Four Strategies to Effectively Engage Students in Online Discussions
Instead of rules for compliance, what about conditions for engagement when teaching in online spaces?
On Twitter, someone posted a visual: “Zoom Etiquette”. The infographic provided expectations for students during instruction within this technology, such as:
No Pajamas
No Bedrooms
Keep Your Camera On At All Times
I sighed. Not that I disagreed with some of these statements. I previously taught a summer school class with Zoom. I would have preferred students get out of bed before logging onto their computers.
My concern is that we are continuing to exert control over a largely uncontrollable situation. I might be wrong, but my guess is some of the same teachers who post this Zoom infographic are also using the same slide decks to convey the correct way to comprehend a text during whole class novel studies, prior to the pandemic.
They need these rules, because without them, students are more likely to become disengaged.
Instead of rules for compliance, what about conditions for engagement when teaching in online spaces? During my Zoom teaching experience this summer with upcoming 4th graders, I discovered with my co-teacher a few conditions that led to student literacy success.
Plan around big ideas and concepts
School was fragmented enough before the pandemic hit. Now that our days may be a series of Zoom chats, our subjects areas may feel even more siloed than ever.
So instead of teaching day-by-day, tie your lessons in with a big idea or concept. This approach helps create a mental framework in which all other knowledge, skills, and dispositions can be understood through. It’s the lens for comprehension when reading aloud texts.
For example, in our summer school course, we focused on “growth mindset”. We wanted to teach students to learn how to learn. In response to this concept, we identified elements of growth mindset - flexible thinking, perseverance, multiple perspectives - as the bends within our unit of study. In addition, we purchased the digital version of many picture books that depicted a growth mindset within the characters we read about via Zoom.
Rethink slide decks as interactive tools
To ensure we were communicating the critical ideas of the unit of study, we posted content in slides. The text was brief and easy to read, and we included images and video whenever appropriate. For example, we posted a picture of a neuron (brain cell) when explaining that when we learn anything, we create connections between neurons.
Yet we also kept some slide decks open. We wanted to invite students to contribute to the learning. One of the more popular slides was the reading graffiti board.
As we read picture books, we asked students to identify memorable quotes from the texts that spoke to the idea of growth mindset. Their contributions were documented. To ensure we kept a running record of students’ contributions, we kept using the same slide deck for each bend (about one week).
Break out rooms are your friend
Try this feature in Zoom if you haven’t yet. Break out rooms can be randomly assigned or preplanned, but the idea is to create small group discussion opportunities for students. They can be as easy as a turn-and-talk, or they can be utilized to engage in more complex conversation such as facilitating peer feedback. Break out rooms can help ensure equity in voice as many learners feel more comfortable communicating in small groups.
In our growth mindset unit of study, students’ projects were to teach the rest of the class something they were good at or were getting better at (an exhibition of their growth mindset). One assignment was to write out a plan for learning. Students were put into breakout rooms to compare their plans and to provide feedback with sentence stems as a scaffold. As a teacher, I could join each break out room to check on things, offer help and clarify any confusion.
Make assessment educative
How do we ensure that any test or traditional assessment task is valid if a student is completing it from home? One approach: making sure the assessment allows us to be responsive for future instruction.
Ensuring assessment is responsive means that it is “educative”, a term coined by Dr. Grant Wiggins, in that it informs us of how students are doing. Educative assessment gives students the opportunity to best represent their understanding. It can also shape instruction for the future.
For example, at the end of each week of our growth mindset summer learning course, we would ask students for feedback on the course itself using the following four questions:
What is going well?
What has been a challenge?
What obstacles have your faced?
What possibilities do you see for the future?
In the first week, one student noted that she liked the short poll quiz we did at the beginning of a previous Zoom chat. It was a simple set of questions that reviewed previous learning about growth mindset and the ideas we learned from the picture books. Other students agreed. During this reflection, I couldn’t help but share that this type of assessment can actually be helpful for consolidating new information into long term memory - growth mindset! From that point on, we started most Zoom sessions with a short quiz sans grades or scores.
Once the pandemic is over, it will be interesting to see what practices stick, what strategies and tools fade, and what initiatives such as standardized testing creep back into education. (I make a few predictions here.) My hope is, especially with families now able to view instruction first hand and see what’s possible for teaching and learning, we will collectively advocate for more promising practices that position students as the driving factor for developing and renewing effective instruction.
For more information about our online instructional experience with 4th graders, subscribe today and access the entire unit of study we developed for teaching growth mindset. You will also see the four steps for creating your ideal curriculum.