27 minute read
A Novel Approach to Learning
BY TOM DICHIARA A Novel Approach to Learning
This spring, Middle School art students created masterpiece sculptures using tin foil; budding freshmen biologists learned to extract DNA from a piece of fruit; eighth grade historians dreamed up origin myths for far-flung civilizations; Upper School Latin students retold The Aeneid with LEGO animation videos; ninth grade writers captured their feelings in their very own poetry portfolio; and Lower School mathematicians helped their fellow Bears grasp complicated concepts—and they did it all from their own homes during distance learning.
“DISTANCE LEARNING” AND “SOCIAL DISTANCING” ARE NOW TERMS THAT REQUIRE NO EXPLANATION, but few had heard them before March, when the “novel coronavirus,” now known as COVID-19, swept the globe. Educators and students were forced to reimagine what teaching and learning would look like as schools, including Landon, moved from in-person learning to an online model. In the span of a few weeks, Landon leadership developed and deployed a distance learning plan (DLP) that, by all accounts, delivered content and kept students engaged through the end of the most unusual school year in decades and brought us to the current moment where distance learning remains part of the approach.
THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT When Head Jim Neill announced March 11 that Landon was closing campus three days early for spring break because of mounting concerns surrounding the global pandemic, longtime Upper School Geometry Teacher Steve Sorkin was convinced he would be back in his classroom by the end of March. Sorkin, who does not own a TV or computer and often jokes that he sends personal correspondence via carrier pigeon, now admits he was in denial; he did not want to entertain the notion that he might have to teach through a computer screen. “I thought we’d be back at the end of spring break—it was just something I took very lightly,” Sorkin says. “But very quickly it became realer than real.”
Many have likened the rapid global expansion of COVID-19 to the “butterfly effect,” and it’s not hard to see why. The butterfly effect is an idea in chaos theory that a small, seemingly insignificant action, such as a butterfly flapping its wings, can have a huge, unsuspected impact, such as a tornado, weeks later and on a completely different continent.
When the World Health Organization (WHO) first received a report of “viral pneumonia” in Wuhan, China, on December 31, 2019, it seemed like just that—a butterfly flapping its wings half a world away. By January 9, Chinese authorities reported the outbreak was caused by the “novel coronavirus,” now known as COVID-19. At that point, Landon faculty and students were just returning from winter break, and the threat of the virus still seemed distant. However, with students from Chengdu and Shanghai, China, scheduled to visit Landon and sister school Holton-Arms at the end of January for the annual Chinese Scholastic Exchange Program, the tornado-like effects of that “butterfly” across the ocean were soon to be felt inside the White Rocks.
In late January, Landon announced that the 2020 exchange program had been canceled, citing safety concerns. “I was all for having the exchange students come because we were hearing that this was just like a flu, and the exchange students were very far from Wuhan,” School Nurse Julie Acebal remembers. “Looking back, I would have been way wrong. But you go with what you know at the time. That’s why they call it the ‘novel’ corona virus—because we are learning as we go.”
Following the program’s cancellation, Landon proceeded with business as usual for another month. Assistant Head Charles Franklin remembers that things changed in late February, around the time that the first cases of COVID-19 in the United States were reported. Suddenly, discussions about the pandemic and its potential impact on in-person learning came to the forefront. A committee comprised of school leadership across all divisions convened to determine whether Landon would have to transition to online learning… and what it would look like if the school did.
Around this time, Acebal started to see reports that suggested students and kids were spreading the virus to the vulnerable, even if they weren’t getting sick themselves. Seeing the butterfly effect at work once again, she lobbied to close school before a positive case could threaten a high-risk student, teacher, or family: “I said, ‘This is a perfect teaching moment for our kids. We need to embrace the Lower School motto and help the other fellow. It’s not just about them; it’s about the greater good and helping others.’ And that’s when everyone just said, ‘OK, let’s close.’”
A PLAN COMES TOGETHER Teachers, administrators, students and families—in a word now famously overused—“pivoted” from denial to almost immediate acceptance, which meant preparing for teaching and learning in ways that heretofore seemed unfathomable.
On Friday, March 13, students enjoyed a day off as teachers participated in on-campus professional development to prepare for the potential move to distance learning following spring break. Middle and Upper School teachers learned the ins and outs of Microsoft Teams, which would provide video chat capabilities and serve as an online hub during distance learning. Lower School teachers prepared to use Zoom for virtual classes and explored online platforms such as Seesaw and Flipgrid. Tech-savvy teachers also led sessions to show their peers how to use advanced features of the school’s online portal BearNet to give assessments, assign and collect work, and deliver content.
“At the beginning of March, the whole tech team sat down and just talking with the teachers and the division heads tried to lock down: what are the most important things?” Director of Educational Technology and Libraries Laurie Sears remembers. “We settled on the priorities being face-to-face contact with video conferencing, giving and receiving assignments, and using technology/ platforms with which people were already familiar. We wanted to try to keep it within BearNet and Office 365, which the Middle and Upper Schools were using at the time, and we built most of our trainings around that.”
The following Monday and Tuesday were used to test drive the distance learning model: students and teachers logged on from home using Teams or Zoom and followed a sample schedule provided by administration. Things went smoothly and, as students settled in to a version of spring break that included no travel and much social distancing, academic and administrative leadership continued to meet to dial in the details of a distance learning plan (DLP). Just a few days into break, on March 20, Neill informed the community that Landon would indeed move to distance learning April 1.
The DLP, which was honed over the course of spring break (and tweaked afterward to incorporate student, teacher, and family feedback), set out the principles that would guide educators and students as they waded into uncharted waters: “an emphasis on community and relationships; the need to be flexible; a reliance on and use of what we already know; and a desire to provide structure.”
The class schedule under the DLP maintained much of the structure of a normal school day. Each day would start off with some combination of an assembly, division-wide meeting, or faculty professional development meeting done via Microsoft Teams Live. Daily advisory sessions (Middle and Upper School) and homeroom periods (Lower School) were next to provide consistency, followed by two class periods with a 15-minute break in between, a break for lunch, two more class periods, and then office hours and athletics in the afternoon. In addition, students would be held to the same standards as if they were at school and even had to abide by a modified dress code.
Hidden Heroes When Lower School students kicked off a project to thank the “hidden heroes” in their communities, they didn’t quite expect the response of gratitude in return.
“I asked all the students to write someone that they want to thank that’s helping them out,” then-ethics teacher (now Middle School Spanish teacher) Justin Roman told ABC7 News in the spring. The local ABC affiliate featured the Lower School students’ efforts in a news story.
Students wrote letters to mail carriers, left messages in chalk, and handed thank you notes to garbage collectors. Some received notes thanking them in return. Connor Satkus ’29 got a letter back from his mail carrier.
And teachers were encouraged to use platforms with which the boys were already familiar, such as Office 365, Teams, Zoom, and BearNet. Although Landon did not commit to a grading policy right away—opting instead to see how students responded first—the boys were encouraged to work under the assumption that their grades would count. A late-April announcement confirmed this and gave the boys incentive to stay engaged that they might not have had with a pass-fail policy.
FLEXIBILITY AND CREATIVITY With these guiding principles in mind, Landon embarked on distance learning April 1, and it was evident from the jump that teaching online could not and should not be business as usual. Afraid of overwhelming the boys, losing their engagement, and keeping them on screens for too long, teachers adapted to find innovative ways to deliver content and nurture skills.
“We basically took everything we’d been doing in the classroom and threw it away,” Middle School Art Teacher Brad Rose says. This included scrapping a complicated multi-week animal project the boys were halfway toward completing. Instead, Rose and fellow Middle School Art Teacher Dori Boyce created a series of 30 projects designed to take an hour to an hour-and-a-half and posted video tutorials for each to BearNet. The students could pick a new project each week, so that by the end of the school year they each had completed eight projects.
“Our overall approach for the spring was for it to be fun, for there to be a lot of flexibility and freedom, and for the kids—in large part—to be able to get away from their computers,” Rose says. “We were very aware that not all the kids had the same set of materials at their house, so we wanted to give them a diverse set of options. One was to design and bake a set of cookies based on a cast of characters from a book, TV show, or movie, and another was to take photos of things around their house that end up looking like all the letters of the alphabet. They could also make a sculpture out of tin foil, tell a story with photos, or research an artist, which didn’t require any materials at all. One kid did this amazing set of Monsters Inc. cookies that looked exactly like the characters. I thought his parents must have worked for Pixar.”
Upper School Science Teacher Vivian English also found flexibility to be key to surviving and thriving during distance learning. With her biology students’ access to labs cut off, she devised ways to give them handson work at home. “I had my students do the extraction of DNA from a strawberry using tools and materials they had around the house,” she says. “I spent a lot of time this summer researching other labs that will work at home this coming school year.”
Zachary ’25 makes artful treats.
Let’s C.R.E.A.T.E! In Middle School Art, distance learning illustrated new ways to C.R.E.A.T.E, which stands for Creativity and Resourcefulness for Education in Art Through Exploration. The program was created by the Middle School Art teachers at Landon and focused on giving the students the freedom to choose their weekly art project.
“Mrs. (Dori) Boyce and I have both been kind of immediately impressed with the extent to which the boys are biting down and trying to come up with new ideas and are eager to have something creative going on,” Middle School Art Teacher Brad Rose said.
The students created tin foil sculptures, baked and designed cookies that make characters from favorite movies look good enough to eat, followed online tutorials on creating new pieces of art, and used spray paint to paint colorful projects. The students moved forward with a new project each week and were also encouraged to think outside of the box and come up with new ideas.
Daniel ’22 works on a masterpiece.
Lower School Music Teacher Chris Chappelle looked at distance learning as an opportunity to take a breath from his whirlwind first year inside the White Rocks and test out alternate methods to deliver his instruction. Notably, he employed YouTube tutorials to help teach the boys to play the recorder outside of class hours. He also used “Freeze Dance” videos for warmups, where the boys would sing and dance along to the music and follow the lyrical instructions to walk, run, skip, or jump. And taught the boys about orchestration and how classical music is used today by having them watch the story of “Peter and the Wolf,” where the characters are “voiced” by different instruments (oboe, drums, piano, etc.) playing classical music rather than by actors using words. “The pandemic forced me to learn the electronic resources available to teachers and students,” Chappelle says. “Many of the things I used during distance learning are things I plan to use when we return to the classroom.”
Upper School history teacher Ian Healy ’00 used Zoom breakout rooms to mimic the feel of small-group activities the boys would have done in person. While this maneuver proved successful, Healy says that teamteaching American studies with English Department Chair Emily Matthews and Upper School History Teacher Will McGettigan presented its own unique set of challenges: it is a doubleblock history and English class, which meant students would have back-to-back one-hour blocks with a 15-minute break in between. “That’s a lot of screen time,” Healy notes. “We got feedback from the kids on what the experience was like, and we ended up going to a model where we would frontload the first hour with synchronous, in-class activity and then transition to asynchronous work where the boys were either reading or writing or doing other things.”
Franklin acknowledges that too much screen time is the biggest drawback to distance learning and praised teachers for devising creative ways to get their students off computers while keeping them occupied. “We need to keep that face time to maintain the connection, but for boys to sit on a screen for hour after hour is not good,” Franklin says. “Faculty have really led the way in coming up with creative ways to be synchronous, to touch base with the boys at the beginning of class, go through a lesson, and then have the boys go away from their screens to complete work. The foundations of it were really successful. We want to keep making continual adjustments and changes as we learn and grow.”
ALL TOGETHER NOW
In a March 13 letter, Neill thanked faculty, students, and families for their support and emphasized the importance of teamwork and community in uncertain times: “It occurs to me that this is what it means to be a community and that this moment shows why community matters,” he wrote. “It holds us up and keeps us moving forward.”
Indeed, Sorkin says that he would not have been able to succeed at distance learning had it not been for the help of the Landon tech team and his colleagues. Manager of User Services Jun Choi, Upper School Educational Technologist Dr. Tara Northcott, and Sears helped Sorkin complete a crash-course in Microsoft Teams that enabled him to take his class online. Assistant Head of Upper School Ardis Danon and Science Department Chair Sacha Place lent him a small whiteboard he could put up in front of his screen to draw diagrams. And Head of Upper School Ehren Federowicz hand-delivered what Sorkin refers to as an “infinite package of colored markers” for use with the board. “I may be the oldest person on the faculty, but this really was baby steps for me,” Sorkin says. “I am so fortunate for my colleagues. Because of them, I could actually try to do this. And I am so appreciative of the kids being tolerant of me so that we essentially pulled off something that was like a class.”
In the Lower School, Steven Micciche also found a silver lining in the giveand-take he experienced with his colleagues during distance learning. “One of the things that was really helpful was that we, as a community of teachers, got better at sharing techniques and methods for delivering content and engaging students,” he says. “That’s something I think we should bring back to the way we normally run divisional faculty meetings: best practices. Who’s doing something that could maybe help us all?”
“It was really helpful that some of our teachers who are comfortable with technology stepped up and helped us with the distance learning trainings and then also provided support to their colleagues,” Sears adds. “It was great to have that built-in group of folks in each division who could help out in that way.”
“I was learning something new from my colleagues every day, whether it was giving the boys the opportunity for asynchronous learning away from their computers or using breakout rooms for small groups,” English says. “I think if I had it to do over again, there is so much more that I would do outside of class, which is what I’m doing now: trying to perfect what I know in OneNote, and trying to look in Teams to do better than what I did last quarter.”
A Battle of Creativity Watching Lego characters donning armor and shields and moving through various battlefields and memories was just another day in Andy Luther’s Latin class during distance learning. For this particular project, Upper School students were encouraged to create new ways to present sections of Julius Caesar’s Commentarii de Bello Gallico.
“There’s a traditional PowerPoint and presentation to the class, but then there is also this creative element. That is so wide open to whatever any of the teams want to do,” Luther explained.
The teams, which were created by breaking the class into small groups, retold the literature creatively. They produced Legomation movies, drew up a recruitment poster, and recorded themselves and teammates acting out the scenes from their own homes.
“I think the distance learning piece has really inspired them to put more into it and even to be more creative with their final projects,” Luther said.
AN UNBREAKABLE CONNECTION
For the distance learning model to succeed, it needed to be built upon the personal connections that are the cement of the Landon community. The daily schedule for each division was key to preserving these all-important teacher-student and student-student bonds.
“The approach of having boys see their teachers and their classmates was really important in keeping them engaged in school,” Franklin says. “You know, I log on at 9 a.m. and Mr. D. is still there to teach—the boys find comfort and connection and a sense of continuity in that.”
Grade 3 Teacher Stevie Brown would start her Zoom homeroom session 15 minutes early just so her students could get a little extra face time with one another. “My computer was set up on the dining room table in our house, and my husband said that the favorite part of his day was walking by my computer and hearing all the little voices,” Brown says.
Dr. Heather Kalish, whose son Ari’24 was in eighth grade and son Logan’21 was a junior this spring, says the morning advisory periods were a great way for her boys to start their day. “It wasn’t an academic need, but it was a social need,” she says. “Ari had Mr. Rose, who came up with games to play and sometimes let one of the kids lead advisory. He got them engaged and made them feel that connection they so sorely needed.”
Afternoon office hours in all three divisions provided another opportunity for students to connect with their teachers. Brown used the time to schedule one-on-one 15-minute check-ins with each of her students. “We would chat, often not even about school, and the boys would show me their room—I saw their fish, their lacrosse sticks, and their posters, and they met my dog Stella,” she says. “That was really enjoyable because I feel like that was a little sense of normalcy for them, and we got to connect.”
“The term social distance tells you something that could not be filled technologically,” Sorkin says.
“Consequently, the kids began to contact me in the conference group during office hours or stay online with me after class or even call me at night just so they could talk and
Upper School Math Teacher Steve Sorkin takes part in on-campus professional development getting comfortable with online platforms prior to shift to distance learning.
have the usual kinds of conversations that we have.”
The divisions also found ways to inject fun into online learning and foster community that way. The Lower School used the social video platform Flipgrid to do “Fun Fridays,” where kids would film themselves competing in challenges—such as seeing who could make the most free throws in a minute—and then posting the videos for their friends and teachers to see. The Middle School sponsored a series of schoolwide themed dress-down days. And Rose and Middle School history teacher Sarah DeCamps sent each student, both current and incoming, a morale-buoying “Bear package” with stickers and seeds for the kids to grow different herbs.
LET’S HEAR IT FOR THE BOYS As many teachers noted, their hard work would have been for naught if students had checked out, skipped class, prioritized videogames over school. Fortunately, by all accounts, the boys bought in, applied themselves, and squeezed every drop of lemonade from the lemons the pandemic has dealt.
“I truly can’t give enough credit to the kids,” Healy says. “It was hard, and we were all learning on the fly, but the boys were just so willing to be patient as we worked through it. They gave feedback and really tried earnestly to do everything we asked of them. I’ve always felt that the Landon boys take their education seriously, and they value it and they value one another; there was such a strong affirmation of that in how they handled these difficult circumstances… They were the highlight.”
DeCamps was continually wowed by her students’ work: her eighth graders wrote myths and read them aloud to fifth graders over Zoom, improved their notetaking and study skills, and created videos, podcasts, and maps for their final civilizations project that she says “are truly like nothing I’ve ever seen eighth graders create.” She adds: “The opportunity for learning without the social pressure of the classroom was just the right mix to help them develop and practice more independent thinking, creativity, and innovation.”
Perhaps most heartening for DeCamps was just how much the boys appreciated her hard work over the last few months of the 2019–20 school year. DeCamps ended the last class for her eighth graders with a poem modeled after Goodnight Moon that described their Middle School experience. As she read the poem aloud and shared it on Operation SOS Takes Flight When the threat of COVID-19 closed the Landon campus and put an end to the lacrosse season, TJ ’22 decided to take matters—and the steering wheel of a Cessna 172 Skyhawk G1000—into his own hands. He launched Operation Supplies Over Skies, best known as “Operation S.O.S,” to continue his flight training in a way that helps those in need.
And that’s exactly what he did. Since taking his mission to the skies, TJ has conducted 16 missions across Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Maryland, delivering more than 54 thousand PPEs and ventilator supplies.
TJ was also honored at the White House for his service to the community, and his story was shared by media outlets around the world including The Associated Press and NBC Nightly News.
her screen, the boys gradually turned on their cameras so DeCamps could see their faces and began writing on the screen using the Zoom “pen.”
“As I looked up, I could see little hearts and graffiti messages of love start to populate my screen,” DeCamps recalls. “It’s rare for 14-year-old boys to bear their emotions so openly, especially on Zoom. But they did. Amidst all the pain in the world right now, I take comfort that they can lean into their emotions, unafraid. And they were all kind of feeling the same thing and chose to illustrate it in such a beautiful way, without even talking to reach other. That is perhaps the ultimate ‘teamwork’ value we speak of at Landon.”
PARENT APPROVED
Just as the teachers praise their students, the parents have overwhelmingly positive things to say about how the Landon administration and faculty have handled a curveball of this magnitude, citing the daily structure, the maintaining of personal connection, and the transparency of communication as the greatest pluses.
“Landon was very proactive in addressing the situation,” Heather Kalish says. “Many other schools seemed caught off guard, but in the beginning of March, Landon already was addressing plans and the situation head on, and they were very transparent about taking a measured approach throughout. My husband and I both work, so I also was appreciative knowing the boys had structure and knew what they needed each day. They had a set schedule, knew their lunch period was a certain time, etc. I could get up in the morning and know that they were good for the day.”
Dr. Ann Hudock had four sons, the Mearns boys, across three divisions at Landon last spring (Alec ’20 and Tom ’21 in Upper School, Luke ’25 in Middle School, and Jack ’27 in Lower School), and she credits the school with providing consistency as the world seemed to be unraveling. “The teachers have been remarkable in their resilience and modeling that for the boys,” she says. “The continuity and the structure for the kids gave me
(Left) “Hats off” to Grade 5 Teacher and Lower School Educational Technologist Kim Coletta, who was one of many who motivated the boys with crazy hat days and other activities designed to engage. (Right) Upper School Latin Teacher (and Co-Director of College Counseling) Andy Luther uses Legos for his class during distance learning.
peace of mind so that I could focus on my own anxieties.” She was especially impressed that Landon “kept the bar high,” didn’t let standards slip, and held the boys accountable. “If teachers saw that Jack and Luke were missing a homework assignment, they reached out to me because that wasn’t the norm. And in every interaction with teachers, it was, ‘How is your family doing?’ It was recognizing that the whole family was involved.”
“Landon did an amazing job,” concurs Susan Furbay, whose son Dylan ’24 was an eighth grader in the spring. “I loved that the school stuck with the curriculum, kept the kids engaged and busy, and maintained a dress code—that really got them in the mentality that they were in school. These circumstances are so new for everybody, but Dylan’s teachers grasped it quickly, and he felt the transition to distance learning was smooth.”
Yolanda Coates, mother of Joshua ’25, also appreciated the structured day, the use of the dress code to prepare the boys psychologically for school, the Middle School parentteacher conferences that “gave me the opportunity to express things I didn’t even know I needed to express,” and the ways Landon helped maintain and even strengthen the bonds between students during a difficult time. “I liked that the boys would meet in small breakout groups and then come back at the end of class,” she says. “It was a great way of giving the boys some more social interaction. I think boys especially have that need to interact with other people, even outside of their friend group. Landon finds ways to meet the boys needs because they know the boys so well.” I loved that the school stuck with the curriculum, kept the kids engaged and busy, and maintained a dress code—that really got them in the mentality that they were in school.
Tracy Brew, whose son Baxter ’21 is this year’s student council president, loved that she got to be a fly on the wall during distance learning: “The amazing thing for me was that I got the opportunity to hear Baxter participate, comment, and discuss with teachers and students,” she says. “I felt like it actually gave me more of an insight into how unique Landon is because of the constant discussions during class.”
NEXT CHAPTER Long before the 2019–20 school year ended, Landon began to prepare for a 2020–21 school year that has the potential to be even more challenging and uncertain than its predecessor. In May, Neill announced that Landon would move up the first day of 2020–21 to August 26 to provide flexibility. He also assembled a Returnto-School Committee (RSC) comprised of academic, administrative, and programmatic leadership and teachers from each division to explore various options for returning to school in the fall. Using feedback from students, teachers, and families—and in consultation with health officials—the RSC and the Landon Board of Trustees worked diligently over the summer to devise and develop three possible scenarios for in-person learning, hybrid learning (a mix of in-person and online), and distance learning. Neill and the RSC were clear that the preference was for in-person learning but were equally clear that prudence and health were the top priorities.
On August 10, Neill informed the community that Landon would begin 2020–21 in distance learning mode through at least September 25: “All of this has been an incredibly complex effort both brought on by the current pandemic, and, significantly, undertaken as conditions have worsened in our area and nationally. It is with this reality in mind and with an appreciation for how well served we have been by the gradual approach modeled by athletics this summer—to say nothing of recent statements from our local health authority and a recognition of both the innumerable new logistical details that we will be rolling out this year (and the need for all of us to get all of them right)—that we have concluded that we are best served by an approach that eases us into the school year.”
In the letter, Neill assured the community the school was still preparing for some form of in-person learning, with tents already on campus, new technology being installed, and updates to indoor spaces underway. In fact, Landon eased students back onto campus with small outdoor gatherings in August. By October, the school brought back half the student body each week for Hybrid Learning mostly outdoors in more than 25 tents spread throughout campus. In November, the entire Lower School returned to on-campus learning. All students, faculty, and staff on campus are socially distanced, wearing masks, and washing hands—following federal and state guidelines for health and safety.
