Fort Worth’s school district wanted to make online classes better. Here’s what it did.
Things quickly turned chaotic for Nancy Estrada and her sons when Fort Worth ISD stopped in-person classes last spring.
Both of Estrada’s boys went to Rosemont Elementary School last year. When classes went online due to COVID-19, each boy had a few different teachers, each of whom used a slightly different system for communicating with their classes.
Just keeping track of everything caused Estrada headaches. She had a hard time getting a handle on weekly lesson plans. She and the boys had to go to several different websites to find assignments from each teacher, complete them and check each assignment off once it was done.
“It was a little bit of a hot mess,” Estrada said.
With the beginning of online classes less than two weeks away, Fort Worth ISD teachers and administrators are working to get students and their parents ready for distance learning. For district leaders, part of that effort is reassuring parents like Estrada that their children’s online classes will be better organized and more effective than classes were last spring.
“It’ll be quite different,” said Fort Worth Superintendent Kent Scribner. “We’re calling it Virtual 2.0.”
Fort Worth ISD adopts new distance learning model
When the pandemic hit, the district was caught in the middle of a public health crisis and a technological emergency. In early March, the Fort Worth ISD’s computer network suffered a ransomware attack, leaving officials unable to access the district’s records. Then, on March 24, Scribner announced the district would remain closed “until further notice” as the pandemic gained a foothold in North Texas.
That left the district with about two weeks to move all of its classes online, Scribner said. The district adopted an online education platform called Edgenuity. Edgenuity lessons generally consisted of pre-recorded instructional videos, short tasks and longer assignments. Students were expected to complete one Edgenuity lesson per week, per class, and they were graded on a pass-fail basis.
The district made contact with about 96% of its students at some point after the shutdown last spring. Of that group, about 91% completed weekly learning sessions on Edgenuity, said Clint Bond, a spokesman for the district.
This year, the district is using a new online model. Rather than completing lessons through a computer program, students will get daily instruction directly from their teachers, and they’ll be graded on a traditional A-F scale, Scribner said. Students in grades K-12 will use Google Classroom, while pre-K students will use another program called Seesaw. The district will give each teacher sample lessons that they’ll be able to change or augment to fit their classes, he said.
“We know that our students need more direct instruction to make necessary progress, especially now that we are back in a traditional grading system,” Scribner said.
One of the biggest changes that students will notice is that they’ll see more of their teachers. New Texas Education Agency guidelines require that students get four hours of direct instruction from their teachers every day. Teachers will also hold virtual office hours where they work one on one with students who need extra help, Scribner said.
Scribner said the district’s goal for online classes is for them to be as effective as possible until the district can safely bring students back in person. The district’s plan is to begin reopening schools for in-person classes on Oct. 5, although Scribner has suggested that the Fort Worth ISD could push the start of in-person classes back further if COVID-19 case numbers in Tarrant County aren’t under control by then.
New online platform provides teachers more flexibility
Chanea Bond, an English teacher at Southwest High School, said the model teachers will use this year will be more student-centered than last year’s classes. The new platform allows for more flexibility than last year, she said.
Fort Worth ISD opted to use Edgenuity for its classes last year because it needed something that all teachers and students could access, Bond said. But not many teachers or students liked it, she said. The platform is useful as an extra tool that teachers can use alongside everything else they do in the classroom, she said, but as a replacement for the district’s entire curriculum, it wasn’t that effective.
The biggest problem was that the platform didn’t give teachers much flexibility, she said. Edgenuity presented students with a computer-generated list of tasks and assignments that they had to complete one at a time. If a student didn’t understand a concept the first time, there wasn’t a good way for teachers to go back and re-teach it to them.
But Bond is confident this year’s online classes will be better. Teachers have had time over the summer to figure out what’s most important in the district’s curriculum, she said. When online classes start next month, they’ll more closely mirror what goes on in an in-person class.
Because the platform is less rigid than the one the district used last spring, teachers will have more control over their own classes, Bond said. Because teachers will be interacting with students directly, if students don’t understand a concept right away, teachers can go over it again in the same way they would during in-person classes, she said.
The stakes for teachers this year are high, Bond said, but no higher than they usually are.
“If we don’t get it right, we’re going to lose students and we’re going to lose time,” she said. “But that’s true of in-person classes and in-person teaching, as well.”
From what she’s seen so far, Estrada, the Fort Worth ISD mom, is encouraged about how online classes will look this year. Things seem better organized, and she has a better sense of how things will look when school starts. She was initially worried that the district wouldn’t be ready to start on Aug. 17, but it seemed like the school board’s decision to push the start of online classes back until after Labor Day gave everyone time to do everything the right way, she said.
She’s especially happy this year’s online classes will give her sons more one-on-one time with their teachers. That’s the biggest area they missed last year, she said.
While the disorganization last year was sometimes confusing and frustrating, Estrada said she understands teachers and administrators had to shift gears quickly and adopt a new system that they weren’t used to using.
“This isn’t what they’ve done. It’s not what they’re accustomed to,” she said. “That kind of showed a bit.”
