This is based on my personal experience as a high school classroom teacher and adviser. For many years, the teaching and learning process usually takes place in the four corners of the room, with some outside classes for collaborative and explorative learning aligned to the content and performance standards. But everything turned different when the pandemic jolted all of us in the education sector. A scary era just commenced and nobody was ready for this catastrophe.
A total educational shift inevitably became the major move thus reformatting instructional and learning deliveries to learners. Different learning modalities emerged as the means to continue education in an anxious, bewildered world due to the pandemic. Learning took place remotely where both parties, the school and the learners with their parents, were rooting for each other to foster learning continuity amidst the threatening virus.
How has this shift affected teachers’ conventional way of teaching?
The educational shift greatly affected teachers. It was in a way challenging all of us in the frontline to meet learners’ expectations through distance learning. It was new, it was scary, and it was redirecting us to pivot something- a kind of education- that was more serviceable and deliverable for the learners to ignite learning without their teachers’ presence. Those were months of monitoring students' and parents’ educational security, writing modules and scripts for video lessons, and opening doors of training to different virtual and online learning platforms. The change affected teachers in a way that most of us went out of our comfort zones. Gone were the days of chalk and talk and collaborative learning activities for students face-to-face but these were replaced with distance learning online and where students weren’t usually working in groups but all by themselves. I saw teachers and most of us working hard to understand and apply new digital modalities appropriate and needed for distance learning. And I say, this was never “a walk in the park”. On the other hand, the majority of the students who didn’t have online facilities were given equal priority for printed self-learning modules.
Over the two school years of distance, remote and blended learning, everyone coped up and must cope especially teachers. They were challenged to put their best foot forward to connect and translate to the learners the most essential competencies they need to develop and master within the quarter, within the whole school year. To a teacher reading this, please give yourself a tap on your shoulder for a job well done. Those were two great school years of hard work.
I was also challenged with different levels of physical tasks in the printing and sorting as well as the distribution and retrieval of modules. These were made on the side of having online classes and frequent webinars that equipped us with skills in the instructional paradigm shift. Moreover, the monitoring of students' submissions was also a challenge, both in digital and printed modalities. This could be a one-sided story from a teacher’s point of view but we empathize with the difficulties the students went through over two years. Now, if you are a student reading this, there is nothing wrong with how you feel like getting burnt out of the different modalities. But if you happen to pass the quarters and the school years, congratulations!
The best experience I could share in the ‘teaching amidst the pandemic” was the actual hybrid teaching through online classes. Seeing students in a small frame in Google Meet and listening to them participate in class were the best evidence that learning continuity is truly possible.
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