Prior to the pandemic, I was teaching English to 8th graders at a small alternative school in Chennai, India. The entire K-8 cohort consisted of 100 kids and about 15 staff.  My classes were a far cry from the stereotypical Indian classrooms with transmissive teaching and passive students. We sat around in circles. Sometimes on chairs. Sometimes cross-legged on the ground. Sometimes perched on our desks.  Classes started with discussions and debates, we had timed free-writes and classes were sprinkled with games and book discussions. You could feel thinking fizzing around in kids’ minds.

Then the pandemic hit. Everything shut down.  Within weeks, all the schools switched to online teaching.  But who was prepared for this complete change in classroom culture and dynamics? By mid-2020, it seemed the pandemic would go on forever.  And while ed-tech companies were falling over themselves in sheer delight at the business opportunities the pandemic had engendered, their stocks skyrocketing, and their pundits were announcing the arrival of the ‘new normal’ in schooling, teachers, one and all could sense the sheer magnitude of isolation, trauma and disconnectedness our students were going through. It seemed as if educators around the world had one plea “Put your cameras on!!”.  Later in the year, in a study spanning 60 countries, Bozkurt et al., confirmed what educators had been shouting from the metaphorical rooftops – online education was not working. In India itself, over 70% of the students were experiencing disengagement and disinterest in learning.  Bozkurt et al., argued that what was happening in the pandemic was not online schooling. It was remote emergency education.

My students too had fallen silent in the online Zoom classroom. They passively heard me out, obediently submitted assignments and left the online classroom correctly on the dot. No hanging back, no banter, no chatter. Faces I could not see. Voices I could not hear. The unblinking silent grid of black rectangles, sometimes decorated with a manga cartoon, sometimes with a bizarre meme which only the teenagers could understand, encapsulated the reality of my English class with my 8th graders.  I tried using humor, started book discussions, cajoled and pleaded. No change. The cameras came on momentarily and then were switched off. The kids continued to be silent. That’s when I came across the “What’s Going On In This Picture” (WGOITP) from New York Times’ (NYT) Learning Network.

Every Sunday, NYT posts a thought-provoking photograph stripped of its captions from their archives. This Visual Thinking Strategy activity asks students three critical thinking questions – What is going on in this picture? What makes you say that? What more can you find?  Learners are asked to post their guesses online and on Thursday, the answer is revealed. Teachers and students from all over the world use this in classrooms. For me, discovering the website was a lightbulb moment. I knew I had to try WGOITP with my students.

I was dead certain that my 8th graders would not be able to guess what was going on with the “What’s Going On In This Picture” picture I had selected (see figure 1). I was sure they would jump to a conclusion that the picture was about a pandemic, given how PPE was so much a part of our mindspace.  I shared the picture on the screen and instructed the students to spend a few minutes quietly observing and noting down their thoughts. “Ok Guys! Thinking time’s up. What do you think is going on with this picture?” The silence continued.  I almost cried. What was I going to do next to stir up these kids? This passivity could just not go on! Feelings of frustration overwhelmed me.  Then, suddenly Fathima unmuted herself “I think it’s something to do with COVID”.  “No. It’s an old picture.” Aziz countered. Whoa!! Was a debate, a long-forgotten debate, just starting to happen? “Yes. I agree with Aziz. The photo is a black and white. And the cars look old.” Izzy said. “The clothes look bizarre.” I pointed to the bell-bottoms a man in the picture was wearing and told the kids these were in fashion in the 1970s.  “I guess the picture is from London. Or some Western city”, Shazia observed.

Then the kids noticed how the central figure was togged up. I explained it was a Hazmat suit, worn to protect the wearer from dangerous substances. “He’s got a gas mask on and his feet were completely covered.  Why would anyone walk down the street dressed like that?” Hana wondered. Abdul Aziz thought the photograph may have been taken during the Spanish Flu era. Others countered that only the central figure was in a hazmat suit, the other people in the picture were not even wearing masks. He responded “Maybe it was the beginning of the epidemic so people were not aware.”  Abdul Aziz retorted that the picture might have been clicked towards the end of the Spanish Flu epidemic. The children’s interaction showed their old ability to engage productively in a group discussion by challenging another’s opinion respectfully and rebutting using evidence.

Another student noticed that the cars were clearly not from the 21st century. So maybe these were the kind of cars people drove during the Spanish Flu era.  I had to intervene here as automobile history was unfamiliar territory for them. I told them that these cars were later models.  Izzy argued that the quality of the picture was too good for it to have been from the 1920’s. But the children still couldn’t understand why one particular man was dressed in a hazmat suit while others were walking around dressed normally.

Then, Izzy noticed that the man in the hazmat suit was carrying something in his right hand. “Maybe he is looking for something? Sana mused. “A sanitizing device? Could he be trying to clean something toxic?” Fathima asked.  But what could be sanitized on the streets with this tiny device? “The device is connected to the box this man is carrying” Yara piped up.  A slew of voices, now thoroughly engaged with the mystery, wondered excitedly if he was searching for a bomb or something hazardous.  I challenged their assumption “Wouldn’t the entire street have been cordoned off, if there was a bomb around?” They agreed. Yara hypothesized that maybe the stick was some kind of a detector. But again, what could it be detecting on a busy street that required the use of a hazmat suit? Fathima guessed “Radioactivity?”

Khalifa who is normally silent during class, suddenly interjected “He’s just showing a new device and getting attention!” I guess he was fed-up with this mysterious fellow in the picture. I congratulated him on his totally “out of the box” guess. Hana took up on the clue and guessed “Maybe he’s in an ad!” Abdul Aziz followed up with “Maybe he’s raising awareness on government orders.” Impressive how the children started zooming in on the solution. Kids always demonstrate how they can guess and think in unstructured ways. I asked them to think in what circumstances hazmat suits are worn? Khalifa jumped in “Nuclear sites!” “Maybe the government wants to start a nuclear site and he is protesting” hazarded Majid. “You nailed it!”, I exclaimed.

I revealed the solution – This photograph was from 1979, a few months after the Three Mile Island meltdown in New York.  This man was an activist raising awareness about an upcoming anti-nuclear rally, I congratulated the children on their teamwork – how they had developed on each other’s ideas and smart guesswork using solid observation skills. I was impressed that the children solved a “mystery” about an event they had never even heard about, in a place they had never seen. On their part, the children said they enjoyed the session because they are forced to brainstorm, solve a puzzle, set forth their opinions and argue.

Thursdays became the WGOITP day for several months as I realized that students loved this activity. We tried variations by choosing pictures not only from the NYT but also Indian photographs or photos that had relatable elements. Apart from WGOITP, I started using other NYT Learning Network ideas to good effect. The fever spread to the other grades as my colleague started WGOITP with younger students. Both of us noticed that attendance and class participation had improved.  Cameras still remained off though – I think that was a way bigger battle and one I didn’t want to pick when the rest of the class was going well. Of course not everyone participated all the time. That cannot be expected in any class – in-person or online.

I learned several lessons as an educator through this experience.  This was the time for, as Bozkurt et al., (2020) puts it, ‘putting Maslow before Bloom’. At the outset of online teaching I should have addressed the children’s emotional well-being before diving into content teaching.  I should have tried having conversations about the pandemic and created spaces for children to share their worries, concerns and feelings. I guess not getting that kind of support from me had silenced the children. It was as if I had let them down as a friend and mentor.

Second, this was the time to abandon the regular teaching method and find lessons which were engaging and exciting in the online mode. Stuff that worked well with web technology and would normally have been difficult to do in our tech-deprived classrooms. Stuff that made kids curious and made them want to unmute and speak. Stuff that was cognitively challenging but also gave kids the opportunity to reconnect with each other.  I had simply transferred my regular, in-person syllabus to the online mode. What works in-person could not necessarily be expected to work in a pandemic-induced online class. How did I as an experienced teacher not realize that?

The school shut down at the end of that year. Kids went their separate ways – some to other schools, and some to homeschool.  But the experience remained with them. My teaching also evolved. I started an after-hours club to continue working with children.  One of the classes I ran used visual thinking combining ideas from WGOITP and thinking routines from Harvard’s Project Zero. And some of the kids from the previous cohort signed up. We met online after months of not having seen each other.  As the chatter died down, and I started screen-sharing, delighted smiles spread across the kids’ faces as they saw an intriguing picture of Chennai street folk during the lockdown emerge on the screen. They knew what was coming…

References:

Bozkurt, A. et al. (2020) ‘A global outlook to the interruption of education due to COVID-19 Pandemic: Navigating in a time of uncertainty and crisis’, Asian Journal of Distance Education, 15(1). Available at: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3878572.

Bozkurt, A. and Sharma, R.C. (2020) ‘Emergency remote teaching in a time of global crisis due to CoronaVirus pandemic’, Asian Journal of Distance Education, 15(1).