybrid system as implemented by Fossil Ridge High School. The general basis is that every student was engaged with everyday which created the difficulty of presenting content to both the students in class and remote at the same time. For me, this ended up being a significant challenge as trying to stay aware of how every student is responding to the new material is difficult as I could not find a setup where I could easily be looking at both the screen and the students sitting in the classroom at the same time. This also creates the additional difficult in that the students are divided into two groups and the classrooms are not equipped with the technology that would make this easy (giant screen so that everyone in the classroom can see everyone remote, as well as the lack of microphones to pick up those speaking in class so that the remote students can hear their questions or answers). As I did not experience the other form of hybrid that I have read about (separate lessons for those remote from those in person) I do not know if that would work better, but I feel like the hybrid model is one that needs a lot of experimentation with before I feel comfortable with it working out well for all students.
Second was fully remote were every student was behind the screen. I do have some concerns about this as the vast majority of students did not keep their camera on making it impossible to see how they were reacting to the material being presented, but it was rare for a student to not be willing to respond to a question when asked, even if they proved rather unwilling to initiate a lot of questioning. Overall I feel like this worked better from a learning perspective as everyone was on the same page of being able to interact with the material. Many of the tools that I found for student interaction when fully remote (chat questions, jamboard sessions, and breakout rooms) did not work out well while hybrid, so at the moment I have a preference for the fully remote experience that we had.
Overall for both versions, I do have some concerns about the long-term viability of these models of education. The main concern is that of the laboratory experience, with the safety considerations around sanitization it proved nearly impossible for the students to carry out labs in the same way that we have done them in the past. I personally feel like this will be a challenge for students in the future as laboratory skills are important, both in the actual doing of the lab, but also in the creation of lab reports. The integration of writing into science is vital and hard to accomplish without the use of lab experiments.
Robert Siller 