Tucked away in a corner of UCLA’s campus sits the UCLA Lab School, just a five-minute walk from the Fowler Museum and right off Charles E. Young Drive.
The tuition-based school serves children ages 4 to 12. As part of the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies, it has two roles: a school where young children learn and a lab where demonstration teachers – the school’s name for its educators – partner with UCLA professors to conduct research.
Beyond the glass-paneled, sunlight-filled classrooms lie a stream and redwood forest, which serve as natural extensions of students’ learning environments. In a usual school year, over 400 students bustle through the Lab School’s campus to create projects in the iSTEAM Lab, sing in the choir after school and explore the pumpkin garden outside the building.
For many students, including myself, the past 18 months have been a blur of endless Zoom meetings and masked gatherings with close family and friends. However, despite a year of monotony for many online learners, the Lab School educators constantly worked to create memorable moments for both themselves and their students.
As the Lab School teachers prepared to enter the third academic year affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, I asked them to reflect on the challenges and highlights of teaching during the pandemic.
When I returned home to Hawaii in March 2020, just days before completing my second quarter at UCLA, my mom welcomed me with open arms. As we unpacked my bags and sat down to share an afternoon coffee, I already felt safer in my mom’s presence, even as we struggled to comprehend how our lives had just been upended.
What I didn’t know at the time was that my mom, an elementary school teacher, was just beginning to face the uncertainty and worry that would mark the experiences of so many educators during the pandemic. As I spent the next day talking to friends over FaceTime and halfheartedly studying for final exams, my mom taught her kindergarten and first grade students in person for the last time before spring break. When she locked up her classroom, she had no idea her students would not return to school for almost a year.
More than 2,000 miles away, on the campus I had just left, the Lab School teachers were met with a similar situation. Following UCLA’s announcement that university classes would be moved online, the Lab School also decided to begin virtual instruction starting March 11, 2020.
When I asked Rebecca Heneise, a bilingual English and Spanish demonstration teacher, about her last memory before the Lab School moved online, she paused for a moment before beginning to smile. Heneise, who teaches fifth grade, said she had just begun a unit on the European exploration period of American history and wanted her students to properly understand colonialism and the unfair claiming of land.
Heneise had her students explore parts of the UCLA campus and place banners stating that the land was now property of the Lab School. However, when the students returned to the Lab School, they found that UCLA administrators had taken over their classroom and were enjoying doughnuts in the newly claimed space.
The activity helped students understand the reality of claiming land belonging to other people, Heneise said. It also allowed the class to bond and enjoy themselves on what ended up being one of their final days of in-person instruction that year, she added.
Joyce Friedman, a primary-level demonstration teacher, said she faced some of the hardest hours of her life during her last day of teaching in person. Friedman, who teaches 6- to 8-year-olds, said she first learned via email that the Lab School would transition to online learning. But since teachers were asked not to tell their students about the decision at the time, Friedman sent them home as usual.
“It was painful,” Friedman said. “It began an anxiety at that time of, ‘Wow, what are we going to do? How is this going to work?’”
For Hasmik Cochran, a kindergarten demonstration teacher, one of her earliest tasks when teaching online was identifying students’ shifting academic and social needs. By seeing children in their homes over Zoom and watching them interact with their home environments, Cochran said she developed a deeper, more holistic understanding of her students.
“Every morning, I was in every child’s house, and I could see ... what independent skills they had, what support they had,” Cochran said. “I feel like I visited each child every single day.”
To provide students and families more flexibility in learning, Cochran sent home lesson plans that allowed parents to support and supplement their child’s academics if the student was unable to attend a Zoom meeting or wanted extra activities outside of class. By directly including parents in the learning process, Cochran said she reached an unprecedented level of collaboration with her students’ families.
Heneise also faced challenges in the shift to online teaching, as she and her fellow fifth grade teachers worked to understand students’ attention spans on Zoom while also transitioning end-of-the-year projects and activities to an internet-friendly format. On top of that, she struggled with exhaustion and isolation as she spent up to 13 hours a day on her computer in meetings, classes and planning sessions.
“Part of the exhaustion was just the emotional uncertainty, what's going on, what's going to happen, the fear, the anxiety, trying to keep it all together,” Heneise said. “And then just, a really strange feeling of isolation, like you're in a little tower, going through all of this.”
For many teachers – including my mom – the start of the new school year created new apprehensions and uncertainties. A few weeks before my mom’s school year began in August 2020, I sat on the living room floor with her, helping her put together sets of flashcards with different alphabet letters for her kindergarten students. At the time, my mom’s school expected some children to return for in-person instruction, so my mom created individual sets of study materials for her students to try and prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus in her classroom.
As the beginning of the school year crept closer, Hawaii’s COVID-19 cases began to hit record numbers. Just days before students were scheduled to return to campus, my mom’s school decided to start the year online. Her classroom, already set up with desks distanced six feet apart, simply became the space where she would hold classes over Zoom until 2021.
Even though the Lab School teachers had learned in the summer that they would start the school year online, they still faced frustrations and unknowns in September 2020 as they greeted new students over Zoom for the first time in their careers.
Anna Terrazas, a primary-level demonstration teacher, said she felt more nervous than usual on the first day of instruction, as she wanted to ensure students new to the school felt connected to their peers, even in a virtual setting.
Despite her initial worries, Terrazas felt her class became a tightknit group throughout the year, as she and her teaching team – which included Friedman – worked to create an engaging learning environment for their 6- to 8-year-old students.
“We pretty much did everything we would normally do in a typical school year, but we figured out how to do it virtually,” Terrazas said.
Terrazas and Friedman held “Friday Fundays'' every week, in which the class explored different themes and activities, ranging from cooking to wearing pajamas. One of Terrazas’ favorite Friday themes was Fancy Day, in which students wore the clothing that made them feel the best about themselves. As the students donned everything from suits to sports jerseys, Terrazas and her teaching team taught the class how to be “fancy” by pushing in their chairs and putting their napkins on their laps.
The teaching team made sure all students could participate in Friday Fundays by using easily accessible supplies and materials. In doing so, they ensured the activities were common experiences that could bring the class closer together, Friedman said.
“It was the shared experiences that built the community, that made the memories,” Friedman said.
Inmaculada García-Sánchez, an associate professor of education, said she appreciated the teachers’ efforts to cultivate community as both a researcher and the mother of a Lab School student.
This past year, García-Sánchez researched students’ perspectives on remote learning and the return to in-person instruction alongside education professor Marjorie Faulstich Orellana and demonstration teacher Elena Pérez.
García-Sánchez said teachers put even greater effort into cultivating trust with both students and parents during online instruction. In addition to Friday morning coffee talks with parents, she said her son’s teachers regularly worked on building students’ social and emotional skills.
For example, her son’s teachers held daily check-ins with the class, during which students were encouraged to express their feelings, García-Sánchez said. For students who were less comfortable sharing their experiences, they had the option to hold up different colored cards to indicate their emotional states. This exercise helped quieter students, including García-Sánchez’s son, start conversations with their class.
From her observations as a researcher, García-Sánchez said Pérez helped to form a community among her 5-year-old students by showing them appropriate ways to express their emotions. Prior to the Lab School’s return to in-person learning, Pérez shared with her class that she sometimes felt uncomfortable wearing face masks. By being emotionally vulnerable over Zoom, Pérez helped her students feel safer sharing their own feelings, García-Sánchez said.
“From what I experienced as a parent and from what I saw as a researcher, is just the teachers actually doubled down on the idea of community,” García-Sánchez said. “So it’s not just that, ‘We’re not going to try because it’s too difficult.’ It’s like, ‘We’re going to try even more.’”
2021 brought new faces to elementary schools across the country – including my mom’s classroom. Following the start of in-person classes in January, my mom’s students began to form close friendships with one another.
By the spring, my mom would regularly text me photos and videos of her kindergarteners throwing paper airplanes to each other or eating snacks together outside of the classroom. While their social interactions were previously limited to Zoom, my mom’s students were now embracing the opportunity to meet their classmates face-to-face for the first time in the academic year.
At the Lab School, similar interactions occurred for the first time in a year as students entered the classrooms in March – months before most UCLA students would return to campus.
However, teachers also faced new challenges as they navigated the transition to in-person learning amid the still ongoing pandemic.
Friedman said that in addition to the pressure of effectively teaching her students, she also had to figure out how to keep herself and her students safe. Unlike in previous years, when students shared classroom supplies and sat on the communal rug together, Friedman had to space out her desks and illustrate the concept of being 6 feet apart by making 6-foot paper chains with her students.
Nevertheless, students were still happy to be back in the classroom and learned how to support one another from a distance, Friedman said.
“There were never any discipline problems because they were just so happy to see each other,” Friedman said. “That was the best thing, just visiting and seeing each other.”
In her work as a researcher, García-Sánchez said she was only able to observe in-person classes over Zoom because of the Lab School’s COVID-19 safety protocols. Nevertheless, she saw how teachers were able to fulfill the emotional needs of students during the transition back to the classroom while also meeting their academic goals.
For example, to build their data-gathering skills, students created and studied charts recording how many of their classmates preferred in-person versus remote learning. This activity not only aligned with the class’ math curriculum, but also created a space for students to discuss any fears or excitement they had about the different learning formats, García-Sánchez said.
Such community-building activities were especially important in supporting students who had faced challenges throughout the pandemic, such as the deaths of loved ones or the unemployment of family members, García-Sánchez added.
“If the children don’t feel safe, they cannot express how they’re feeling. They’re not going to be ready to learn,” García-Sánchez said. “There was this seamless integration of attending to the social-emotional needs of the child as integrating with meeting curricular goals.”
Heneise said transitioning to in-person instruction created an entirely new dynamic for her class – and a new set of memories for her. Upon returning to campus, Heneise began setting aside time on Wednesdays for her students to play outside. What started as simple games of capture the flag and kickball soon became an important opportunity for Heneise to bond with her students as she joined the class activities.
“I realized that it was the first moment that I felt any kind of connection and relationship with them because we were on a team. We were working together. We were problem solving. We were strategizing,” Heneise said. “It was the most fun, and they loved it. “
Terrazas experienced a newfound appreciation for in-person instruction on picture day. When taking the class photo, she and her students temporarily took off their masks, and Terrazas watched as her students expressed awe at being able to see one another’s entire faces.
Although she would usually take for granted seeing a student’s smile, Terrazas said it was one of the memories that stood out to her most upon returning to in-person teaching.
“It was the sweetest moment of all of us just looking and being like, ‘Oh wow, we get to see all of you,’” Terrazas said. “Those small things that we normally take for granted, (it) was just such a beautiful moment.”
At the end of the school year, Heneise experienced more sadness than usual as she said goodbye to her students. When the year ended, she felt she was only beginning to adjust to her classroom and getting to know her students better.
“It felt like I only taught from March to June, and it felt rushed,” Heneise said. “It wasn’t a lost learning year, but it definitely felt cut short.”
When the Lab School resumes instruction in September, it will mark the third academic year affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, Cochran said rather than worrying about the future, she prefers to focus on how she will address new challenges as they arise.
“I believe everything’s going to be okay, always,” Cochran said. “We’re just gonna just march on.”