By Jared Pinder & Peyton Stinnett
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writers
The Problem
A typical school day during COVID-19 starts off differently than a school day did before the pandemic. Instead of waking up, driving to campus and interacting in person, students get out of bed, turn on their computer and get onto Zoom. Being on Zoom for hours on end has consequences. Students say their eyes get tired, they start losing focus, sometimes a throbbing pain starts in the back of their heads, all the while they start zoning out of the lecture and end up not really learning anything. These common responses to staring at a screen all day have become know as Zoom fatigue.
According to a researcher at Stanford University, Zoom fatigue occurs in part because there’s an excessive amount of close-up eye contact. Seeing yourself in real time on a screen can cause fatigue. Video chats reduce usual mobility and the cognitive load is much higher in video chats.
The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards advises that middle school students should only have three to four hours of online instruction daily. But given the in-person restrictions over the last year, schools in some cases have required more than that, which leads to more Zoom fatigue.
“Zoom Fatigue has caused my grades to drop slightly,” said Alyssa Marquez, a Towson University student. “I can barely focus on my work because I am mentally drained, and it is causing an overall effect on my grades, which affects my attitude.”
“I think the problem is that students are staring at screens so much more now thanks to Zoom,” said Susan Mouring, a Harford County school teacher who teaches math to middle school students at Southampton Middle. “It hampers the focus of the students leading to more and more absences.”
Added Thomas Larkin, a Towson University student: “I almost feel like I am entering the twilight zone when I experience it. I lose so much focus in my classes that I just end up zoning out and I end up not learning anything.”
Nicole Young, a teacher at Southampton Middle School in Harford County, started to see the same thing with her students. She noticed that most of them were not interacting in class and were starting to complain about eye soreness while also being too mentally drained to participate in class.
Young knew she needed to find a solution to this problem to help her students out through this tough time.
The Solution
Young, a math teacher, held classes online like most other teachers across the country. She didn’t want to substantially reduce class time, because then students would fall behind. Even if she recorded videos, students would still be online, which wouldn’t solve the screen time issue.
Her solution? Starting last spring, she turned Fridays, which had previously been normal class days on Zoom, into open sessions. Her math students still come online, but it’s a different kind of experience. She lets them ask questions about what they’ve learned throughout the week.
The sessions only last 45 minutes, and while it is not required for students to attend, Young heavily suggests they come. If students do not want to come or they don’t feel like they need it, Young will give them an activity to do on a different website, to keep their focus on the class.
Young got this idea when she realized that many of her students were going offline and communicating through group chats about problems they were having and going to different websites to find their solutions. This sparked an idea to commit one day to what the students were already doing on their own.
These sessions are personalized to students’ needs, meaning that Young allows them to guide what they cover. There’s time to meet in smaller groups, as well, so there’s more individual attention. If students come without questions, Young gives them an online activity to complete. These activities range from finding other math problems online from different sources that may be giving the student some trouble to going online and finding math games for students to do to give them a break from a long week of Zoom lectures.
Insights
Young has learned that what works best is when the students come with questions and are communicating their needs clearly. The more specific their questions, the better she can respond to them. She has learned that having any sessions over an hour often leads to awkward silences, so she keeps them to 45 minutes.
Young has learned that it is best to meet with students in small groups in order to keep the conversation in these meetings lively and not have any awkward silences. She has also learned that she needs to come prepared with activities on different websites like the ones described above just in case students don’t come with questions. The materials needed are just some links for the activities on the other websites and to lecture notes that she can refer back to if students have questions.
She has learned that she needs to always make herself available to her students in order to really build a relationship and build trust with her students.
The most important insight is that if a student is not responding to the session and is not speaking, the best thing to do is to ask them straight up what the issue is and to move on from there and always try to communicate with the student.
Young has been trying to also replicate the Friday sessions into her normal lectures to continue to engage her students and to make classes interesting and to engage her audience.
Evidence of Effectiveness
Young said some of the previous problems — students doing worse in class than when in person; not engaging and having their cameras off — are not as common now that she’s made the change to Friday open sessions. With the check-ins at the end of each week, teachers have been able to see more students getting involved and asking questions more than when they would in the beginning of online learning.
“I have seen a lot of positive feedback from my students on these sessions and I have seen a raise in their grades and participation in normal classes as well,” Young said.
The students have been more comfortable with asking questions, participating with lessons and showing their work. Young has also seen this solution more effective when she brings in interactive lessons.
Teachers have also seen that students that did not excel in in-person learning struggled in the beginning of online learning. And students that excelled in in-person learning and needed social interaction struggled online. But with the check-ins and now having a couple of days a week in person, students of every learning type have been able to interact and also get better grades than previously.
Young said these sessions have also helped her to gauge if she’s going too fast or spending too much or too little time on concepts. So she can see what students are struggling on throughout the week and bring more explanations on Friday and take any additional questions students have.
Young has had to adjust her calendar and see what topics and chapters her class must spend a longer time on and what she can condense or eliminate in her calendar in order to make room and not run out of time before the end of the school year.
“You could basically say that I’m not on pace,” Young said. “I’m a few weeks behind just because there were some concepts students didn’t grasp as quickly and we needed to spend some extra time going over those concepts, so I’ve had to make modifications.”
Young has had to modify her school calendar almost every school year, but she has had to make the most modifications this year due to online learning and what is best for teaching her students.
Limitations
The transition to online learning for students was a hard adjustment. When Young and other teachers at her school started the Friday check-ins, many students would attend the check-ins and engage and ask questions about what they covered throughout the week.
Now, as the school year has gone on, fewer students are attending the check-ins and when they do attend, they don’t participate and/or turn their cameras on.
So when Young doesn’t get the feedback from students she was anticipating, she has turned to alternative assignments where students must explain their work and if they don’t understand a concept, she will integrate further explanations into her lessons on the other days of the week.
The mixture of online and in-person learning has been difficult as well, as online classes have become more challenging. It’s harder to keep students’ attention when they are sometimes in person.
However, with the help of meeting with teachers around the county, teachers like Young have seen improvements thus far and are ready to see what they must adjust in order to help their students transition to this new type of online learning.