As teachers navigate Mitty’s new world of glaring screens amidst the pandemic, their main focus is, as Educational Technology Coordinator Mrs. Kristy Savage describes, “helping students to stay engaged and wanting to learn.”

In her own classes, Mrs. Savage has made community building a major part of her classes, trusting that students will be more inclined to learn if they want to be there with their peers. She tries to meet with her students in small groups every two to three weeks, which has helped her “get to know them so much better.” 

Additionally, Mrs. Savage worked with the education technology groups Spectrum and Edsby to hold teacher workshops over the summer and provide other online resources. These ranged from a conference on how to best approach distance learning to bimonthly training sessions on Canvas, a new “one-stop-shop” learning management system. Canvas keeps interactive activities in one spot, and compiles a single to-do list with all the deadlines from a student’s different classes, providing a measure of simplicity amidst all our world’s chaos. This year, some teachers have piloted their courses on Canvas, and Mitty intends to make the complete change over next fall.

Ms. Jasmine Solder, an English teacher, remarks that the workshops were insightful and have helped her accomplish her goal of making everything “simple” in her class. She has been able to use what she learned to recreate her summer reading seminars in her freshman course virtually, an accomplishment which “restored some of my confidence in being able to teach ‘normally’ over Zoom.” Still, it saddens her that her students “don’t get to interact with each other in person since my class is built on partner and group work.”

Mrs. Savage concludes with a simple message to students, emphasizing that teachers are committed to helping their students and working with them through shared struggles: “We’re really grateful that you’re trying as hard as you can to learn, and we hope that we can create the best experience possible for you, given how hard these circumstances are.”