•  
  •  
 

Author Biography

Elizabeth Davis began teaching at P. K. Yonge in 2019, after serving as the 8th grade science intern during the 2018-2019 school year. Before becoming an educator, she spent two years working in a virology lab at UF.

Angela Flavin has worked in several positions during her employment at P. K. Yonge:

Speech Language Therapist, 1st grade instructor, 3rd grade instructor, 4/5 instructor, and K-6 support teacher. She is currently a member of the second and third grade learning community and serves as their learning community leader.

Melanie Harris, a 7th grade math instructor, recently completed her doctorate in curriculum, teaching, and teacher education and has taught in Alachua County Schools for more than 31 years.

Laura Huffman taught kindergarten for 16 years in LeClaire, Iowa. She loves helping children learn to read and write. She continues to study writing instruction with little ones.

Dicy Watson is currently on a gap year. She taught third grade teacher during the pandemic—her tenth year of teaching and her fourth year at P. K. Yonge.

Kristin Weller has taught middle and high school mathematics for more than 25 years, including 7th grade math, Algebra 1, Geometry, and AP Statistics. She has National Board Certification in Early Adolescent Mathematics.

Abstract

We began this pandemic cycle of inquiry by acknowledging that we all viewed relationships with our students as foundational to the teaching and learning process (i.e., Elmore, 2004; Fullan, 2007; Noddings, 2014; Rimm-Kaufman, et al., 2014). While we had well-established strategies for creating caring classroom communities in our face-to-face classrooms prior to the pandemic, we were all searching for new online strategies for keeping relationships vital when faced with the abrupt transition to remote instruction and the isolating effects of the Spring 2020 lockdown, both for ourselves and for our students. Hence, we committed to documenting and sharing with one another, the innovative strategies we were employing across our elementary and secondary school contexts. Through the use of informal sharing time and Zoom breakout rooms, we were able to connect personally with our students and to revitalize teacher-to-student and student-to-student relationships in our virtual classroom space.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.5038/2379-9951.6.1.1199

Download

Share

COinS