What students think about hybrid learning
By Essie Ashton ‘21 and Divine Niyungeko ‘21
As the 2020-2021 school year approached in late August and early September, schools across the country implemented different hybrid learning models to allow students to safely attend in-person classes during the pandemic. Catlin Gabel School (CGS) hopes to soon apply hybrid learning as well.
In late December, Governor Kate Brown made a statement that gave Catlin Gabel School (CGS) the green light to begin their hybrid transition.
“Oregon’s school metrics, the measures of local community spread of COVID-19 that guide when it is appropriate to open schools for in-person instruction, will be advisory rather than mandatory, effective January 1. Moving forward, decisions to resume in-person instruction must be made locally, district by district, school by school,” Governor Brown stated.
Released on Jan. 28, Catlin Gabel has laid out an eight-week plan to transition from remote learning to hybrid, aiming to have all grades on campus before Spring Break which starts on Monday, March 22. The school created a different transition plan for each division to accommodate age-specific needs. The choice for each student to return to campus for hybrid learning will be left up to their families.
For the Upper School, the hybrid plan states half the students will be on campus at a time in A and B cohorts. This means half the students will be logged into class on Zoom or doing asynchronous work while the other half will be in person with the faculty, each two days a week. The school sent a survey out to Upper School students a few times since the beginning of the school year asking them to select friends and who they carpool with so they can create the cohorts. Besides siblings, the school has said they can’t promise students will be with their selected friends or carpool group, but they will try.
For returning Upper School students, school will look very different from what they are used to. Freedom to roam the campus, off-campus lunch privileges, and unsupervised free periods are some of the notable changes listed in the plan. Specifically for juniors and seniors, returning to campus comes with much less of the freedom they are used to. The plan states that students will eat, study, and socialize in supervised and assigned outside spaces to ensure all students adhere to the safety guidelines. Additionally, students across all divisions will need to bring their lunch and water bottles and will need to leave and arrive on campus close to start and end times.
It is inevitable that school had and will continue to look very different than it has in the past. Upper School students have had a wide variety of responses to how the rest of their year will look, and for seniors, the structure of their last semester of high school.