I established a simple and productive work cycle for my classes during the first two weeks of Remote Learning. With a foundation in place, I’m now trying to find ways to reproduce what we’re missing from our typical in-person classes.

One thing I tried was starting the week’s unit with a single question.

“The area of one of these regions is easier to compute than the other. Why?”

A nice opener to our area unit: I captured and shared some representative student responses and gave them some follow-up questions to consider for homework.#math #mathchat #geomchat #RemoteLearning pic.twitter.com/Jfm3Z1pdtO

— Patrick Honner (@MrHonner) April 20, 2020

After answers came in I shared some representative responses with the class:

The shape on the left is easier to compute the area of because it can be divided into recognizable polygons (such as a triangle)

It is easier to compute the area of the region on the left because it is made out of lines.

The region on the left’s area is easier to compute since it can be triangulated.

Then I posted follow-up questions for students to think about as homework:

• Why do straight lines make finding area easier?
• Why does breaking something up into triangles and rectangles make its area easier to compute?
• An answer to the previous question might be “Because we have formulas for those shapes”. Why, then, do we have formulas for the areas of those particular shapes?

This work motivated the next day’s video, which was designed to leverage this specific conversation (as discussed in last week’s post), which launched our standard cycle of

Video Intro➜ Text + HW ➜ Formative Assessment Quiz ➜

Written Work Submission ➜ Feedback and Revision

I often design lessons around simple but provocative questions like this, stirring up conversation and debate and then moderating a whole-class discussion that leads us in the right direction. In the first few weeks of Remote Learning I’ve been missing that. This small change brought back a little of what’s been missing.

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• Remote Learning Journal

Like many teachers thrust into emergency remote learning I’ve been making videos for my classes. Having observed the flipped classroom bubble from a safe distance, I definitely had opinions about instructional videos, even if I didn’t have much experience making them myself.

I got some good advice from a colleague early on: Don’t waste time replicating what’s already out there. It’s the kind of obvious advice someone used to doing everything from scratch needs to hear. Using Khan Academy videos wouldn’t be my first instinct, but they’ve been a useful resource for teaching AP calculus: They’re aligned to the curriculum, they cover the key procedures, and they already exist.

The existence of a core set of instructional videos for calculus has allowed me to use my limited time to target what my students want and need: They’ve asked for videos that explain concepts, cover more challenging examples, and review our assessment items. I can invest my time in those, as well as videos for my geometry classes, for which there aren’t as many suitable resources available.

I’d say the most useful videos I make are those that are responsive to my students. They are videos driven by student need or informed by student work. Making a video review of a math task for a class is much more meaningful having looked at all of the students’ work. The video isn’t just about what I would do; it’s about what we all have done.

There’s this ideal of “putting your course out there”, publishing your full set of instructional videos once they’re set and done. But at the moment the value in video for me is in capturing and narrating our shared mathematical experience. Those videos have value for us right now, but maybe not the next time around, when a different group is experiencing a different story.

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The end of week 3 of remote learning in NYC brought news that schools will not reopen during the 2019-20 school year. This is by no means shocking — perhaps only the timing is a surprise — but it’s still a remarkable decision.

This announcement probably marks the end of the honeymoon period of remote learning for students and teachers. If the novelty of zoom meetings and recorded lectures hasn’t warn off yet, looking ahead to 10 more weeks of classes-at-a-distance could be a potent dose of reality.

The cancellation of the Regents exams offer another set of challenges. While an understandable decision, the tests serve as summative assessments in many high school courses. How will students respond knowing there’s no longer a Regents exam to pass to earn credit for a course? How will teachers and schools adjust to the loss of their courses’ final exams? Every week of emergency remote learning brings much to think about.

I’m hoping the structures I’ve put in place and the relationships I’ve built with my students can carry us to the end of the year. I’ll make sure students get what they need out of my courses and are prepared for next year, but I’ll also use our time together to get creative and do some fun extra-curricular work. The end of the year is a good time to try new things, even if the entire enterprise is an experiment!

We have a long way to go. And even doing our best, we’ll still have the fallout of a million disrupted educations to reckon with in September. One crisis at a time.

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May you live in interesting times, so the blessing / curse goes. These are certainly interesting times to be a teacher.

Mandatory remote learning has given the entire teaching community a common challenge to face, one that most teachers have no experience with. Effective teachers are problem solvers by nature — with hundreds of little issues to deal with each day, we must be — so it’s no surprise that teachers are largely rising to the occasion. But in observing teachers navigate this challenge, I’ve noticed very different approaches.

I mentioned this the other day.

I get the sense that many teachers in the early stages of #RemoteLearning are focused on recreating the experience of the class, whereas I seem to be focused on recreating the workflow. (An observation, not a judgment.)

— Patrick Honner (@MrHonner) April 2, 2020

A lot of teachers are looking to recreate the experience of their classroom, with mandatory Zoom meetings, roll call, video-proctored exams, and other synchronous activities. My approach has been to recreate the workflow of our classroom: presentation of key ideas followed by low-stakes formative assessment followed by a work-feedback-revision cycle, all happening asynchronously. With this basic framework in place I’ve only recently begun to consider how live sessions can fit in. I see their value, if for no other reason than to connect with each other, but so far students have expressed mixed feedback about their importance.

As I said in my tweet, this is all observation, not judgment. Like everyone else I’m just trying to figure out what works for me and my students. And things will change, as they so quickly do these days. But I hope we take advantage of these new challenges and new technologies to rethink what we do, rather than simply figure out ways to replicate what we’ve always done.

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