Idaho teachers aim to reach students via PBS

Two Moscow elementary school teachers have joined colleagues from across the state to create and deliver a series of lessons to be aired on Idaho Public Television.

Starting last week, teachers began delivering 55-minute lesson plans designed for students in third through sixth grades every weekday. Tiffany Ringo, third grade teacher at Moscow’s Lena Whitmore, said the project took off fairly quickly.

“I was part of the week one instruction, so my episodes were all on last week,” Ringo said. “I had less than 72 hours from when I found out that I was part of the project and until when I had to have my first episode complete.”

Moscow Teacher Lacey Watkins said one of the driving motivations behind the project was to reach students who may not have internet access at home. Equitability and access are linchpins in public education, she said, and the pandemic has wreaked havoc with school districts’ ability to provide both. Put simply, she said students throughout the state must have equal opportunity to learn even if they don’t have the same resources other students have at home, including internet access.

“The Idaho Department of Education, and PBS -- Idaho Public Television -- were trying to problem solve how to get instruction out to students that don’t have access to internet across our state,” Watkins said. “The nice thing is, the way that it’s set up, they’re also posting it on YouTube, so students that have access to internet and students that don’t -- both of those demographics … can tune into it.”

Watkins said teachers receive $1,000 and a continuing education credit for participating in the program.

Watkins’s lessons, which began airing Monday, became a bit of a complicated project. Rather than simply hosting classes via a teleconferencing service like Zoom, she said she spent a lot of time filming different facets of her lessons and then spliced them together using video editing software. Her first class took her two days to film and assemble.

“It morphed into more complexity than I had originally planned,” she laughed.

While she is grateful to have this tool to reach out to Idaho students, Watkins said online instruction was difficult to adapt to at first. She said teachers are used to being able to instruct students in a classroom and so their lessons are usually designed to be delivered via a more direct, hands-on approach.

With remote instruction, especially recorded lessons, she said this was no longer possible so they had to strategize ways to engage students with these methods and anticipate the questions they may have. She said this challenge specifically is why it was so important to have the help of Idaho’s Regional Mathematics Center out of Lewis Clark State College to help refine the delivery of their lessons.

Math Specialist with the center Ryan Dent said teachers came to the table with amazing ideas for instruction. He said it was his job to help them devise ways to package that instruction in such a way that it would be accessible to young students -- for example describing two halves of a whole accompanied by a video of the teacher slicing fruit.

“It’s a big project with a lot of eyes on it. So our job was really to let (teachers) generate their first ideas -- they’re much more creative than we probably could be,” Dent said. “As soon as they signed up, they started thinking about stuff right away -- within six hours, they had somewhat of a vision for how they wanted it to go so we didn’t necessarily want to mess with the creative part of it.”

Online versions of the daily lessons can be found on Idaho Public Television’s YouTube page at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCcilbrY8iMEwzNHNugHqlhw. For those who wish to watch on television, third grade instruction begins at 7 a.m. Mountain Standard Time, fourth grade begins at 8 a.m., and fifth and sixth take place at 9 a.m. and 10 a.m.

Scott Jackson can be reached by email to sjackson@dnews.com.