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After two decades of teaching, Stephen Lazar suffered an injury that made it difficult to teach in a classroom. A career he loved was suddenly in jeopardy.
After a semester-long sabbatical two years ago to take care of his health, Lazar was determined to keep practicing his craft.
He applied to New York City’s Virtual Learning Classrooms program, which allows students to sign up for advanced classes that are taught remotely. The program, known as VLC, is designed to address a longstanding inequity: Small schools often struggle to pay for a wide range of classes because funding is tied to headcount, leaving students with limited access to advanced coursework.
As the number of small schools has more than doubled since 2016 due to declining enrollment, the virtual teaching program has surged in popularity. Its 42 courses serve about 2,500 middle and high school students from 70 schools.
Lazar traded his lively high school classroom for a drab Education Department building in Downtown Brooklyn where he teaches Advanced Placement courses alongside other VLC educators. The experience has been positive — nothing like hastily planned pandemic-era instruction, he said — and the coursework is setting his students up for life after high school.
“Online environments [will] be central parts of their college and work experiences in the future,” Lazar said.
Chalkbeat recently caught up with Lazar about his experience teaching virtually.
The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What’s the goal of the virtual teaching program?
VLC was created before the pandemic to help give students equity and access to advanced courses and early college credit opportunities. We offer courses to students whose schools either don’t have enough students to offer a class or don’t have a teacher trained to do it.
This means I have some classes that are a mix of students from different schools and others where I am teaching a full section at one school. My first-period class has students from schools in the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, and Manhattan. One is part of a network of schools that serve recent immigrant students. And another is screened, which means the school’s admissions process takes students’ academic records into account.
In the country’s most segregated school district, it’s a pretty remarkable thing to bring such diverse students together.
How similar is the experience to teaching during the pandemic?
The only real commonality is that we’re on Zoom. Because I only teach during the traditional school day, all of my students are in a classroom in their school with a teacher there to support them. This means there is a different type of accountability for students with this model than what many students experienced during the pandemic.
While students being together presents some more classroom management challenges than when students were at home, it also makes it much easier to do collaborative work and projects.
What are your favorite advanced classes to teach?
AP Seminar and AP Research are particularly valuable offerings. These courses are both content-agnostic and help students develop research, writing, and presentation skills on topics that they choose. These are uniquely challenging for schools to offer as they’re the only APs that require teachers to attend a week-long training.
Last year, I asked my AP Seminar students, all of whom were 10th and 11th graders, what the longest paper they had written in other classes. The vast majority said it was four or five paragraphs. In AP Seminar, they write a 1,200- and 2,000-word paper. In AP Research, they write a 4,000-word paper whose demands are higher than anything I did as an undergrad.
What are the drawbacks of the virtual teaching program?
I lose 5-10 minutes of class every day to students logging on and putting away computers at the end of class. There are days when the internet is down. I don’t overhear side conversations students are having while they’re working. What I offer students, however, far outweighs these drawbacks.
How do you build a learning community given that the students in your classes may come from multiple schools?
While it takes more time to do it, what creates community and engagement isn’t different. Just like in the classroom, I build community with students by asking them questions and really listening to them. They build relationships with each other by working and talking together. While I might not notice as quickly if a student is not engaged, my onsite partner in the classroom will and will let me know so I can reach out to that student.
How do you approach classroom management?
The rare times that significant things happen, the approach to them will depend on how my onsite partner wants to handle things. I have partners who want to take care of everything on their own without involving me; I have others who let me know what’s happening and want me to be the one to address them. I’m fine either way and both work well.
What’s something happening in the community that affects what goes on inside your classroom?
The day after the election, I went to teach my U.S. History classes in person [nearly all of the students in those classes attended the same schools]. I asked students what, if anything, they were most worried about. About half of my students wrote that they were worried that friends, family members, or themselves could face deportation. There is real fear and unease right now.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever received, and how have you put it into practice?
When I was student teaching, a math teacher at the school suggested that I create a “Happy Folder” filled with thank you’s, work from challenging students who finally got it, and those letters teachers get from students years after leaving their classrooms about how they finally got a lesson.
He told me this was his most valuable possession and that if his house was ever on fire, it would be the first thing he would save after his kids. I followed that advice and started my own folder, which continues to grow each year. The folder has saved me from the depths of despair more times than I can count.
Alex Zimmerman is a reporter for Chalkbeat New York, covering NYC public schools. Contact Alex at azimmerman@chalkbeat.org.
