Teachers as Students: Adapting to Online Methods of Instruction and Assessment in the Age of COVID-19.

Abstract

All across the nation, school districts were announcing what many educators were expecting; schools would close their doors to traditional instruction in light of the Covid-19 pandemic. Suddenly, many teachers found themselves in the precarious position of redesigning previously developed face-to-face lessons, to ones that could be delivered from one computer screen to another. The uncertainty of how to suddenly deliver instruction online to diverse learners posed a challenge to virtually all science and mathematics educators and teachers were faced with the daunting task of transitioning from familiar in-person pedagogical practices to ones that relied on technological proficiency, creative methods of assessment, and underutilized pedagogies of care. The purpose of this article is to describe my personal experiences with online teaching during school closures as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Additionally, this article will describe the ways in which I adapted my instruction, assessment, and approach to diverse students to meet their needs in the remote secondary science classroom.