‘I Feel Half as Successful’: Teachers Push to Ban Hybrid Instruction, But Districts Want to Keep It

“I think we’re just at our infancy in terms of how we’re going to use technology in the future and have, really, schools without walls,” said Gustavo Balderas, the superintendent of the Edmonds School District in Washington state. “Kids that maybe have to be, for example, homeschooled for very specific courses or they’re ill or there’s a weather issue happening — we can quickly flip and kids would still be able to access the proper curriculum with a live teacher.”

His district, like many, intended to be open entirely in-person for the current school year, but as Covid evolves, so have those plans. One of the frustrations that has come with hybrid teaching is that it hasn’t stuck for long because of health scares that have forced districts to swerve from that format to all virtual and back again in an endless loop, sometimes with a sprinkling of all in-person classes.

“I just had to close down a school last week,” he said in late October, during a panel discussion hosted by the Education Writers Association. After taking a day for teachers to plan, “now we’re fully remote for all grades for two weeks.”

Ending that roller coaster but keeping hybrid teaching in the toolbox could make it an easier situation for teachers, especially if the health crisis eventually recedes. He noted, however, that every change in how the district operates requires negotiating with 13 different labor unions in his 22,000-student district.

“Education systems are typically not nimble,” said Balderas.

Culatta, whose book, Digital for Good: Raising Kids to Thrive in an Online World stresses creating a healthy digital culture, is emphatic that the version of hybrid teaching used in the pandemic was hardly the real or ideal version of the format.

“That’s the biggest bit of confusion as we talk to districts and states and unions,” he said.

He likened it to having a blanket and a tarp if you’re lost in the woods. “That emergency shelter in the woods is not a house,” he said. Districts in the pandemic focused on providing kids with devices and internet access and software to make it all work together. In the strain of the moment, they paid the least attention to training teachers. His organization’s training for teachers is all about using technology to engage students in meaningful ways, not about hardware and software.

Now that schools have done a lot of the hard work on those pieces of hybrid and remote learning, he said, “what would be incredibly stupid is to take this tech foundation that has been created through the pandemic and instead of building a house on it, just cover it up with dirt and say ‘Glad that’s over.’”

Unfortunately, he said, “the reality is there are a lot of districts that are filling in the foundation with dirt again. That’s where I’m really worried.”

That tech-driven future is hard for many teachers to see as the pandemic drags on. Some teachers are losing their jobs for refusing vaccines or masks. Fresh and fervid scrutiny of teaching is leading to censorship and firings. Longstanding problems, including difficulty filling some teaching jobs and other school staff positions, seem worse. Unions are winning salary fights in some places but striking in others, and the pandemic has triggered new conversations about working conditions, including about concurrent teaching.

“Hybrid/virtual teaching creates a ridiculous amount of extra work and stress for teachers,” Louisiana middle school teacher Kristen Avocato tweeted in late August 2020. “Today I have been so busy that I have only had an iced coffee and a single pink starburst for nourishment.”

One survey of teachers earlier this year by Rand found that teachers ranked hybrid teaching as their greatest source of job-related stress, followed by remote teaching and changes in modes of instruction.

“What hasn’t worked is hybrid learning,” Randi Weingarten, president of the powerful national American Federation of Teachers, said in a tweet condemning the practice. “Hybrid is disruptive to parents & educators & kids alike and simultaneous live stream & in school learning is an untenable pedagogical practice.”

In Orange County, Fla., which includes Orlando, the teachers union proposed a clear rule: “Hybrid instruction is not permitted,” a memorandum of understanding reads. “Live stream instruction and cameras in the classroom are not permitted.” A district counterproposal strikes that line. Union and school district negotiations, and any formal freeze on hybrid teaching, are at a standstill over salaries.

While at least a few local unions managed to get concurrent classes taken off the table through short-term agreements with their school districts, those may have no bearing on the long term.

“This is not precedent-setting,” said Kyle Arnone, deputy director of the AFT’s Center for Collective Bargaining. “These are temporary solutions to deal with temporary problems.”

Brad Marianno, a professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has been tracking these temporary agreements between teachers unions and school districts since just before the pandemic hit.

“I actually expected more school districts to formally negotiate memorandums of agreement around pandemic-related working condition changes than actually did,” he said.

Some school districts tried to anticipate the hardships teachers would face with hybrid teaching and head off frustration. In Minnesota, Mankato shrunk the school day so teachers would have more time during working hours to rewrite lesson plans, and the school district cut out “specials” — activities including art and music. Frederick County, Md., schools also boosted teachers’ planning time by about a third when it shifted to hybrid classes.

Osceola County schools in Central Florida offered extra pay to teachers who took on two sets of kids at once, spending nearly $4 million on 950 teachers over a few months, school district spokesperson Dana Schafer said. They were paid as if they each had added an additional class to their days. By the spring, the district jettisoned hybrid classes — both because most students were coming back to school in person, but also because it was so taxing for teachers.

“Overall, the task of teaching both face-to-face and digital students at the same time proved to be a lot for teachers as they didn’t want any group to get shortchanged when it came to support and instruction,” Schafer said.

The Frederick County, Md., teachers union also wanted a ban on hybrid teaching and proposed as much when contract negotiations began earlier this year. Hybrid lessons were the subject of no-confidence votes in the superintendent and school board and led to at least one lawsuit in the district. School administrators agreed only to study the issue. A committee of teachers and school system staff created a report that hasn’t yet been discussed publicly, but the teachers union president said the consensus was to try to avoid hybrid teaching.

“Because you’re doing [simultaneous teaching] — kids at home and kids in person — whatever you’re doing with your class has to be able to be done with your students at home without special materials,” said Missy Dirks, the union president. That was especially tricky for art lessons and science classes and younger students with whom teachers use hands-on tools for almost everything.

Without special equipment, just built-in laptop cameras and microphones, her teachers could not effectively keep tabs on both groups of students, particularly the ones at home.

“You walk away from your laptop but they can’t really hear you,” Dirks said. That means “you can’t assist the in-person kids like you would like to. [Teachers] ended every day feeling like they failed students. Nobody wants to end their day, every day, feeling like that: ‘I’m working twice as much. I’m having to duplicate everything. And I feel half as successful.’”

“It’s just demoralizing.”

If hybrid teaching survives teachers’ pushback and evolves in K-12 schools, it could look something like what’s becoming more common at colleges and universities — something educators have dubbed “HyFlex” instruction.

“Students’ lifestyles require flexible, customizable, technology-enhanced learning opportunities that suit their busy schedules,” SUNY Genesee Community College staffers wrote in a prepandemic guide to HyFlex, or Hybrid-Flexible courses. “Students are no longer constrained by geographical location and can engage in high-quality educational experiences from anywhere, at any time, on any device.”

Brian Beatty, an associate professor of instructional technologies at San Francisco State University, created HyFlex teaching about 15 years ago in part as a way to attract students to niche or small graduate programs. The intention was to provide easy access for students, including working adults, to courses, based on a student’s preference and availability. In an ideal set up, students choose between in-person instruction; live and interactive online classes taught by professors also working with students in-person; or online instruction that isn’t live but can be viewed at any time — what are known as asynchronous classes.

The ideal version allows for a seamless shift between different modes of teaching, with students using any format that works during a given day or week.

“The whole point of this is designing for when students can’t be there in person,” he said.

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