Online learning – delivering a teaching & learning micro session

So when asked on Friday if I would deliver a teaching and learning micro session on online learning to the staff at my school the initial panic/terror at speaking to a large body of people at a school I recently joined replaced itself quite quickly with the inner critique of “but what do I know?”

Sitting down between live lessons this week, pulling together what has worked well and not so well in the humanities faculty I lead, has been really enjoyable and helped to refine the remote teaching and learning guide for the team. I wanted to share my thoughts – this is my first post so please be kind!

I knew what we did in the classroom was working well and many elements could be transferred to online teaching. We were worried about maintaining engagement, siblings sharing multiple screens and the amount of content to be covered during this time that as I write this, I sadly can’t see ending in 6 weeks. As a faculty consisting a number of disciplines (geography, history, RS, sociology and psychology), we knew that a one size fits all approach wouldn’t garner the best results for remote learning so we decided on our “non-negotiables” in our online learning. These are:

1. Accessible learning
2. Clarity
3. Checking for Understanding
4. Engagement
5. Asynchronous learning

Accessible lessons

We agreed that lessons would follow a similar pattern of quick to start quiz/retrieval from last lesson, explanation of new ideas, practice & then end with a quiz to further check understanding.

Lessons would have a similar layout and format each week so that students would know what to expect. Tasks may well vary based on the content but the chunks of the lesson would remain the same across the faculty. Sentence starters and writing frames along with challenge questions would be clear in the lessons so all could access them. The start of the lesson would be pitched slightly lower than usual to enable all students to feel that they have achieved and so attempt the learning before increasing the challenge in the lesson.

We also agreed to keep additional resources such as extra documents needed to a minimum to reduce possible confusion for students.

Clarity in the delivery & expected outcomes from students.

Small changes in the way we planned and delivered the remote learning could have really big differences. We saw this where we used the Oak National lessons and the quality of the work the students handed in was high. Picking apart what worked using these lessons helped us to refine our delivery and explanation of key concepts on line and give explicit instructions on how the work was to be completed. Students need clear and precise explanations. Using loom to record over PowerPoints enabled teachers to ask students to pause the video to complete tasks before giving answers or the next task was explained. Embedding our school expectations of beautiful work in remote learning would ensure that we would not accept poor quality work and students were clear on how work should be presented. As we would in class, live lessons or recorded instructions would include pointers such as “remember as good geographers we use pencils when drawing diagrams” to enable students to hand in high quality work.

Checking for understanding

This felt harder to translate onto the screen but having had over half the faculty off isolating before Christmas we’d picked up some top tips. We didn’t want to overwhelm the department so kept it simple for now.

• Cold calling during live lessons.
• Asking all students to type their answer into the chat function on google meets but only pressing send after counting down 3,2,1 meant no copying ideas and you could ask a student to expand or contest others ideas.
• Use of whiteboard.fi to quiz students where you can see all their virtual whiteboards at the same time
• Use of google forms or quiz’s as exit tickets from lessons because you can see responses by student or by question so pick up on misconceptions easily.
• Google docs shared with students so you can live mark. Alternatively one sheet with a column/box per student for answers in the lesson to monitor understanding.

Maintaining engagement (or dissolving the screen – Doug Lemov)

We are still working on this as it’s only the second week but we know we have to compete with what is going on at home, on their social media and after 5 hours of online learning if you’re the last lesson of the day they will have screen fatigue!

A lot of the checking for understanding activities help to increase engagement. We don’t insist on cameras on for students but will ask all students questions. We didn’t want to add in the use of flashy apps just because, we agreed to only use them if they added to the learning rather than crowded it out. Mentimeter.com has been successful in increasing engagement, the students like to see who can get their answers up first. Systems we already used in the classroom can be effective such as show me, students writing in on paper and holding up work to the camera are easy and quick to engage students.

Using the schools rewards system to praise excellent effort, participation and aspirational work including regular “shout outs” and sending examples of work to the Heads of Year are routines already in place but have become more important now we are remote. Our Heads of Year share these shout outs and photos of work in assembly.

Regular feedback using our school online platform including using our marking codes in the messages. Using our marking policy of whole class feedback has kept it manageable for KS3 and using students work as best practice or model examples for the next lesson.

Asynchronous learning

Our school has been great at setting realistic expectations of live learning. We have a live element to our lessons and it is a testament to the brilliant department I work with that when faced on Tuesday morning with the news all year groups were remote they all suggested continuing to pre-record the lessons as we had been when whole years had been isolating last term. There are huge benefits of students being able to pause lessons, complete the work when suitable but still compete a google quiz & submit work to get feedback.

Dividing up the years groups between teachers makes this manageable and by sticking to the agreed format of lessons & with the non negotiables included means that they are well planned and explained so can be used across classes. Where they fit with our schemes of learning we have used Oak National lessons, they are super! History have been recording micro explainers where they noticed gaps in their students understanding of complex ideas. These are a series of mini lectures explaining a concept that students are able to access repeatedly to help close gaps. We are planning on rolling these out across the faculty as needed.

Finally we have a google doc that our team add to as they find new ways of working to share best practice. Student voice is being used by the school to find out what is working well in their view which will be interesting to see their views of remote learning for next time.

Many ideas here gathered together from my lovely humanities team but also a big thank you to Elisabeth Bowling: A Wild Surmise (who I had the pleasure of working with previously) whose teaching and learning insights I highly value & the Edutwitter community for sharing ideas & promoting debate.