Teaching

Throughout Emergency Remote Learning I’ve been making changes to try to better serve my students. Regular surveys on what’s working and what’s not have helped me adjust my approach, and they also created opportunities for students to make their own suggestions. Not surprisingly, some of the simplest and most useful changes I’ve made have been proposed by students. For example:

• A student looking for more structured opportunities to interact with me suggested adding an optional question field to the daily attendance form. Students visit this form first thing each day, so it’s a great place to ask them if they need any any kind of assistance or clarification. I’ve been consistently fielding great questions ever since.

• A student was struggling managing assignments on multiple platforms (like Google classroom, Delta Math, AP Classroom, etc) so suggested I create a Google classroom assignment for everything they had to do, even if it wasn’t to be submitted on Google classroom. This helped centralize their organizational burden.

• Another student asked for a weekly plan on Mondays so they had a better idea of what to expect from the week, both in terms of content and workload. This has been a popular addition to their workflow.

• In response to an end-of-year assignment to build a Geogebra demonstration, a student asked for a video walking them through exactly what I was looking for. Several students have already remarked that this was very helpful for completing that project.

Listening to students is a critical part of effective teaching, and tapping into their experiences and expertise during Emergency Remote Learning has definitely helped me do a better job. As their End-of-Year surveys come in, I’m hoping they can help me out one last time, as I start to think about what Remote Learning from Day 1 might look like next year.

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A simple but effective approach has been recreating student groups in Google chatrooms. I designated a recent assessment as a group assignment and added a collaboration component: Students had to create a chatroom with their assigned group and discuss the task there.

They were also required to invite me to join, which allowed me to eavesdrop on their mathematical conversations.

I was very impressed with the level of discourse in the chatrooms: In most cases I was observing the same kinds of productive conversations that I observed in our classroom. I also found myself interjecting just as I would in class — sometimes to answer a question, sometimes to ask one.

The chatrooms persisted after the official group assignment, continuing to serve as a place for both scheduled and impromptu collegial collaboration. And in an attempt to leverage the established community, a recent assessment involved selecting and submitting one problem from a set, subject to the restriction that no two students from the same group could submit the same problem. This forced students to communicate about their selection, and it left open the opportunity to use the group as a resource as they completed their individual work.

These chatroooms are easy to implement and very flexible: They can be used effectively both synchronously and asynchronously by students, and can be leveraged in a variety of different ways by the teacher. This is definitely a structure I’ll keep, and one that I’ll think more about as we move toward an uncertain new school year in the fall. 

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My emergency Remote Learning strategy has evolved primarily around teacher-student interaction. Given my limited experience and tool set, this has been my best leverage point. I’ve tried to establish a simple work-flow that lets me interact with students around mathematics, and that has formed an effective foundation for the course.

As the semester has unfolded I’ve tried to recapture some of what has been missing in this approach. One small thing we did recently was a peer review assignment that successfully recreated a little of the student-to-student interaction that’s been missing.

The activity centered on a typical assessment item, but rather than write my own I pulled an old Regents question. Longtime readers know I’m not a huge fan of Regents questions, but I wanted students to work on a specific kind of “applied” area / volume question that typically appears on the Geometry Regents exam. Also, by using an old test question, I could use the pre-existing rubric (as it were) and the published sample student responses as the basis for the peer review.

I assigned students to groups and distributed the scoring resources. After students submitted their own work they had to connect with their group and, using the scoring materials, perform their peer reviews. I captured everything in a Google form, where I could sort responses by reviewer or reviewee and look for consistency among the evaluations.

Usually the goal of peer review is to get students to engage with rubrics, but here it also served to get students interacting with each other. In my regular survey of students, one of the highest variance items had been:

I interacted with my classmates around mathematics this week.

Many students were naturally interacting with their peers, but many weren’t. This modest peer review activity succeeded in getting the entire class communicating with each other and interacting around their shared work.

And it was nice to find a standard classroom assignment that could be effectively repurposed to serve the goals of remote learning as well. As we look toward an uncertain future, we’ll need as many of those activities as we can find.

With 6 weeks left in the school year, it's probably a good time to start thinking about which of these #remotelearning practices could be effective next Fall.

— Patrick Honner (@MrHonner) May 18, 2020

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One thing I’ll miss from Remote Learning is rolling submissions of student work. As I discussed last week, students have 4-5 days to submit their assessments, and work that comes in before the deadline is evaluated and returned with feedback. Students can then choose to revise and resubmit their work before the deadline for full credit.

The approach has successfully created a consistent space to interact with students around their mathematical work. But it has also brought a welcome change in my grading workload. From the moment it’s assigned, student work trickles in slowly and steadily. This lets me evaluate a few at a time and quickly return them. Of course there are still plenty of students who wait until the deadline to turn in their work, but the incentive to submit early means there’s nothing like 100+ tests waiting for me all at once.

The ability to spread out my work has been invaluable during Remote Learning. The chaos of everyone working and schooling at home means uninterrupted blocks of time to focus are even rarer now. Knowing I can always turn an unexpected free 15 minutes into productive work helps keep all the balls rolling.

This process also has me approaching feedback differently, in a way that’s more like an ongoing conversation between teacher and student. I think we’ve both benefited, and it’s something I’ll continue to think about after Remote Learning has ended.

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