Listen to Jamaican American, Montessori teacher Vanessa Norwood Clark in North Carolina talk about transitioning from hands-on learning in the classroom to the expectation to teach Montessori online. “Each day I said, ‘Vanessa, this is your new normal…You have to figure it out.’” Vanessa says she learned how to use Zoom, Google classroom, Google Meet, and SeeSaw in order to engage her students in distance-learning. She learned how to teach interactive lessons for students online and digital materials while simultaneously learning how to use new digital platforms. She shares how she, her son, and her husband had to learn how to use digital platforms to work-from-home and to learn-from-home.

Vanessa sadly lost her cousin David Blagrove who was a nurse in New York in April of 2020. He was working with Covid-19 patients. Then he became sick and ...