The Placer County Office of Education Story (January 2021)
Jennifer Hicks:
So as we moved from kind of a traditional distance learning model into more of a hybrid model, where we had students that were coming to school a couple of days a week and then engaging in some independent learning at home via the computer, one of the things that we didn’t really think about is this idea of concurrent teaching. So as we progressed into the fall and into the winter, we had many situations where teachers were teaching two different groups of students. So, they had a group of students that were physically in class with them, and then they had a group of students that were Zooming in from home. And the expectation was that they were really engaging in teaching both of those groups of students. In some cases, the teacher was even at home, so the teacher might be at home, the students were in the classroom, and then another group of students were Zooming from home. This type of teaching really created some unique challenges.
Teaching in this environment creates different challenges related to student engagement, to how do you balance attention between the students that are online versus the students that are in the classroom, how do you create collaborative opportunities for students to be talking and working together across those two modalities, how do you ensure that you are providing inclusive opportunities for all students regardless of their background and need. And so, one of the things that we’ve been doing with our districts is providing professional learning opportunities, specifically training and communities of practice focused on some of those best practices and strategies and skills that are most effective at supporting concurrent teaching, and really looking at what are the guiding principles that support effective concurrent teaching. And like anything that we’ve done through this pandemic, it’s really been a continuous improvement process.
So, we try something, we learn from it, we might do it really well, we may fail, and then we try again and we try to do something differently and something more effective. So, this ability to really work closely with teachers through professional learning to help them really go through these improvement cycles and identify what’s working for them in their classroom and then constantly tweak and improve it so that they’re really able to meet the needs of all of their students. One of the things that I think is important for all county offices and educational agencies across the state to really tap into and take advantage of is this whole statewide system of support that we have.
So, we don’t feel like we’re working in isolation in Placer County. We know that we have an entire statewide system that we can tap into. And this includes things like our geographic lead agency groups, our SELPA content leads across the state, our agency partners at CDE and CCEE. Lots of opportunities for regional networking. So, we meet on a monthly basis with the 14 county offices that are in our surrounding regional area to talk about what are the challenges, what are the best practices and really work through these things together. So, it’s this idea that we don’t have to do this alone, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel, we have these great support structures that really span from our immediate county to our larger region to the entire state. And so being able to tap into those support structures has been really critical for us during the pandemic but also we see as something that’s critical going forward.