The week started out with a few empty chairs in class. My attendance is usually 100%, so even a couple of absences is noticeable. Especially when it happens every period. By Friday there were 7 or 8 students out in every class. The DOE wasn’t acting as fast as parents were, but the shutdown was inevitable.

I knew things had gotten real when the NBA suspended its season in of the middle of the game I was watching. I remember telling students closure was imminent. We probably won’t be back before Spring Break, I told them, maybe not even by end of the year. I said we might be dealing with this for the next two years, somewhat prophetically.

Teachers had started to stay home, too, which made it easier for me to book a computer lab for the Thursday and Friday of that week. I brought my geometry students in for a crash course in Geogebra. I had a feeling it would come in handy.

They closed the schools the next week. For students. Staff still had to report, though more were calling out. In an email the Chancellor of NYC Schools spelled it out for us: “By Monday, March 23, we expect all students and teachers to begin engaging in remote learning in all grades.” I had one week to figure out how to turn myself into a remote teacher.

One year later, I’m still figuring it out. This is the 40th entry about my transition from experienced classroom teacher to novice remote teacher. I’m glad this series is nearing its end, but I’m also glad I kept a record of where we started and how far we’ve come.

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As a geometry teacher I rely heavily on compass and straightedge constructions. My course usually begins by establishing the basic construction results and developing facility with the technology, and those ideas are then woven into topics throughout the year. We’ll pull out our compasses to explore triangle congruence, review parallelogram theorems, understand concurrency, and more.

I worried about my ability to efficiently assess the hands-on construction skills of 34 Zoom boxes every class every day, so I took a different approach this year. I de-emphasized compass and straightedge constructions, and instead relied on Geogebra as a construction and exploration tool. Geogebra has generally been a terrific substitute: In most cases, we now just pull out Geogebra when we would have pulled out our compasses. The underlying thread of construction has been disrupted a bit, but the course has still flowed in the way I wanted.

Until we hit transformations. My approach to teaching reflections, rotations, and translations is deeply embedded in the theory, and the inherent constraints, of compass and straightedge construction. Out of necessity my approach this year has revolved around finding ways to make existing materials work, but this was a unit where simply swapping Geogebra into my existing materials wouldn’t cut it. Too much of the development of the ideas required a fluency with geometric construction that my students just didn’t have.

I’ve reached the point where I’ve started developing new lessons for remote instruction, but I hadn’t yet had to re-design an entire unit. That’s what I had to do with transformations. Luckily I no longer feel lost as a remote teacher. I’ve started to develop a sense of what works for me and my students, and I have a set of tools I can use to deliver instruction and gain access to student thinking. I redesigned my transformations unit around simple prompts like intuitively identify the center of rotation:

100 student responses. What was the prompt?#math #mathchat #geomchat pic.twitter.com/CVAbFXQYTg

— Patrick Honner (@MrHonner) March 18, 2021

And simple tasks, like sketching transformations and investigating whether or not two objects could be images of each other.

In the end, I was happy with the way the unit worked. Ideas flowed differently, but they flowed, and well enough so that when I’m planning my transformations unit next year, for a (hopefully) normal classroom, I’ll be thinking about what I did remotely.

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It’s natural to focus on what’s missing in remote teaching, but some things do work better remotely.

For example, this week I introduced reflections in my Geometry class. I began by having every student sketch the reflection of a quadrilateral.

I watched every student sketch this in real time and confirmed that they all had a good intuitive understanding of what reflection meant. Then I gave them two triangles and asked them to work together to devise a mathematical strategy for determining if two objects were indeed reflections of each other.

Dashboards, like in Geogebra Classroom and Desmos Activity Builder, have solved the biggest pedagogical problem I’ve faced in remote teaching: They give me access to student thinking. Here I can see that students already have the core ideas of the lesson — congruence and constructing the line of reflection — on their minds.

Usually I’d gain this insight by walking around, looking over a few shoulders, eavesdropping on a few conversations, asking questions. Though it’s not quite the same, dashboards like this give me efficient access to much more individual student thinking. And it’s especially nice, and easy, to just share this screen with the class and show them all that thinking. We can debrief their strategies, honor student creativity and ingenuity, and extract the ideas we need to move forward.

Efficient access to student thinking makes formative assessment easier, too. Here I’ve asked students to sketch an object such that for exactly five points P.

In just a few moments I can see that the class generally gets the idea, publicly praise students 5 and 3 for their degenerate-case thinking, and offer student 4’s response for further consideration.

Like everyone else I’m looking forward to mingling in classrooms and looking over shoulders again. But with a return to schools on the horizon, I’ll also be thinking about what’s worked well in remote teaching, and I’ll try to bring that back with me when I return.

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