Accepting the Challenge: Teaching at the Federal Way Internet Academy

Wendy Nevin and Mike Feuling teach middle- and high school-level courses at the Internet Academy, an online school based in Federal Way, Washington. Both Nevin, an English teacher, and Feuling, a math teacher, were experienced classroom teachers before joining the academy. They spoke with Northwest Education assistant editor Bracken Reed about the challenges and rewards of online teaching.

Q: What led you to online teaching?

WN: Challenge and change were my motivators. It just seemed like a great opportunity. It was kind of an exciting thing when we first started talking about it, because nobody was doing it. It was a good opportunity to try it and see what was going to happen.

Were you teaching in the Federal Way district already?

WN: Yes. There was a small group of us that were talking about it for about a year. It started as a conversation about how we could get the homeschool families involved with the district, because there was a real distance between homeschool families and the public schools at that time. They didn't really like public schools, and we wanted to find a way that we could reconnect with them. So we worked with them for a couple years in elementary classes, and then started in the high school after that. And it was probably a year after that that we had people start to write online curriculum for the high school level. And then there were three or four of us that came on full-time in 1998.

And then we opened up to K-12. That was a crazy time. We had people wanting to take classes that we didn't really have curriculum for yet. So we were working on the fly for a lot of that. Mike has done a lot of work with curriculum since then. We've got a really solid and established curriculum now. No more writing on the fly.

MF: No more writing on the fly. I won't let them.

Mike, were you in the Federal Way district also, when this started?

MF: Yes. I've been teaching for 18 years. Not all in this district. My initial interest was basically that I had just finished getting my master's degree in technology in the classroom. And when I finished that and got back into the classroom I saw that most classrooms still only had one computer, 30 kids—technology in the classroom was just not where I thought it should be or where it could be. So, between the challenge and also being ready for a change, and then the opportunity to use my interest in technology, this was a perfect fit for me. Online education was just starting.

WN: We'd only been using the internet in the classroom for a very short time, so it was all just very new, very exciting.

Do you feel that teaching online is completely different from teaching in the classroom, or are there a lot of similarities?

WN: I don't like to compare them, because they are really, really different. I love teaching in the classroom, and I like this a lot too, so it's not like one is better than the other. But they are very different. Here you're working with students more one-on-one than you ever could in the classroom. You can work with them more in-depth and at different levels, and you can spend more time with them on projects, because there aren't the interruptions you have in the classroom. You're not managing all the students at the same time.

Are there fewer behavioral-type problems?

WN: Yes. For the most part, online, those kinds of problems are limited to students not turning in assignments or being late getting them in.

MF: There's also misuse of the internet, but we don't even have much of that.

WN: Another thing that I really like about teaching online is that we end up working a lot with students that might have disappeared in the classroom. Students that were too quiet to ask questions or bright kids that were afraid to talk in front of everyone else. This format gives them time to think about the things they're going to say. They get to write it down. They don't have to do it in a matter of seconds—raise your hand or else the teacher's going to call on somebody else and the whole discussion is going to be over with and you've lost your chance.

How about non-traditional students? Students that might have ended up at an alternative school or that might have dropped out. Do you feel like you reach a lot of those students?

WN: I think that we might get a lot of applicants in that category but we're not real successful with them.

Is it because they lack the discipline that it takes to do well in this format?

MF: Motivation.

WN: Our classes are hard. The kids end up working a lot and they work really hard. When we first started I think people thought it was going to be really easy, maybe an escape. Some of the kids that would come here would say—"I'm going to go to the Internet Academy! I don't have to go to school!" And they quickly found out that it wasn't that way.

But we're also a good fit for teen mothers, medically fragile kids, and a lot of other unique needs. Some students just simply can't function in a school for one reason or another, but are academically fine. This works out really well for them.

One of your fellow teachers mentioned that when he first started doing this he thought it might be less time-consuming...

[Laughter]

...but he said it's been the exact opposite, that he actually spends almost double the amount of time that he spent as a classroom teacher.

WN: I wouldn't say for myself that it's exactly double, because classroom teachers spend a lot of time outside of the classroom as well, but here you can't tell 30 kids something once, you have to tell 30 kids 30 times.

There's no mass e-mailing?

WN: Well, sure, but...

MF: But if they don't read it you can't say it out loud to the whole class again.

WN: The way our classes are set-up, the students are at all different places in the course. So, in dealing with one student on a particular assignment, you can tell them something today, but John's going to come tomorrow and need the same thing. And Sally's going to come three days later and need the same thing. So, that's what I mean by not being able to tell everybody.

MF: Another timing issue is that students are working really close to 24 hours a day. When you're in a regular classroom situation you still come home and correct papers, but you don't have kids that...

WN: ...that are constantly ringing your doorbell saying "Here, Mr. Feuling, here's my paper."

MF: Right. Our students are constantly working on weekends. If we're sick, if we take a vacation, there's no substitute [teacher].

WN: And we don't close class. They still work. They still "come to class."

MF: Right. We don't close classes, so basically you get a day or two behind. Any kind of vacation—winter break for two weeks for example—usually [students] are bored after two days, and it's real easy for them to sit down at the computer and do some work, which they do. Last year at Thanksgiving, before I sat down to eat, I went online to see who was working and it was unbelievable. So, it would be different if kids stopped working, but they don't. It's continual. And I think [the difficulty is] not so much that it's double the time as that you're never really caught up. You can't get to a Friday and say "I just have this stack of papers to correct and then I'm fine and I go in on Monday."

WN: You can manage that in a classroom. If you have a big project that the kids are working on then you're working with them as they go through it, but there's not the continual back up. And the other thing is—we were just talking about it this morning—when we were in the classroom we would maybe take a stack of papers home, check them off, make sure that they did it, put it in the grade book, whatever. Here, we answer everything, and sometimes you end up making comments that are longer than the students' answers.

MF: On each question.

WN: The feedback is a lot deeper and a lot better for the students, but, yes, it takes a lot of time to do that.

MF: It really does. Whenever you go anywhere, even if you're on vacation, you take a laptop.

You don't get summers off then?

[Laughter]

WN: We both teach summer school in the summer.

MF: I'm the summer school director, and we both teach, and we both write curriculum, so no. I think I had five days off this last summer. That was good. But at the same time, we enjoy what we do. Otherwise we wouldn't be here.

Does either one of you ever miss teaching in a regular classroom?

MF: There are definitely things that I miss. I miss being up in front of kids, for instance.

WN: Having that noise and that activity, and the things that you can do—the energy that comes from having kids all together, learning together. That's a powerful thing. When that happens [in the classroom] there isn't anything like it. It's great.

We do have students come in here sometimes and it's always really, really nice to meet them. We really like that. We all feel like "Oh, it's so nice to have these kids come in and see them face-to-face again." So we do miss those kinds of things.

MF: The reason we're willing to work all the extra time and the weekends and the holidays and not really have any sick leave and all of that really comes down to flexibility. Like our students, if we need to we can work late at night or early in the morning—it's not like we have to be in the classroom ready to go. We can be really crabby. [Laughs] When you're in the classroom you can't be really crabby without it showing. Online you can be really crabby because you can just type...

WN: You can still be nice in an e-mail and they'll never know!

MF: So it really comes down to the flexibility.

WN: That and just the fact that you can teach. My daughter just started teaching this year and every time I talk to her she's got a story about discipline in the classroom and time getting the kids seated and the disruptions and things like that. And every time I talk to her I leave thinking—remembering again, because sometimes I forget—that I actually really, really get to teach when I'm doing this.

MF: There's no worry about the kids lining up quiet before they go to lunch or coming back from a fight at recess, those kinds of things. We really get to focus on teaching.

WN: Another thing I like about it is that we do a lot of behind-the-scenes teaching. A lot of the kids come out of here with a sense of power in their own learning. They have learned how to learn. Nobody is feeding it to them. They have to read all the directions, and they have to figure it out. They have to develop some kind of schedule and they have to have discipline. They learn what the word procrastination means and that there are consequences for that. They come out with a lot of lessons besides just math and English. At the end of the year there are a lot of thank you's. Students will say, "I feel like I really know how to learn now," and that's very rewarding.

MF: Another thing about it that's actually very interesting is that we have no idea what our students look like. We have no idea where they live, how they dress, how they talk. Half the time we don't even know their gender.

WN: We take them like they are. How they present themselves in their e-mails and in their work.

MF: And I think before I started [teaching online] I didn't realize how much students, teachers, all of us, can really show our personality and our sense of humor in writing. People say, "Don't you miss how the kids act and stuff?" And I say, "You'd be really surprised." In fact, students are probably more open in their writing than they would be in the classroom. They don't hold anything back. They joke. They use probably more exclamation points than I do. [Laughs]

WN: They use satire sometimes. They're very creative. They'll talk about their hobbies, their interests.

MF: Things that a regular classroom teacher would probably not have time to listen to or really get into. And they can do this because anytime they e-mail us they get a response. It's not like when I was in the classroom going over something and I had fifteen hands up in the air, and I could only answer one kid. Now I answer all fifteen.

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