After wrapping the first iteration of Sun Devil Learning Labs, some of my IgnitED Labs peers and I were tasked with helping facilitate an event for Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College Lead Teacher Week Workshop. This Zoom event would allow teams from over fifteen school districts to meet digitally in order to collaborate with the teacher candidates they will be working with this coming school year.
I served as somewhat of a digital concierge, directing participants into pre-assigned rooms organized by district, school, and grade level. The night before I had spent about an hour individually assigning each participant into their respective rooms so that when the time came the morning of, the system would automatically disperse everyone to exactly where they needed to be.
Due to reasons out of our control, things didn’t necessarily go as planned and improvisational efforts were required with about sixty-five of my one-hundred total participants being left in the main session (indeed, not where they needed to be). Through patience and some quick-thinking from my group and me, I was able to manually invite everyone to their individual breakout rooms over the course of the next half hour. From then on the event went on without a hitch; with my hopping around from room to room as needed to answer the occasional tech support question. While the morning undoubtedly began with an inconvenience for them, several faculty members went out of their ways to stop by and thank me for my attentive (if not a bit frantic at times) work throughout the day after finishing up their individual meetings.
As our communities adjust to living and working within a post-COVID-19 world, it is incidental moments such as these that demonstrate the power of compassion and patience during a time when untested plans develop out of necessity, and everyone can only pretend to fully understand what is going on at any given moment.