I believe that the single most challenging aspect of most hybrid plans is the need for classroom teachers to simultaneously instruct students in the classroom and students online. In other words, you are teaching two separate audiences at the same time – one group of students in the room with you, while other students join from home. Obviously simulcasting of instruction presents some challenging. The first is a technical one, related to the availability of the hardware, software, and adequate internet bandwidth to pull everything off. When you walk into one of our classrooms, you tend to see the teacher’s laptop open in Microsoft Teams, broadcasting the lesson to online students. Many of our teachers are using the projector to project the students at home onto the front screen, so that the students sitting in the room can see those who are at home. This is also done in classrooms with a video screen available, so that students in the room are aware and can interact with students who are at home. Our teachers are also equipped with an iPad, which allows for further flexibility. Some teachers are using the iPad as their lesson plan and notes, something they can hold close to guide them through the lesson. Other teachers are using it as an additional camera, so that the students at home get an up-close view of the teacher – instead of just the far away take provided through the laptop. In the most sophisticated practices, the teacher can use the iPad like a tablet, sharing his or her iPad screen to both the students online and through the projector to the students sitting in the room. There are a lot of different configurations, and it has been really incredible to see the creativity and ownership of our teachers in solving the problem of simulcasting their classroom instruction.
Admittedly, attending to students both at home and in person can be physically demanding and draining. Teaching all day, under regular circumstances, is both intense mental and physical work. Broadening the scope of the teacher’s attention across virtual and in-person modalities at the same time only intensifies that work. Of course, with time, our teachers will develop routines that allow their brains and senses to back off from the initial intensity of all new systems for engagement and interaction, but it is still a heavy lift.
To address this transition to simulcasting, we strategically made two structural shifts to our daily schedule. First, we decided to move to a 4-day week for in-person hybrid instruction. This leaves us Fridays for virtual only learning. Having one day during the week in 100% virtual mode not only allows us additional time for a deep clean of the campus, but it provides teachers with a sensory break and time for additional instructional planning. The other shift, perhaps even more significant, was to shorten our instructional day. In essence, our in-person instructional is a half-day in length, with students being released a lunchtime each day. We offer additional support, tutoring, and coursework in the afternoon. Our teachers have the option to leave the physical campus (which we encourage to limit physical interaction to the extent possible) to work the remainder of the day from home. We have given this first 9 weeks of hybrid learning the title of “transitional period” as a way to communicate that we are indeed making ongoing transitions and structural shifts back to in-person instruction and services. But of all the adjustments, the biggest is the teacher shift to simultaneous instruction.
There are some schools and systems that have founds ways to avoid simultaneous instruction altogether. To do so, schools have basically had to adopt one of two strategies. The first strategy is to restructure the teaching staff into completely different groups, so that students learning virtually are attended to exclusively by teachers working virtually, and in-person students work with in-person teachers. On the surface, this strategy may seem ideal. Of course at the high school and intermediate levels, this may not be possible at all due to the complexities of the master schedule. Simply stated, it may not be possible to group students in all of their electives and unique schedules into entirely in-person or virtual classes. Those teachers certainly would have to teach both in-person and virtually anyway, although they might avoid the need for simulcasting. The other, perhaps unintended consequence of approaching the division of the school in this way, is that it also divides the staff into in-person and virtual camps. I’ve heard not so pleasant stories of staff lobbying to stay virtual, while colleagues are forced to teach in-person, with correspondingly higher levels of health risk. Contract negotiations and collective bargaining are usually not far behind.
The other strategy to avoid simulcasting, much less popular it seems to me, is to platoon schedule the entire school, with all in-person learning happening in the morning, and then all virtual learning happening in the afternoon, using basically the same teachers to do both. We also explored this possibility, but even if we moved to an exclusively 4-day work week, the four days would be incredibly long and still tight for our high school courses in terms of instructional time. In other words, it’s hard (although not impossible) to fit two schools days into a single day.
In the end, like most schools, we opted for simulcasting. It is a trade-off we discussed at length as a leadership team. We mocked-up different scenarios to see what the other possibilities might look like, and decided in the end that a shortened day initially will allow our staff to build their capacity as simulcasting, and then grow from there without having to significantly interrupt the typical school day or week calendar. We’re just a week into it now, but I’ve been really impressed by the degree to which our teachers have worked collaboratively to support each other in designing and implementing their systems for simulcasting instruction. It’s perhaps the biggest variable in hybrid learning, and our teachers have already been attacking the design challenge head-on.