An Analysis of Fully Synchronous Pandemic Secondary Education

Introduction And Background

The purpose of this study was to explore student perceptions and recommendations for teachers after their participation in twelve weeks of fully synchronous online learning using Virtual Interactive Real-time Instructor-led (VIRI) Classroom Technology because of the global COVID-19 pandemic that forced closure of schools worldwide and cancellation of Face to Face (F2F) classes. This “emergency remote teaching” (ERT) was defined by Hodges et al (2020) and differentiated from online learning because of the exigent circumstances demanding the shirt to ERT. While the entire Los Angeles Unified School District transitioned to using the Schoology™ learning management system (LMS) platform and required middle and high school students to check in once per week for an hour or less with their teachers, the charter school that participated in this study chose to require 100% of its grades 6-12 students to participate in a fully synchronous learning experience using the Google Classroom™ LMS. The leadership of that school, after consultation with parents, students, and staff, made the decision that fully synchronous learning would almost assuredly result in the least learning loss – a concern which has been in the forefront of policy decisions, local, state, and federal budget allocations, and on the hearts and minds of parents and educators who fear that an entire generation of young people worldwide will have experienced learning loss from which they cannot recover.

Each student was issued a Chromebook device with portable hotspot for internet access and provided various opportunities to learn how to use the Zoom™ videoconferencing platform. Various school created instructional videos on how to use Zoom™. Written instructions were emailed to students and parents, posted to the school’s website and social media sites, and printed copies made available for students when the Chromebooks and hotspots were issued. Students who did not attend one or more classes were telephoned and given technology support over the phone by either a student or staff technology helper to successfully login to their synchronous classes. As necessary, Facetime™ and Skype™ were used with students for whom the verbal instructions were inadequate. Of the school’s approximately 750 enrolled students about 40 were unable to be reached by school staff telephonically. The school then sent staff to the homes of those students to provide socially distanced in-person technology support to help those students access their synchronous learning classes. Those in-home ‘tech support’ sessions included any necessary trade out of inoperative technology equipment and in-person instruction in the proper way to access their classes. One hundred percent of the school’s students had a Chromebook and hotspot and were successfully able to access synchronous learning by the end of the second week of pandemic-forced online instruction, and the school boasted a 96.4% daily attendance rate at classes from the period beginning March 19, 2020 (the third day of pandemic virtual instruction) through the end of May 2020.

The charter school participating in this study had already used Chromebooks in classrooms when students were on campus, but their use was sporadic at best. The school required all 42 of its credentialed teachers to use the Google Classroom™ platform because, over the course of the previous eight months, the school had conducted more than 35 hours of professional development on the Google Suite for Education™ and supported all teachers in transitioning to that platform for most assignment distribution and collection. There were some teachers who used the Chromebooks daily, most used them about twice a week, and several teachers used them about once a week. Once the pandemic hit, the school held professional development sessions to teach teachers how to use the Zoom platform for synchronous teaching and learn some best practices for synchronous learning prior to ‘being thrown into the deep end of the pool’ and having to teach synchronously full time. It is worth noting that about one-third of the school’s teachers had successfully participated in a three-semester unit university professional development extension course on the topic of online teaching during the summer of 2020.