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Teachers and staff find resilience, inventiveness, creativity to maintain academic continuity in a time of turmoil While students enjoyed an extended spring break through Wednesday, March 18, teachers and staff began busy preparing for a transition to distance learning. “While we recognize that no online platform can replicate the Trinity experience,” wrote Sprague to families that week, “our goal is to maintain as much teaching, learning, continuity and community as possible during this unprecedented circumstance.”
ADAPT AND OVERCOME Distance learning began Monday, March 23 and continued through the end of the school year in late May. A screenshot from Trinity’s first-ever Virtual Morning Meeting on Monday, March 23, 2020
As Trinity teachers and students left campus on March 6 to begin Spring Break, little did anyone realize they would not be returning for nearly six months. Although administrators had met several times to make contingency plans for the potential spread of the novel coronavirus (at that time seemingly limited to the Seattle area) and study guidance about the possible need to close school for limited periods, few if any were prepared for the speed at which the landscape would change over the second week of March 2020. “It was tough,” said Lee Sprague, Associate Head of School. “Although we had been strategizing before spring break about possible plans, everything changed quite quickly. Additionally, it was clear that we had to come up with [a new daily schedule] that would be comfortable to students, suit their needs and their teachers’ needs, and be as flexible as possible.” By the end of spring break, Sprague had already sketched out what would become an entirely new modified daily schedule — one that could provide times to work both independently and collaboratively — and a plan for continuity of instruction that would guide something Trinity had never before attempted: teaching and learning entirely online.
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Sprague said the main goal was to maintain continuity. “Teachers focused quickly on what was essential, and continued to teach their students day after day,” said Sprague. “Students continued to feel that teachers cared about them and their success.” • Students in Marcus Jones’ ’00 IB Global Politics class chose a country in the bottom half of the Human Development Index (HDI), identified intransigent issues, and developed solutions that could bring the country into the top half of the HDI. • Students in Julie Davi’s Spanish classes collaborated on a Latinx Spotify playlist. • Students in Alice Phillips’s IB Higher Level Biology made the most of being stuck at home by raiding the pantry to conduct “kitchen labs,” or experiments using household appliances. One group measured the effect of salt on pasta cooking, another potato chip grease smooshed on graph paper, and a third group grew bean sprouts in plastic baggies.
