Week 8 Focused Observation: Use of Remote Teaching and Learning in a Face-to-Face Classroom

Nicole Tate

Date of field experience: April 1-5, 2024

Yorktown Middle School - ELA 8th Grade - 2nd and 3rd period

As a preservice teacher, I think I am at an advantage with the fact that I have been on the other side of virtual learning. I have done it all: entire asynchronous classes, digital snow days, Zoom classes, mix of Zoom and asynchronous- you name it. Within my practicum class this semester, the only time I have seen her do remote learning was for the eclipse day. She assigned "work time" for them to continue working on their project. I can't remember whether or not she had them show a receipt in any sort of way. In my experience, if I am just given work time in a class, let alone online, I would rather spend that time doing something more pressing, whether it be a different assignment for the same class or a different class. When I am a teacher and inevitably have to teach lessons asynchronously, I want to refrain from assigning entire days of work time as much as possible.

Thinking about remote learning in a theatre classroom, this becomes tricky. I am very lucky in this sense that I took theatre classes in high school online during Covid, so I have seen what it looks like both partially online and completely online. In my high school we also did an entire production of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" on Zoom. The one thing I hated about this, besides the fun part of rehearsal of getting to hang out with your friends, was that tech crew didn't really get to do a lot. The actors got to do pretty much everything they would normally do, with many limitations of course. There are thankfully many awesome tools online for things like lighting and sound. The difficult part of teaching tech online is materials that students may need for stuff like costume making.

This week was a ROUGH one. This was the first week "coming back" from my concussion- to work, rehearsal, screens, etc. Monday was definitely the longest and hardest day. I am already feeling very overwhelmed with all the makeup work from missing just one week. My brain is moving at a slower rate and I am not supposed to be doing a lot of physical activity still. I find myself getting frustrated more easily at things, which is not part of my character, but I understand that it is due to the concussion. I really hope I am able to catch up this semester but given that there's less than a month left I am very stressed about it. I also started teaching my unit plan this week and I think it went very well despite what is going on with me.