How can we do responsive teaching remotely? We’ve learned a huge amount about online learning since last spring, but assessing what students understand remains challenging. Indeed, as our remote teaching improves, difficulties assessing students’ needs and responding become more troubling. One barrier is participation (I’ve written about ways to build distant learners’ motivation and habits here). Another is fitting responsive teaching to the constraints of remote learning – the subject of this post. In sharing simple techniques which fit the principles of remote teaching I’ve prioritised timesavers – which demand limited planning time, and mobile options, for students without laptops. Having chosen a specific goal for the lesson, we face three huge challenges in responding to student learning:

Challenge 1: It’s hard to know what students have understood

Principle: Use an objective measure of student understanding each lesson – respond next lesson

First, we need an encapsulating task: an exit ticket revealing whether students have understood the key idea in the lesson; a task in which they solve a problem, summarise a plot point, explain a new phenomenon. I’ve written about designing them here.

Then we need an efficient way to collect students’ answers. We could ask students to:

  • Write their responses and share in the chat, or by email.
  • Complete a form (timesaver: a self-marking form which shows you the scores without any marking).
  • Mobile option: submit an artefact of learning; this could be an emailed photograph of a hand-written answer, a diagram, a concept map, anything – I recently saw a great video of a three year-old’s junk instrument performance.

We can then review the task and respond to the biggest gaps in understanding next lesson.

Challenge 2: It’s hard to know what students are thinking

Principle: Track all students’ understanding of key points during each lesson – adapt teaching immediately

Online teaching allows us to check students’ confidence easily. For example, we can:

  • Pause for questions in the chat (asking all students to respond, writing ‘No questions’ if they don’t have any).
  • Ask students for emoticon reactions (mobile option) to let us know how they’re doing (for example, pressing the ‘hand’ icon to let us know they’ve finished a task and are ready to move on, or a ‘thumbs up’ if they’re confident).

Students’ confidence can be a poor indicator of their understanding, but it may help us identify barriers and judge pace – and get students used to frequent participation.

Hinge questions – multiple choice questions around key misconceptions – allow us to assess all students understanding rapidly. I’ve written about designing hinge question here: they can be planned in advance, and we can get responses easily through the chat (another good mobile option as students need only type one letter) or by asking students to show their choice to camera. (In the classroom, we need a routine to choreograph responses and avoid copying: similarly, we can ask student to wait for our signal to enter their answer.) Hinge questions let us pinpoint student misconceptions rapidly: through our question design, we can ensure that any student who answers ‘A’ holds a given misconception, and respond accordingly.

But for me, the chat is the single best thing about online learning. I use ‘everybody types’ a lot: asking a question and pausing while everyone writes a sentence or two in the chat. We could never get around the classroom quickly enough to scan every student’s answer in a minute – online, we can. The subsequent discussion can be shaped around students’ points, as we draw them in to expand on their comments, describing their ideas and exploring their misconceptions. The chat allows a constant dialogue of questions, confusions, and ideas. Asking everyone to type seems to encourage shyer learners, who can comment without the pressure of raising a hand or articulating their point immediately. Keeping up with the chat can be hard: to give ourselves more time to read student answers we can invite those who have finished to read one another’s; this also gives them the chance to see 25+ model answers straight away. Used well, the chat allows us to track students’ thinking better than we can in the classroom.

Challenge 3: It’s hard to help every student improve

Principle: Help students improve their work by offering judicious feedback and guidance, and ensuring students act on it

  • It’s worth recalling the evidence suggesting that feedback isn’t always the best solution: this decision tree suggests times we should delay feedback.
  • We can also help students improve without feedback. For example, we can share models (students’ work, or ours), and ask students to compare their work to the model and refine their answer accordingly. More ideas about how to help students improve without feedback here.
  • If we are giving feedback, it’s likely to be whole-class feedback, since we can get an overview of all students’ work in the chat, and it’s hard to give individual feedback anyway. The key thing is ensuring students respond to the feedback: we can ask them to rewrite work immediately and share their revised answer with us or in the chat.
  • If we do want to give feedback to individuals or small groups, we can put students into break out rooms. For example, we could ask students to compare their answers and come up with a common answer, while visiting their breakout rooms in turn.
Conclusion

In the context of learning languages, Michel Thomas argued that the crucial thing is to ‘get the ball over the net’: to say something coherent enough that a ‘rally’ of conversation could begin. Remote learning raises the net: it robs us of many of the cues we rely on to respond: students’ facial reactions, their comments to peers, what’s written – or not written – in their book. The fundamental strategies and principles of responsive teaching have not changed: check what all students have understood, give succinct feedback, ensure students act on it. The challenge is getting the ball over the net: initiating a rally by eliciting evidence of student learning and permits you to give feedback. By planning end-of-lesson checks, frequent pauses to track understanding, and opportunities for feedback, we give ourselves more chances to get the ball over the net, and let a rally begin.

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