Making the Transition to Virtual Methods in the Literacy Classroom: Reframing Teacher Education Practices

Lindsay Stoetzel,Stephanie Shedrow

doi:10.14305/jn.19440413.2021.13.2.04

Lindsay Stoetzel, Stephanie Shedrow

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.14305/jn.19440413.2021.13.2.04

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Abstract

In response to the COVID 19 pandemic universities and colleges abruptly closed and teacher educators had little time to move instruction from face-to-face classrooms to digital learning environments. This sudden shift created a myriad of obstacles as instructors worked to retain pedagogically sound and effective instruction digitally—while also preparing novice teachers to teach online themselves. Adding another layer of complexity was prospective teachers’ lack of knowledge and hesitation regarding technology tools, as well as how to meaningfully integrate the tools into their teaching. Facing these challenges, we as literacy teacher educators drew upon effective methods of teacher education, literacy practices and digital literacy to rethink the way we design lessons and assignments for our literacy methods courses. The framework we created for restructuring the integration of technology into courses can be duplicated across disciplines and guide instructors to reconceptualize their use of tech tools to re-envision face-to-face and digital instruction to expand learning outcomes.

Highlights

In March of 2020, amid the growing concerns about the spread of the coronavirus in the United States, the University of Washington was the first major university to cancel in-person classes and move all courses to online instruction (Kamenetz, 2020)
While all preservice teacher (PST) were successful in recording, posting, and analyzing their videos, it became immediately clear that more support was needed to understand what an effective readaloud would ‘look like’ in a video recording
By shifting our instructional design process to consider the context of digital literacies, we were able to achieve our content goals, model best practices in teacher education, and work to begin filling the gap in teacher preparedness of technology integration

Summary

Introduction

In March of 2020, amid the growing concerns about the spread of the coronavirus in the United States, the University of Washington was the first major university to cancel in-person classes and move all courses to online instruction (Kamenetz, 2020). While research has continually highlighted that beginning teachers are unprepared to teach with technology in traditional classroom settings, there is almost no attention to preparing teachers to teach in virtual environments (Koenig, 2020) To address this gap in PST preparation, we sought to augment our fully online literacy methods courses to mirror the current teaching context and challenges in K-12 education. From our experience, we knew that students’ lack of knowledge made them afraid to take risks and try new technologies and platforms when creating virtual instruction— which often resulted in lessons that utilized tech tools but were one-sided, static, or uninteresting With these considerations in mind, we launched a self-study (Dinkelman, 2003) to intentionally carve a path forward to improve the quality of our current courses and potentially the future classrooms our students will one day lead

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