Since March of 2020, she and her fellow math teachers at Laney High School have worked to adjust to online learning and ensure their students were successful while out of school, even in advanced classes like statistics and calculus. Laney Principal Sharon Dousharm said the teachers put their "blood, sweat and tears" into creating lessons for their students to enhance remote learning.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, teachers around the country have adapted to teaching outside of the classroom, found new tools online to enhance learning and focused more than ever on emotional health of students as the pandemic took hold.
Many of them took that adjustment a step further to ensure their students' success. These are a few of the many in the Wilmington area who took that extra step.
It was teachers like Metz and co-worker Sharon Sterken Berg who not only went above their call of duty, but impacted the way the entire school taught while learning remotely during one of the largest disruptions to the public school system in history. And that's reflected in their students' test scores.
"Our math 3 scores actually increased," Dousharm said, "In some ways, I was like, wow, surprised, but then I'm not shocked, because some of the greatest innovative, techie things that came out of last year in helping other staff teach asynchronous and synchronously came from this group (of teachers)."
Sterken Berg and Metz said at first there were a lot of tears and frustrations from students, and they struggled to connect with students as most kept their cameras off on Zoom calls and the teachers couldn't walk around their classrooms and check to make sure students understood the lessons.
Much of their time was spent creating content to put online for students to use as guides, since the higher-level classes don't have as many resources available through sources like Kahn Academy. They also found new ways of helping students learn through use of technology like XP-Pens and digital whiteboards, which they helped other staff use as well.
"For the teachers, I think it was a harder transition than the students, just learning a lot of technology and having to just kind of be thrown into it," Sterken Berg said.
But after finding new, creative ways of teaching, they said it's changed how they'll teach even when they're back in classrooms with all their students.
Sterken Berg said she plans to keep the videos she created during remote learning on her classroom website to help students with homework or if they miss a day of class, and Metz said she loved using sites like Canvas to assign work and send feedback to her students.
Betsy O'Hara, an eighth grade math teacher at Cedar Grove Middle School in Brunswick County, said she loved remote teaching and tried to make it the most positive experience possible. Before March of 2020, she never used technology in her classroom, instead having all her classwork and assignments done by hand on paper.
Remote learning changed that, and she said she plans to continue using the programs she found most useful even when her students were back in person, like Google Classroom, which allow her to give automatic feedback on problems rather than grading assignments by hand.
Her efforts led her to be named Remote Learning Teacher of the Year by the Southeast Education Alliance.
"You have to grow as an educator in any situation that you're in, and it's all about how you view it," she said. "You just have to do what you have to do to be successful, and my goal last year was to try to make it as successful not just for myself, but for my students and for their parents."
She said even though it's not the best way to teach or learn, having positive attitude encourages students to also think positively about the situation. She also allowed time during her classes to put her focus beyond the math lesson that day so students could talk about how they were feeling, what was going on in their day and see how their peers were doing even when they weren't face to face.
That interaction was especially important for Rachel Holt as she navigated her class of second graders through remote learning at Surf City Elementary in Pender County.
She tried to include as much face-to-face time on her online lessons as possible so her students could see her and their peers and talk with each other, rather than watching a video or doing an online activity.
She allowed students to split up into break-out rooms so they had more one-on-one interactions with their peers during lessons, and each Monday students who did the work she assigned got to participate in a show-and-tell time with their classmates. She also said the year was a team effort between herself and her students' parents.
Holt said she's looking forward to being back in her classroom with her students in-person this month, but remote learning taught her many lessons she'll continue carrying with her when schools open up once again.
"I just don't think that I ever really understood just how busy and how much is going on in these kids lives on a daily basis when they leave school. The good and the bad at home, all of that comes into play," she said. "Those things are going to carry over for me. I'm going to always keep that in mind for the future."
©2021 the Star-News (Wilmington, N.C.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
