Spotlight on Our Shift to Online Learning

It’s the end of the year, and we’re here!

When schools switched to remote-learning in the spring, we learned what we could from educators figuring out a brand new way to teach. Nobody in education thinks it’s optimal, but we’re all doing the best we can, and it does have some advantages.  We taught two virtual programs in May and June, and we focused on building our anti-racism, anti-bias education online. 

Summer and fall have typically been when we lead more teacher trainings, and January through June has been when we offer most of our classes for students. 2020 has not been typical.  As demand for anti-bias education grows, as more schools prepare to spend the entire 2020-21 school year E-learning, and as clients that postponed programs in the spring are rescheduling, we’re proud to say that we’ve already taught hundreds of learners virtually—and we anticipate that in the next six months, we’ll work with over a thousand more. 

We’ve learned about lots of new tools for teaching: Zoom, Google Classroom, WebEx, Streamyard, Nearpod, Menti . . . just a few. But lots of the familiar elements of our workshops are still there: we lay out group agreements and discuss confidentiality; we assure students that they have a right to accurate information and respect; we use a link to a virtual anonymous question box so that they can ask us anything. 

A lot of the questions are reassuringly the same.  Teens are wondering about body parts and media messages and masturbation and just what exactly causes a pregnancy, or wondering if they can make their sex-ed teacher laugh.  (They often can.  One of the perks of the job).   But some questions we’ve never had to answer before: one young person asked “will I ever have a first kiss because of covid?”

Our hearts go out to the youth who feel like this isolation is going to last forever; it won’t.  And we’re grateful to be in a position to offer that reassurance, when students choose to share their worries. And we’re glad to know that when we all come out of lockdown, that student will have the knowledge and skills and self-awareness to make their first kiss (consensual and) unforgettable.