FAQs

Bearing in mind that even the most engaging of face-to-face classes has a variety of engagement levels ranging from quiet alone work to exciting group work, a live online class will have to adapt to students needs. Engaging with a screen for even half an hour might prove too taxing for many learners particularly depending on tasks they are engaged in. Reducing the time spent live or taking 5-min breaks where students turn off webcams, stand, and stretch is a helpful practice. Tasks like reading a text or completing bookwork can be done pre or post live lesson. Experts advise the 'Chunk-Chew-Check' method- Lectures are chunked, max 10 min, followed by time for the students to chew on the information with some activity (think about Bloom's taxonomy), then checking understanding through some formative assessment: a poll, survey, or response. Not to measure mastery but to check understanding.

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Depending on the age of the students, parents might be an important part of keeping the student engaged in their home environment. Particularly for elementary school students, parental involvement will be necessary at some level. Regardless of the involvement of parents of older students, working from home and setting up a space and technology will likely require the cooperation of the parents. Consider how to communicate with them too. Is there an issue of students having parents do assignments for them? Yes. But this isn't unique to online lessons.

One option is to have the first 5 minutes of class be a check-in time where you can see how your students are doing and gauge their mental/emotional state for that day. Another idea is to use time released emails through Gmail. You can stay connected to students by sending individual emails that give encouragement, ask how they are doing, or ask a specific question related to a class task. Teachers can set a time to write emails to their students (or one that you can copy and paste to all students) and time it to be sent out in the middle of the week. This way students and teachers can stay connected and ]can still be in contact, making connections beyond classroom content. Another way to keep the online environment positive is to dedicate the first or last 5 minutes of class to students sharing their personal high-point of the week, something that made them smile or made them happy that week.

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It is important to ensure that students are learning and to keep them accountable to complete assigned work, despite them not always being in an ideal learning environment. Stepping away from a rigorous learning environment into a home environment can be challenging - especially without a normal schedule or people around to provide motivation. One option is to put students into small discussion or check-in groups. You can provide weekly tasks that they have to do together, as well as some homework assignments that require them to connect with their small group, talking about an idea or completing a question together.

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• Remember that assignments can be used for practice or assessment of learning. There should be more of the former activities and less of the latter. Assessment includes useful feedback for students (and teachers) or it can be used as part of a formal grade. Remember that most assignments do not have to fit into this last category!

• Giving students more practice activities will help them to know how to practice using what you’ve taught them. You may decide to track if they’ve completed the work through a quick look at submissions or a very simple “quiz,” or you can tell them that the assignment is designed to strengthen their abilities, but it’s up to them if they want to learn or not. (Consider your students’ motivation levels to determine which is suitable.)

• Assessment of learning is important to students as well as teachers: students are excited when they feel they have learned something. Thus, teachers can give assessments which are largely used by students to check their understanding/ability and not to determine grades (or which are merely used as complete/missed in grading). This kind of assessment can be extremely simple and doesn’t require the teacher to monitor cheating. Typical examples are exercises with answers provided which students can check themselves, and quizzes which are auto-graded and provide students with feedback. It can be useful to explain to students your expectations for a particular exercise, for example “this is a basic exercise, and I expect most of you can get 90% or better” or “this is a challenging exercise, so don’t worry if you only get 50% or so.”

• Another way to use assessment as feedback for students is to share your assessment of a few students with the entire class. The students selected for assessment could be random, or those showing typical responses. The assessed students could be identified or anonymous (sharing names is especially good if a piece of work has shown many positive aspects). Students with moderate levels of motivation will be interested in hearing how others’ work has been assessed, and will better learn the features of the work you expect.

• Lastly, some assignments may be graded to represent students’ learning, and teachers will have to give attention to each assignment. The key in this case is to assess on the specific items taught, showing discipline not to correct every error or less than typical response.

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• The first step is to articulate what you expect from learning: what behaviors, attitudes or understandings will you count as learning? You should have goals that include (for a speaking class) for example: student recognizes appropriate types of responses to a greeting, student can produce openings for several small talk topics, or student uses small talk appropriately in a dialogue. Tell your students these goals explicitly – then they can focus on them too!

• Then, consider the variety of ways that you can check students’ learning of the goals you’ve chosen.

o Quizzes and exercises which are auto-corrected can quickly give you results and a sense of students’ understanding or ability in topics you have taught.

o If you are teaching live classes, calling on students for answers is quite standard for Chinese students, or ask questions to the whole class in a chat where you can look over a large number of replies and see how students are doing.

o Another possibility is to ask students to produce a response at the end of a live or recorded session, similar to an “exit ticket.” This question could be an objective question (e.g. what’s a synonym for complex?) or subjective (e.g. what’s the most useful thing you learned today?).

o If you give students a more complex assignment, you may want to first look over 10-20% and see if students seem to have learned what you wanted. If they are doing okay, you can go forward in assessing. If the assignments reveal a lack of understanding of what you taught, you can consider providing further instruction, and asking the class to revise before giving feedback.

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The key to engaging students is to: know where they are, give them what they need, and give them space to think, practice or try out what you are teaching.

• Knowing where students are means to both understand where they are at materially/emotionally and to know the background they bring to the topic you are teaching. If you’re in touch more personally with a few students in your class, or chat with your monitor you can get a feeling for how students feel about their current situation (as a group). Are they overwhelmed with homework, are they having trouble with internet, are they feeling bored and ready for an interesting challenge, or are they worried about the future and unable to concentrate? Ask your teammates about their students if you don’t have a comfortable way to ask yours.

• Knowing students’ background on the topic you’re teaching will help you to give them what they need. Consider giving a pre-test if you’re not sure about their knowledge. You can do this before class or at the time of a live presentation, but don’t call it a “test” and make them anxious! Instead just say “I want to see what you can already do with this topic.” Try to have several questions of differing difficulty. After they have tried the questions and before they get anxious tell them: after class I think most of you should be able to do this. Otherwise, think carefully about what you’ve already taught students and how to make this lesson build on previous ones smoothly.

• Space to practice, try out, or apply what you taught will make the lesson seem worthwhile and help them to see if they’ve gotten your instruction. There are so many ways to do this, some quite simple. For example, you can ask questions, pause and provide answers: even in a recorded lesson, this can be quite effective if you leave sufficient time for students to think and respond. Providing simple exercises during the class where students can check their answers and see if they were right will be quite motivating if they are correct.

Credit: Gretchen Nauman