Hybrid Teaching: Using Tech to Teach In-Person and Remote Students Simultaneously

By Amy Wolf, Assistant Director of Communications and Marketing
This article appeared in the Spring 2021 Issue of the Tower Hill Bulletin

In Meghan Donlon’s first grade classroom, students sit at their own desks, six feet apart, each with his or her own set of math cubes for an addition and subtraction lesson. At home, two students have their own sets and are displayed on the SMART Board for the rest of the class to see. 

 

In a normal year, the students might be crowded around Donlon at a table as she demonstrates a task with her own set of cubes. But this year is not normal. In order to safely show her class—including the students at home—the task at hand, Donlon has an overhead camera over her set of cubes for her students to see.

 

While the majority of students and teachers have been on-campus for most of the 2020-2021 school year, about 7 percent have been learning from home regularly, with others tuning in remotely when needed.

 

“In the beginning it was a bit challenging only because I was so used to either solely teaching all the students in-person, or we had the Zoom experience in the spring,” Donlon said. “Doing it hybrid was definitely challenging at first. You had to make sure the students at home had access to the materials you were going to be using in the classroom and make sure those students were able to participate and be engaged in a lesson.”

 

In order to prepare for hybrid learning this fall, the school did a lot of research in order to determine technology needs, Associate Head of School and Chief Information and Innovation Officer Anthony Pisapia said. The school spoke with experts in the audio-visual field as well as with colleges and universities who have more experience with hybrid and virtual learning.

 

The results were cameras, microphones and speaker units in each classroom, as well as additional computers so that teachers don’t need to plug their own devices into the SMART Boards—everything is already set up and ready to go.

 

The building of that infrastructure happened over the summer, with Josh Boughner, Matt Coyle, Charles Sharon and others on the technology team outfitting nearly 100 classrooms with the technology.

 

“What it allows is that if you can’t be there that day, we have a solution where you can Zoom in, and it allows us to be responsive to the health needs of the community in a way that keeps us all safe,” Pisapia said. “If you need to be home, if you came in contact with someone with COVID or your test came back positive, you can stay home without losing that connection to Tower Hill.”

 

While she’s always used technology in her classroom, Middle School math teacher Fatima Sabre said she’s never relied on it as much as she has this year. In particular with math, it can be difficult to see what students are doing at home, so rather than have students take a picture of their notes, she’s using the program Desmos, which allows students both in-person and at home to submit answers, share explanations and discuss problems with each other.

 

“There have always been lots of interesting and free applications we can use for math, but many teachers didn’t use them very often,” Sabre said. “Hybrid learning has helped me realize how useful these programs can be—both to students in-person and students online. They can make math more interesting and more fun.”

 

For most teachers, there was a learning curve when it came to learning how to use the technology. Training teachers to use Zoom—the video communication platform Tower Hill uses—began last February, about a month before the entire school shifted to distance learning. Hybrid training began in August, with departments and divisions meeting with the technology team to learn about what the technology could do, how to set it up and how to configure it.

 

Even for teachers like Donlon, who has a technology background, hybrid teaching certainly had its hiccups in the beginning, but she said the experience has taught her to be more flexible.

 

“I definitely feel that this year has taught me so much more than I have ever been taught as a teacher,” she said. “I think my takeaway with the hybrid is you really have to be flexible in the classroom. I had to figure out how to incorporate hands-on activities safely for students in-person and make sure my kids at home had the materials they needed.”

 

While a lot has changed this year, one thing that hasn’t changed is the education Tower Hill students are receiving.

 

“COVID is really a terrible and unfortunate thing, and what we were certain of from the very beginning is we did not want to pause learning in any way for our students,” Pisapia said. “What’s been fantastic this year is we’ve seen that our students have not fallen behind in any way. We’ve been able to keep an incredible amount of forward momentum. Our standardized test results are where they need to be, college admissions are where they need to be, and we’ve been able to keep running and keep ticking as Tower Hill is meant to, providing the most excellent experience that we possibly can.”