Every student that was previously instructed in-person by my company has been on Zoom for over a year. While we’re making plans to transition our learning centers back to in-person come this Fall, we have also spun off a permanently-virtual version of these courses. Instead of letting this year be a fluke when considering curriculum and instruction, there has been significant time devoted to improving the experience of student learning in this online face-to-face environment. Here are some reflections on what I’ve learned over that time, both in teaching last year and helping adapt our curriculum.
Use Platform Tools
It’s important to take advantage of the tools provided. My company uses Zoom, so we’ve tried to keep the curriculum (and teachers) up to date on using the chat effectively, encouraging reaction buttons as a mode of interaction, and an intentional use of the mute button to improve the classroom experience. The chat has been particularly useful as a way to draw out students who don’t often speak up, as well as a great tool for games where private answers are essential1By default, we recommend instructors set the Zoom chat to “Host only”, so student messages won’t distract other students. This is how our text-only online classroom we’ve used for years works as well.
Of course, screen sharing and whiteboard and screen annotation are vital to online school success. There are activities we’ve created that rely on Zoom’s screen annotation being “dumb”, and staying in place no matter what happens on the computer. You can have templates in a slideshow, allowing labels drawn with the annotation tool to persist across multiple slides.
Breakout rooms are a tool we’re still figuring out how to manage. The delay in moving between rooms can make them rough for younger kids who need more immediate attention. At all ages, it can be a problem for a teacher to trust students who have no supervision for the majority of a breakout room activity. That said, our instructors and students are getting used to them, and we’re beginning to write them back in to our curriculum.
Learning about, and embracing, the tools we had available was the main reason our switch to virtual instruction was successful. However, there are ways we’re still working on making it thrive.
Don’t Replicate Classroom Experiences
A virtual classroom is not a regular classroom made online, and it shouldn’t be. It’s a unique set of tools and experiences that require separate planning2Hence why teachers are upset by “hybrid” instruction. It doesn’t make sense from a curriculum and instruction standpoint. and curriculum. I think the biggest failure of the last year is trying to shoehorn in-person activities and experiences into an online medium.
There are some activities that run legitimately better online. We should take the time to fine those and hone them, instead of taking a great in-person experience and force it online without consider the tools available. There are also activities that run just about equally online and in-person. We can breathe a sigh of relief whenever we find one.
Our company is not guilt-free here. Due to time constraints and other factors, there are definitely closing activities in our lessons that are mediocre. However, we’ve been taking time to address those. We continually revisit lessons based on instructor feedback, and I’m personally thankful for the instructors who, on a limb, try something we had never considered and share the results. They are thinking within the space and the tools they have, and creatively solve hiccups we accidentally provide them.
While our instructors continue to adapt lessons on the fly (they did it in-person too), we also had a concerted effort at the beginning of our transition last year to learn more.
Experiment
I ran dozens of experiments with our curriculum team and our learning center directors. If the curriculum team had a hunch about a new online activity, they’d write them into a separate set of slides and send them along to a willing participant to try it with their class. For several weeks, we threw ideas at the wall and learned a lot.
Some of these confirmed our expectations. For example, a very popular game called Pot of Gold is simple to implement, but we wanted to confirm it worked online. Doing so allowed us to discover a few rule tweaks and additional ways of increasing student participation.
Others were welcome surprises, such as a complicated contest format that required a proof-of-concept. While it could be done in-person, doing it online was a unique experience that required a lot of student focus in a contest-oriented class, leading to really great results.
Of course, a few were abject failures. The most notable was our attempt to have a collaborative whiteboard for all students, where all objects were malleable. These online tools are great if you’re working a team of, well, adults with a common goal. A group of 12-year-old boys was not the target audience, as this experiment showed. Suffice it to say that it got shot down almost immediately.
Experimentation is important, though. There are many theories about curriculum, and a certain intuition you gain from writing it over time. But nothing compares to seeing how it works in a classroom, and the overall student and teacher response. An activity could be great when implemented correctly, but be devilishly tricky to actually implement. These are important aspects to check. Be open to change, and don’t get precious about a lesson. Eventually it will fall out of favor and need adjustment.
Group and Individual Interactions
A huge concern is fostering socialization and familarity within a class. While our company focuses largely on extracurricular classes, so we have less impact compared to standard schools, having a healthy class dynamic is important for making the course fun, and improves how a student engages with the material.
Developing good social expectations for before and after class in an online environment is tough. It’s much easier to show up 30 seconds before class when you’re online; also, banter is made difficult when students can’t naturally group themselves in sections of the room. One person can talk, and kids are not good at handling that.
As mentioned before, in-class collaboration isn’t a solved problem either. Efforts like breakout rooms certainly help with older students who are already somewhat active in class (and aren’t as liable to goof off), but younger students have a tough time in a group by themselves, and a teacher can’t overhear conversations or gauge which groups are in the most need without experiencing 15-30 second delays moving between rooms.
Finally, individualized attention and assessment is very tough. While some students (like my own) take to the chat very well, it both misses a certain personable interaction that a real conversation has, and doesn’t work well for students on certain devices or of certain ages. You can’t “walk over” to a student virtually without leaving the entire class behind as you head to a breakout room. These issues can make for either a chaotic, or very bland, environment. A teacher very focused on student interaction can lose control of the tools to make it happen. A teacher worried about the technology can fall into a bad habit of making the class look like a lecture from over 20 years ago, with a dry instructor lecturing to a class, and only a few students bother to pay attention and answer questions the teacher asks for the sake of including a few kids in the action.
There are many issues with online instruction, both educationally and socially. But it’s here to stay, and it’s incumbent on those implementing it to optimize the curriculum for it.
- 1By default, we recommend instructors set the Zoom chat to “Host only”, so student messages won’t distract other students. This is how our text-only online classroom we’ve used for years works as well.
- 2Hence why teachers are upset by “hybrid” instruction. It doesn’t make sense from a curriculum and instruction standpoint.