We’re over a month into hybrid learning at Lincoln School, and I thought it might be a good time to talk about the model we chose for our return to campus this semester. It’s a model that we worked on as a team last summer in anticipation of returning to campus in August, and then refined over the course of the first semester as our return was delayed due to government regulation here in Costa Rica. In that time, we had to make many decisions about our structures and policies, and for each one we were forced to weigh the immediate safety of our students, teachers, staff, and community against the long-term effects of continued quarantine. We knew that we needed to get our students back on campus for everyone’s emotional and, quite frankly, financial wellbeing. Humans need contact and parents need to work. The questions were simply about how to do it while protecting everyone as much as possible.
A caveat: there are many models of campus return in the world, and I don’t think there’s a universal “right” way to do it. As long as schools kept safety as a primary concern in making decisions, I choose to assume good intent: we are all just doing the best we can in unprecedented times.
3 Cohorts
Our first decision hinged on how many students we could safely have on campus at any given time. Government regulations limited our capacity on campus by a percentage and set social distancing in all spaces at 1.8 meters. From there, we measured our classrooms, hallways, and common spaces across campus to determine a maximum capacity in classrooms for each of our academic divisions. The principals worked with the registrars to examine our populations within and across divisions (in the cases of families with multiple students of varied age ranges) to divide our students into multiple cohorts.
But, there were other limiting factors compounding those of physical space. In the high school, for example, we had to look at individual student schedules to manage class sizes in a schedule of over 100 different course offerings taught by 50 teachers who in many cases were responsible for multiple grade levels. We couldn’t just bring back a certain generation (like seniors, for example) due to the need to limit the number of students in a room who were taking a course assigned to only one teacher. To do so would have forced us to either hire considerable extra staff or to split classes across multiple classrooms while teachers moved back and forth between them simultaneously. This would have left us with classrooms of students without teachers for indeterminate periods of time and, because teachers cover multiple grade levels, would have forced us to cancel (or move to asynchronous work) other classes entirely. We played with that puzzle for multiple times but, in the end, determined in just wasn’t feasible.
We also had to consider families who weren’t ready for their students to come back to campus. While we were able to create cohorts that in theory would allow is to have half of our students return to campus at one time, we ultimately determined that we needed a third cohort for the students who would be staying home and continuing with virtual learning. So, three cohorts: one comprised of students who would remain virtual and the other two for students who would return to campus.
Week On / Week Off
But for how long? There were really two viable possibilities here and we went back and forth on this decision for a while. One possibility that we looked at for a long time was to have students on campus for two days at a time and to rotate that between the two on-campus cohorts. This would give students frequent exposure to the classmates and teachers and it fit with our A/B day rotation in secondary. On the other hand, we were concerned about how disruptive this would be for families as they tried to schedule transportation and work requirements, especially if the two day on, two day off rotation changed from week to week. Finally, we were concerned about student safety and our ability to contain a possible outbreak with students “sharing” spaces so frequently. As I remember it, this was the primary reason we ultimately decided against the two-day rotation.
Instead, we decided to rotate our students weekly. This allowed students to attend classes in-person for a full week at a time (more on that in a minute) which we hoped would create a little more stability/predictability for our community. We also felt that this would make it easier to protect our students and community by cleaning the campus and materials between cohorts to avoid cross-contamination.
4 Days On / 1 Day Off
To make it even safer, we decided that Fridays would be virtual for everyone. This gave us three full days between cohorts, which was important to us for multiple reasons. For one, we were reading early on that scientists projected a three-day lifespan for the virus on surfaces. I’m not sure if that’s still regarded as fact, but by having campus empty from Thursday afternoon to Monday morning we hoped that any lingering virus that might have been missed in cleaning would not survive to infect the next cohort. We also hoped that this would also build in a quarantine period for our students so that symptoms might show before a student returned to campus, again helping to mitigate the risk of an outbreak among or between cohorts. Finally, and I can’t say we planned this but it’s certainly true, hybrid learning and teaching is taxing and the virtual day gives students and teachers an additional opportunity to recharge without losing additional instructional time.
Half Days
The truth is, we felt and continue to feel really confident about the protocols and procedures of our hybrid plan. We social distance, practice good hygiene, control our numbers, and generally just look out for one another. We monitor classrooms and common spaces, have new procedures for when students need to use the bathroom or visit the office, make sure we have good ventilation, and adjusted staff schedules to make sure we have good oversight throughout the day. The only remaining parts of our schedule that we still had lingering concerns over were recess and lunch. How would we manage to stay within our protocols with large numbers of students potentially sharing spaces with their masks off to eat?
There were other factors, but I think this was the primary reason we decided that our on-campus learning would end at 12:15 each day. By going to a half-day on campus, we eliminated the need for students to gather for lunch. We still allowed students to eat at recess, but we were able to accomplish this in small groups with protocols dictating that students not talk while their masks were off. Lunch was much more complicated.
Instead, our students are dismissed from campus at 12:15 to go home for lunch. Then, they finish the day virtually, though this looks different in each division. In the high school, students’ afternoons allow for online tutorial sessions with teachers. This allows all students to continue their learning or get the extra help they need, but it is especially important for our online cohort of students who aren’t on campus at all. The afternoon tutorials are really a time for teachers to check in with them.
Instructional Flexibility
I don’t even know where to begin in describing my admiration for our faculty. Twelve months ago, the teachers at Lincoln transitioned from face-to-face instruction to virtual teaching, literally overnight. Four weeks ago, they did it again…transitioning from virtual teaching to simulcasting hybrid instruction. There’s at least another full blogpost to be had in describing what this looks like, but for now: one of our key features of success has been our teachers’ ability to choose instructional practices that best fits their students in their course. There are common expectations, sure: we need to make sure each and every student has equitable access to the learning experience. This looks different in different classes though, especially when you consider the differences between science labs, language classrooms, gyms, etc.
The Details
There are MANY other important aspects of our hybrid plan that has allowed us to return to campus while keeping our students and community safe. From uni-directional hallways to modified uniforms, many of them were thought of in advance and laid out in the protocols and procedures we outlined to faculty and families. Like adjusting arrival/dismissal traffic patterns, many other decisions have been made each day as we have monitored our implementation and adjusted to the real-world practicalities of keeping our community safe while returning in large numbers. What I personally love about our team and community is that we’ve done it together by remaining flexible (dare I say entrepreneurial) and keeping our primary consideration the overall safety and wellbeing of every member of our community.
Next Steps
We’re four weeks into hybrid learning, and we’re already planning our next transitions back to a full-day schedule and then for when we’re able to have all students on campus each day. Again, my favorite part is that we’re doing this as a team. We meet multiple times each week to work through current issues in leading the school, but each meeting also includes conversations about next steps. I’m not sure yet when those steps will be taken, but it’s reassuring to know that we’ll be taking them together.
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