Teaching in the Online Classroom
Here we are again. Last March teachers and pupils all over the world were plunged into educational chaos. This time, we’re all more prepared, but everyone - teachers, pupils, parents - recognises that almost everything inevitably falls short of in-school learning. Who knows what the future will bring: it’s entirely possible here in Ireland that we might have a small number of weeks of remote classes left, and that teachers will never have to do this again in their whole careers. It’s also possible we’ll be doing this intermittently for some time. Meanwhile, we’re trying to do our best in a medium we had never used before the spring of 2020, and the difficulties can seem overwhelming: do read this powerful recent post, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Teacher by @tweeterofwit:
Even though there’s someone else in the house, doing the same kind of thing at the other end of the hall: you feel alone. You’re in your study for so many hours that you feel marooned there. Your focus on your screens is so strong that, as it begins to get dark outside, you don’t even notice. Your study lights are on; the hallway outside is a cavern of January darkness.
A new book, Teaching in the Online Classroom: surviving and thriving in the new normal by Doug Lemov and the Teach Like a Champion Team, was born out of the March 2020 chaos, in the spirit of helping teachers improve their online practice:
It’s incumbent upon us as a profession to learn new methods to reach them as quickly and effectively as possible … No one asked for the world to change this way, but it has. As teachers, that means there’s work to be done. If you’re reading this, you realize and embrace that fact.
If you’re online a lot on Twitter and read blogs, there’s a huge amount of help available, but it can be too much: how do you find the limited number of things which will really help you in your particular situation? And most teachers are not on Twitter or reading blogposts, and so this book is very welcome, gathering for its readers important principles of online teaching and the smaller tips and ‘hacks’ which teachers love [as an example of these, check out Tom Sherrington’s ‘crowd-sourced’ post on Checking Students’ Writing, which gives us a whole slew of neat ways of looking at what our students have written]. The highest praise you can get from a colleague when you show them something is ‘That’s so simple!’
The first chapter, by Hannah Solomon and Beth Verrilli on ‘Synchronous and Asynchronous Learning’, is a sensible and balanced look at a tension many schools are still facing: uninformed demands from some parents that entire timetables should simply (and somehow seamlessly) move online in live ‘synchronous’ classes. Anyone teaching like this knows what a poor option it is; anyone learning like this knows it too. Others, like the UK Secretary of State for Education, don’t (even though Ofsted, who you think he might listen to, have said the opposite):
However, last week Ofsted’s research head, Professor Daniel Muijs, said it was an “unhelpful myth” that the best way to deliver remote education was through live lessons.
This book lays out many of the reasons why: the relentlessness of ‘screentime’, the fact that pupils engage with live classes through a very unsatisfactory medium, all the technical glitches that inevitably plague both pupils and teachers, the cognitive demands on attention, the sheer amount of preparation time needed for such classes (and for ‘flipped’ material) compared to ‘physical’ ones and of course the economic factors which have exacerbated a ‘Matthew Effect’ of widening disadvantage (broadband access, home set-ups and so on).
Back in early April, as we headed into the tech tsunami, I wrote this piece on Daisy Christodoulou’s valuable new book Teachers vs Tech. Solomon and Verilli also cite it, referring to important principles of multimedia learning and the ‘redundancy principle, as do Colleen Driggs and Jaime Brilliante in Chapter 3, ‘Culture of Attention and Engagement’:
Christodoulou writes, “When we use a connected device, we are using a device that is plugged in to a distraction engine.” This distractedness becomes a habit for us as soon as we are on our devices. Our brains are adaptable and neuroplastic. They are changed by the way we use them and habituated to the context. Over time, writes Maryanne Wolf, skimming replaces reading, and our capacity to concentrate is eroded.
I strongly recommend Wolf’s book Reader, Come Home: the reading brain in a digital world, about which I wrote in some depth in this piece about ‘cognitive patience’.
However, the problems now are more immediate than ‘over time’: we have no choice other than to use these ‘distraction machines’, and we are trying to manage attention both in online classes and when addressing material asynchronously with far weaker tools than we have in the classroom. As Drigg and Brillante point out, underloading working memory can erode attention as much as overloading it (all those whizzy things on screens, managing technical challenges, teachers being over-ambitious in content delivery). Attention is central to all learning, and now we have had to learn how to be better at maintaining it in a totally new and in some ways hostile environment (here is my very slow series of essays on attention in education and culture).
Some more comments prompted by this book:
‘Seeing’ students is something we’re all concerned about: how do we metaphorically ‘see’ them given the disconnections of distance? Jen Rugani and Kevin Grijalva’s chapter is called ‘Dissolve the Screen’: an impossible task, but we can do as much as possible. There is a constant emphasis in the book on personal connections, including, in the sample videos the book directs us to, what seems at times a relentless use of first names (but then imagine this from the perspective of the child).
Try to emphasise the ‘physical’: use pen and paper as much as possible, make sure handwriting continues (most platforms make it easy to return handwritten work via photos/scans), try to get children to read paper books and materials, use a literal hands-up rather than yet another robotic click of the platform’s electronic icon.
Simplest and best: in an online class, make sure pupils do something within the first 3 minutes: don’t let them sink into passivity from the start. Save the introduction and re-caps of previous learning until after 3 minutes. This is close to a ‘Iron Law of Online Learning’. This works!
Teachers have had a crash-course what cognitive load means. In the early days, we were all too ambitious. Perhaps this is one silver lining: when back in our natural environments, we may be more conscious of this (I know I was last term, when we were screen-free).
Aim for ‘clear and crisp exemplars’ (again, one for the ‘real’ classroom too).
Avoid switching as much as possible (cognitive overload again) when screen-sharing.
Make materials extremely clear when screen-sharing; pupils may be accessing via very small screens (I currently have the luxury of a massive screen: it really makes a big difference when teaching live). Icons on asynchronous material are helpful (when to pause a video, for instance).
‘Plan for technological failures’. Easy to get away with this in the physical classroom for a while, but can be totally disastrous when online.
The importance of procedures and routines: they’re important in the physical classroom too, of course, but when pupils are out there somewhere in cyberspace that importance is heightened.
We’ve all learned how effective cold calling is in the online class, even more so than in the physical classroom. It may well be the best tool to maintain attention, as well as checking for understanding. It can take several forms, but basically it tells pupils that we value their contributions, and helps them engage by voice or text. It must come from an atmosphere of trust and reassurance.
The central problem of all education is: how do we know that children have learned? Simply, how to assess? Out of the classroom, this is harder, but that doesn’t mean we can’t improve at it, or that we don’t have any tools at all, and we’re all getting better at working out what works in our situations.
Erica Woolway, Emily Badillo and Doug Lemov conclude in ‘Coda: Planning for the Future’:
One of the few things we are certain about for school in the coming years is its level of uncertainty, which will almost certainly be historic. The most honest answer to almost any question about the future is this: no-one knows. And yet, schools must plan and design and implement ( ) in such a climate. Nervous laughter might be forgivable if it weren’t so deadly serious. Young people are relying on us. We have to prepare, whether or not it’s plausible to know what we’re preparing for.
This is right: too many people, including keyboard warriors and politicians, think right now that they know. There are millions of confident experts in how to handle a pandemic out there. Meanwhile, as educators, we know we don’t know: we know no class is perfect (particularly now), but we get as close as we can, and we do our best.
On remote teaching: since the start of 2021, and the resumption of remote teaching, there has been plenty of reflection and advice. Here are some useful links:
Ben Newmark’s review of the book. ‘Teaching In the Online Classroom is the closest thing any of us has to a guide for how to teach without children physically present in our classrooms. Lemov and his team, as humbly and respectfully as you’d expect from them, have gone on an expedition into this unfamiliar new normal and brought back the findings of the teachers they’ve found working out there. It’s more of a map than a manual.’
Distillation of key take-aways from the book by LambHeartTea.
Tom Sherrington and Emma Turner in the ‘Mind the Gap’ series discussing the lessons that have been learned on online learning, and even more relevantly they have just interviewed Doug Lemov himself.
Tom Sherrington on Principles for Remote Instruction: Notes from a #TLAC Masterclass.
Matt Stone has excellent visual summaries here (as long as you’ve read the book).
Shaun Allison on ‘Remote Responsive Teaching’. Very sensible with practical advice.
Phil Naylor’s ‘Natters’ podcast has an interview with Professor Daniel Muijs of Ofsted: ‘What’s working well in remote education.’
Tweeter of Wit, an English teacher in Northern Ireland, with a teacher’s perspective on the reality of remote teaching for so many.
Rebecca Foster: ‘On remote teaching and hitting the wall’: ‘Make your CPD offer bitesize and clearly focused on specific areas of need e.g. how to use Class Notes in Microsoft Teams or how to set up a Google form quiz. Create short videos or guides and make these easily accessible for teachers to access as and when they need to.’
Andy of Codexterous on using OneNote for both remote and ‘normal’ teaching.
James Maxwell reflects on “A Year of Remote Learning: The learnings of a teacher and headteacher”. Lots of good sense here: ‘In a period of unparalleled challenge, including for many of our teachers who are juggling professional lives with the stringent demands of home and family lives, including potentially the homeschooling of their own children, we have to put trust in our teachers to decide for themselves, alongside departmental colleagues, what strategy is going to be most impactful for their students within their subject context.’
Ann Marcus-Quinn in the Irish Times: ‘What works with one discipline may not with another. Primary and post-primary require a very different approach and not everyone has an appropriate device or good level of connectivity to access online classes. There is no one-size-fits-all.’
Mark Enser has pieces in the TES (free log-in needed) such as applying Rosenshine’s Principles in the remote context, and An overworked teacher's remote learning survival guide.
Dee McGillycuddy and Niamh Moore-Cherry in the Irish Times: “While schools, teachers and SNAs are going to extraordinary lengths to support children and provide them with enriching, interactive and engaging content, the deeply relational spaces of school are extremely challenging to replicate using virtual platforms.”
There are links throughout Teaching in the Online Classroom to demonstration videos. Here’s a snippet from Emily Badillo, which seems to me an excellent example of an asynchronous lesson.