Ensuring Equity in Hybrid Instruction: Part 2, Training

“Our teachers know it’s hard, but also know it’s possible. And they also understand that ‘our kids deserve it, so I’m going to make it happen.’”— Jeanine Zitta

The Pointed Problem: Building Teachers’ Proficiency in Completely New Approaches

With the start of hybrid instruction just days away, Jeanine Zitta was determined that things go smoothly when students returned. If teachers could pull it off in their first week back, she knew that all students — whether at home or in school — would be able to stay on track with the curriculum. Recognizing this, she had already invested significant time and energy researching best practices for hybrid teaching, and sharing the essentials with the leaders she oversees in her network of nine elementary schools (For more, see Part 1 of this series.).

But she also knew checklists and resources by themselves were not enough to enable teachers to learn how to teach effectively in such an unfamiliar environment. They had to cross that all-important bridge from understanding in concept to understanding in practice. And yet, since no one in her network had ever taught hybrid before, they lacked their own experts to model it.

The Innovation: Creating and Sharing Expertise

Zitta’s longstanding approach toward professional development has been to make it as real as possible, and to build upon the expertise that already exists in her network. She did this over the summer when she tapped some of her most expert teachers to build online instructional materials and train their peers on how to use them in activities that replicated real virtual lessons (See “Improving Quality in Virtual Teaching Across a Network, Part 2.”).

Now, to help her schools get teachers fully up to speed in hybrid, Zitta guided her school leaders though a similar process, in which they:

• Each identified one teacher to coach to an exemplary level of hybrid instruction;
• Captured the key actions steps of effective hybrid teaching as they coached these teachers to exemplary;
• Used videos of the exemplary teachers to model effective practice for the rest of their teachers while also providing them with feedback once students returned.

The Story: Showing it’s Possible

Reducing Teaching Anxiety

Zitta realized the great potential for teacher anxiety around something as complex as hybrid instruction. She knew it’s not simply a matter of turning on a webcam while teaching as one normally does in the classroom — not if one hopes, as she did, to give all in-person and at-home students the same opportunity to learn. In the classroom, teachers will normally check for understanding by physically circulating among students; in remote learning, they review student work online in real time and drop in on students’ virtual breakout rooms. Hybrid means doing both at the same time.

Add to this newness the requirement that teachers and students be socially distanced. In this unique moment in history, students would have to be sufficiently spaced apart, posing new challenges to small group discussion, monitoring student work, or team-based learning. And students had to learn a host of new routines, for everything from entering and leaving the classroom to eating lunch. And with mask-wearing, no one would be able to see the mouths of anyone in the school when they’re talking — which wasn’t an issue when all teaching was virtual.

Zitta set out to show teachers that, despite so many difficulties, effective hybrid teaching was not only possible, but they could do it consistently well across her network of schools.

Boiling it Down to Essentials

The first step in building teachers’ competence in hybrid instruction was for her principals to each identify one teacher to coach to exemplary levels of practice. Zitta advised them to pick someone who A) was already close to exemplary in both in-person and virtual instruction, and B ) was willing to be coached right now. She further urged them to enlist tech savvy staff members to set up a model classroom in which to practice and hone technique.

As soon as teachers were back in their school, Zitta had her leaders stand in as students as the they practiced teaching hybrid lessons. Critically, they did so for students both in the classroom and online, to make sure both could fully access the content and discussion. As they did, they captured the teacher moves in writing, along with timestamps, to share with the rest of the staff (See “Hybrid Instruction School-Wide Expectations” under Artifacts below).

Giving Teachers “At Bats”

The action steps, videos, and model classrooms then formed the basis for training the rest of the teaching staff within each school. As with their colleagues who’d already been coached to exemplary levels of practice, the other teachers had the chance to practice with school leaders and other teachers standing in for their students. In this way, teachers had the chance to experience high-quality hybrid teaching just before their students returned.

And at Zitta’s urging, the modeling continued after students were back in the building (See her guidance here.) Her leaders recorded and shared additional videos of their exemplar teachers — this time as they taught actual students instead of adult stand-ins. Zitta says these videos were especially useful in teacher coaching because they showed teachers that hybrid teaching was possible with their own students: “It’s so much easier for teachers to then think, ‘Oh, I can actually do this!’”

Celebrating Success, Following-Up

Throughout the rollout of hybrid instruction, Zitta made every effort to make her team feel appreciated. In the same early newsletter in which she began urging her leaders to start preparing, she included a music video of Alicia’s Keyes’s song “Good Job,” featuring teachers and others working through the pandemic. When students finally did return to school, she created her own video montages with photos from their schools, set to Andra Day’s “Rise Up,” and Miley Cyrus’s “The Climb.”

She also continued to provide a steady stream of practical guidance in her newsletter, based on her observations, which she did both in person and virtually. Three weeks after hybrid launched, she included, “Level Up: 4 Teacher Skills to Coach to Mastery This Week.” Pointing out that new outbreaks might force everyone home again, she encouraged her leaders to coach their teachers as much as they can while they were in their building. She also offered ideas on preparing for teacher absences, so that learning would continue without pause.

Zitta says it was noteworthy that while teachers naturally had some trepidation's about returning to school, she heard little anxiety expressed about hybrid teaching. “I really do attribute that to all the preparing we did,” she says, adding, “I’m so proud that our teachers know it’s hard, but also know it’s possible. And I think they also understand that ‘our kids deserve it, so I’m going to make it happen.’”

Tyler Archer, one of the network’s principals, agrees Zitta’s process reduced everyone’s anxiety about taking on such a complex challenge. “We felt like we were all learning and getting the support together,” he says. “It didn’t come off as a list of things you must do, but as ‘this is what we know helps kids learn and move them academically, so how are we going to adapt that to the hybrid setting?’”

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