For Carrie Molinero, second grade teacher at Madison Elementary School in Hinsdale, a remote snow day was something she would never have imagined in her 25 years of teaching, let alone a whole entire year on Zoom.
“After 20-something years teaching (in a classroom), I was terrified, I was like … how on earth am I going to teach things like money, telling time, using 10 blocks, all these hands-on things full remote?” she said. “We know learning is a socially inherent process. It’s incredibly difficult to do that when you’re disconnected from students and don’t have that face to face contact.”
Molinero, who opted to teach the 2020-2021 school year virtually in her Community Consolidated Hinsdale-Clarendon Hills District 181 cohort, said she was stunned at how well the year went by. Others also took notice — Molinero was recently named South Suburbs Teacher of the Year by the Illinois State Board of Education.
“I’m just flabbergasted,” Molinero said of the honor.
Last spring, District 181 asked staff and community members for their choice of a district representative for the Illinois Teacher of the Year Award. After being picked out of 30 nominees, Molinero was then selected as the South Suburbs top nominee by ISBE.
Several nominators pointed at Molinero’s emphasis on nurturing students both academically and emotionally. One parent said, “She uses humor and humility as she speaks, and has mastered the inevitable classroom management challenges in ways that allow students the freedom to share and participate, but also the discipline to keep learning at the center.”
By approaching teaching from a different perspective (quite literally), Molinero said her connection with the remote crop of students was almost “even stronger” than it had been in years past.
“I think it was because I was seeing their families at home; their brothers or sisters, when I’d read aloud, would come and sit on their laps, it was absolutely amazing,” she said. “And I would host things like Zoom “sleep-unders” where my students would come online at 8 p.m. and I would be here in my pajamas with my kids and we’d all read stories together.”
Developing that social emotional component is critical for students, Molinero added. And even more so when they’re seven or eight years old, in front of a computer for several hours a day.
The adjustment from in-person to Zoom wasn’t just felt by students — Molinero said teachers across the country have had an uphill battle figuring out virtual learning.
“It was a tremendous challenge, and I just banked on my own experience of dealing with younger children, I really tried hard,” she explained. “When I started the year — I only had my laptop computer, and seeing 23 faces on one teeny weeny laptop screen was one of the biggest challenges.”
Molinero eventually applied for a donor grant and was able to get a larger monitor.
“The large screen was wonderful. I always kept a really close watchful eye on them — and this is kind of what you do as a teacher in person too, if you see a few kiddos losing their focus, it’s time to stop and come back,” she said of her pandemic-teaching style. “I phased them into remote learning very slowly. We started off in smaller learning increments and larger breaks away from Zoom. So like, for 10 minutes of learning, we’re going to take a 20 minute break.”
Molinero said she found the intersection of old-school learning and technology fascinating — while the latter allowed educators to overcome some of the barriers they’ve had historically, it also sent experiential learning to the back.
“Our team values balance between technology and traditional learning. When I was remote last year, the students may have been using Zoom to get my instruction, but there’s still a need for students to write, to cut and glue — they still need all of those things,” she said.
When Molinero first started teaching two decades ago, she said she worked with a teacher who already had all her lesson plans written in her lesson book at the start of the year — and it changed Molinero’s approach before it even began.
“I asked her, how did you do that? And she said, oh I just white out the dates every year. This was 1998, and I asked her how long she had the lesson book, she flipped to the front cover, and it was from 1982,” Molinero said.
“I told myself I am never, ever going to be like that. Every group of students is different, and it’s so important to respond to the students you have in front of you,” she added. “And so I have made it a mission of mine, I literally throw away my lesson plan book every single year.”
Molinero calls it “responsive teaching” and it’s where educators respond to their students and meet them where they are. And that system isn’t only reserved for the class curriculum, she said.
Whether in person or remote, Molinero’s second graders are encouraged to utilize the district’s internal messaging system to chat with her when need be. The conversations don’t have to be about homework or books, and students can freely unload their personal problems and concerns.
“We know that if students have social needs that aren’t met, learning can’t take place,” she said. “It’s important for us to be open to having these discussions.”
