Distance learning has certainly made it difficult for students to learn, but it has also presented many teachers with challenges when it comes to adequately teaching their students. With a lack of face to face interaction, arts teachers have definitely faced their fair share of challenges. The Newsroom interviewed Bella Vista drama teacher, Mrs. Schlatter, in order to see her take on how she has approached teaching amidst a pandemic.
How has your teaching changed during distance learning? The biggest challenge that I’ve had over distance learning is my arts classes. it is because they’re performing arts, and performing automatically assumes that there is one person with an audience. It’s very difficult to replicate that situation on zoom. I’ve had to really adjust my expectations. I don’t want to go on record of saying that they are lower, they're just different. When you look at the standards of what we would typically cover in a performing arts drama class, I’ve had to maybe put some aside in order to facilitate the type of lessons that are actually gonna make somebody feel successful. So giving an example, today we started an improv unit, which I’ve kind of resisted doing because that’s live interaction. I’ve had to change my teaching to think about what’s gonna be more frustrating than it’s worth. While there are certain activities that I think are the crown jewels of an arts class, sometimes you have to put those crown jewels away, because it’s not gonna create the same kind of experience. My biggest fear is people are gonna be like “drama sucks," when in actuality it’s just drama on zoom. I’ve had to change my teaching by letting go of some of my favorite things, and delving deeper into topics that we can do better on zoom.
How do you try to create interaction among your students? Honestly, the only way to deal with it is positivity. Any negative reinforcement tends to keep cameras off. So what I’ve learned is by asking them to, but not demanding, adn just complimenting and praising and pointing out how when cameras are on or people are just participating. I’ve learned that some people can have their cameras on or they can talk, that's all their wifi can handle. To me, praising when someone is speaking up or has their camera on and making them feel really good and creating that environment on the zoom call where it’s all positive has yielded better results.
Have any drama events been cancelled or just postponed? I don’t believe we will be able to do a fall pay, we also usually do an actors night. We usually go see a show, we usually have an actors night which is open to the whole school, and then we usually have a fall play. All of those were scheduled, we had them on the calendar because we assumed that we were coming back, but I don’t think that we will be able to reschedule them because we have events for the spring that we want to maintain.
How do you as a teacher try to remain positive? Whatever I can do to create laughter. I think that one of the most important things is to just not forget that we’re in a pandemic. And in a pandemic we’re not going to meet all of the standards, and we’re not going to get all of the information in. For me, what keeps me positive is learning to forgive things that we can’t do, and knowing that people are gonna be okay.
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