Teaching beyond barriers: Google continues their commitment

When Google closed its offices due to COVID-19 a week before NYC public schools did, our Google Citizen Teachers didn’t hesitate to think of ways to continue apprenticeships virtually. “It wasn’t an option to not make this work. This is a commitment we made to students and we don’t want to let them down,” says Jackie Zopf, Music Operations Program manager, YouTube. “We’re connecting globally every day—this is normal for Google and we’re fortunate to be well-resourced.” 

By the time P.S. 157 closed, Jackie and her fellow Google Citizen Teachers Gary Hoffman, Mike Hudson, Gene Panov, Peter Ruess, and Harry Bullen were ready to continue their Pencil Code, Google Coding, Writing Academy, and Scratch (formerly Lego Robotics) apprenticeships online.

For Writing Academy, the plan from the beginning of the semester was to have each of the 7 students create their own YouTube videos, starting with a Treatment. Almost like a script for a Pilot, a Treatment is a written piece that explains the characters, main plot, climax and falling action of a video. Since video filming is no longer feasible, Jackie, Gary and Mike decided to move forward with Treatments and are instead exploring storyboarding or animation as possible final videos.

“We have very engaged students this year but right now, the challenge we’re solving is scheduling,” says Jackie. Writing Academy pairs each student to a Citizen Teacher, who coaches them through their writing project, in this case the Youtube Treatments. Since each student has different schedules and/or has to share devices with siblings, Jackie is working with Teaching Fellow Melesa Hall to have Citizen Teachers meet 1:1 with their students, having Melesa drop in these sessions to ensure everything is going smoothly. 

“Citizen Schools was so active about trying to get devices to students,” says Jackie, “but it still took a few weeks.” P.S. 157 parents were given instructions by the school on how to pick up a device, but it was a small window and not all parents received or understood the email. Our Teaching Fellows have been working hard in the past few weeks to connect with every parent and have been a great resource to P.S. 157 parents.

“It’s not just the quantity of devices that’s the issue, but the quality, which is just as important,” says Citizen Teacher Harry Bullen, Software Engineer at Google who transitioned his Lego Robotics class to Scratch, a coding platform once the school went virtual. “For Scratch, it’s best to have two screens, one for my lesson and the other for the coding page, but my students make it work with one.” 

Jackie’s eyes light up as she recognizes these two names—“we have them for Writing Academy too and they’re best friends!”

With COVID-19 shedding light on inequities in public education, Citizen Schools is proud to partner with talented volunteers from companies like Google to reimagine solutions for our students during this pandemic. “I was looking for a greater way to make an impact since my job at Google is not a social impact role. I looked for a 20% Project on our HR site and decided to be an Internal Ambassador for Citizen Schools. Then during one of the information sessions I helped set up, I realized I wanted to directly interact with students. This is my second year and it’s something I’ll always treasure” shares Jackie. 

“I saw a need and felt the call to action,” says Harry. “I had a privileged life and seeing the inequities made me want to do something about it.”