The COVID-19 pandemic began in the late months of 2019 and by Spring of 2020, in an effort to limit transmission of the virus, schools across the globe had closed and transitioned to emergency online teaching which may have disrupted their current learning procedures. In the United States, over 13,000 school districts completely closed down during this time. Schools began to offer multiple types and modes of instruction in order to continue providing instruction for their students. One of these was "emergency remote teaching." During the emergency remote teaching environments (ERTE), teachers worked within the ERTE framework to design their online instructional strategies. The purpose of the study is to report instructional strategies teachers used to provide education to their students during the extremely constrained set of circumstances presented by the COVID-19 pandemic, and to examine their contextualized stories regarding why they used these strategies as well as their perspectives on the comparative success of those strategies.