Despite COVID-19 challenging in-person teaching, education majors are becoming more resourceful and trained.
Since the beginning of COVID-19 in the spring 2020 semester, the University of Rhode Island’s School of Education has changed aspects of its curriculum and practicum courses to follow health and safety guidelines.
These changes allowed students to take advantage of some educational opportunities even with the pandemic closing many typical opportunities.
Safety concerns left many URI students without the opportunity to teach elementary school students in person as they usually would. But with new vaccine and safety regulations, Rhode Island schools have begun to consider reopening these opportunities to students.
Susan Brand, an associate professor of early childhood education, found that many early childhood education majors adapted well to helping students during COVID-19 through their determination and virtual learning apps. Many of the majors were forced to adapt to many new applications, ranging from Google Classroom and Class Dojo to Screencastify, to provide a communication platform to engage students while learning how to teach virtually.
“It took quite a bit of initiative and creativity on the part of the students to make these virtual lessons relevant to the children and motivating enough to sustain their interest.” Brand said
Peter Adamy, an associate professor of elementary education, explained that small groups of elementary education majors completed practicums through cooperation between the Warwick Elementary School system and the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE) over the last two semesters.
“We had an arrangement with the Warwick School District for elementary [education] under two of their elementary schools,” Adamy said, “[They] basically took on all of our students but it was in a very different format than they used to; none of them went out physically to the schools.”
So far during the fall 2021 semester, he has noticed that schools are beginning to find placement times for the education majors as RIDE continues to be flexible about the changes to student teaching hours and the URI curriculum.
He also noted that many students are recently being placed in their schools, which is later than they usually would, but most students are happy to be in these schools face-to-face again.
In the ever-changing environment of COVID-19, Adamy offered one piece of advice for students entering the education major and its practicums.
“One of the things about becoming a teacher is you have to learn to be a problem solver because you never know what to expect.” Adamy said, “Some things will always happen that are out of the norm.”
Despite the impact of COVID-19 on students currently studying to become teachers, Adamy observed that education major graduates are succeeding in their careers, and the major has seen increased enrollments this semester.
“The group that just started [teaching practicums] now as juniors is one of the biggest groups we’ve had in years,” Adamy said. “And so we’re having to adjust a bit obviously to getting kids back to face-to-face and having classes on campus and wearing masks and all the stuff that everybody’s dealing with.”
In reflection, Brand found that the education department and graduates have become more resourceful with the addition of virtual classrooms, which adds to the skill set of the education majors.
“Most of the students that I surveyed at the end of their student teaching felt that they learned a great deal of expertise about technology,” Brand said.