Biology teacher Jack Warren has published an article on student care in the classroom and as a school during periods of online learning. Warren co-authored an article for the National Association of Independent Schools through his completion of a Master of Education at Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of Education. The article “Caring for Students Within Our Communities” is part of the Back-to-School Playbook, a joint initiative of NAIS and Peabody College.
The article gives educators tools for creating interpersonal ties with students and fostering a sense of community within the class and the school as a whole after in-person classes have moved online. Warren and his co-authors, Severn School Math Teacher Matt Lapolla and East-West International School Head of School Jeffery Kane, encourage a culture of flexibility, purposefully building community, a growth mindset, and a focus on student wellness.
Blue Ridge School was among the legions of schools that had to convert to distance learning last spring because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Warren credits Blue Ridge School’s Dean of Faculty and Academics Pete Bonds with creating a positive work environment for the School’s teachers during the rapid transition to distance learning. He says, “When you put a lot of pressure on the teachers, they have a tendency to falter. Then the students falter.”
“Specifically with student support, Pete’s schedule worked really well: the fact that classes were shorter [and] every day was the same.” He says the speed and decisiveness Blue Ridge School took during this time reduced uncertainty among students and parents, too.
Warren says BRS’s decision that a student’s performance could only raise his grade and not lower it during the unexpected trimester of distance learning was another point of effective student care. “Another thing we did really well was that the teachers reached out to students a lot, through the advisory, through classes. If kids weren’t coming to class, teachers reached out a lot. We did have kids ‘drop off the face of the earth’ but we followed up on it every day.”
Warren himself lived the experience of online learning as a student. His two-year master’s program met in-person at Vanderbilt last summer but classes had to move online this summer. He enjoyed the asynchronous nature of some of his classes, but he admits that online classes have drawbacks. “The hardest part was just sitting in front of the computer for so long,” says Warren. “And also you just miss the informal interactions.”
What he saw was that in the transition to distance learning, interactions that were once informal had to become intentional. For example, he says, “One person organized a book club. Another person organized a fantasy baseball league. It’s funny because those are things that normally would organically happen but now we have to really be intentional and say ‘now we need to meet at this time every day and talk the book we’re reading or fantasy baseball or whatever. You know, you’re not usually intentional about fantasy baseball.”
“I found that the best professors were the ones who used the breakout function [in Zoom] and they would put us in a group of four. We would talk about the prompt but eventually it would turn into ‘how’s everyone doing?’ And that was really important because last summer we saw one another all the time. This summer we’re only talking about school, but our relationships are a bit deeper than that.”
Now Warren sees his students’ pre-class behavior in a different light. He says, “It’s almost like we took it for granted. It’s like ‘the kids are just chatting before class starts’ but that is more essential than you think. That stuff is the stuff that builds a cohesion, a community in the classroom, and that’s important.”
