Education Week - April 21, 2021 - 10

NATIONAL SURVEY DATA

When it comes
to remote/online
instruction, how
have you changed
instructional practices
since the beginning of
the current school year?

65%
of teachers said
they've decreased
the amount of group
or partner work
among students.

67%
of teachers said
they've increased
the degree to which they
encourage nonverbal
methods of class
participation (e.g. typing
into the chat box or private
messaging the teacher).

42%
of teachers said
they've decreased
time spent lecturing.

SOURCE: EdWeek Research Center
survey, 2021

fore students head off down the wrong path on a question.
She said she wants to continue using these collaborative
documents, even after a return to the physical classroom.

4.

Give explicit instructions and stick to
routines.

Throughout this school year, Tina Stevenson has asked
her remote students for feedback on what's been going
well, and what could be going better, in virtual learning.
(Stevenson teaches remote and in-person students concurrently.) Her middle schoolers told her that they wanted
clearer, more specific instructions for everything-from assignments to how to use the tech itself. Stevenson, a math
teacher and department chair at Locust Grove Middle
School in Virginia, started giving tips on how to use some
of the tools embedded within Google Slides. She also created a consistent routine for every math lesson: warm-up,
go over yesterday's assignment, then answer questions.
Bender, the South Carolina drama teacher, has also
tried to inject more stability into online students' schedules. She has in-person students and full-time remote students, whom she teaches during different class periods.
She started giving her remote kids a plan for the week
ahead. That way, if students miss a day-due to connectivity issues, work schedules, or family emergencies-
they know exactly what they've missed and where the
class will pick up next time.

5.

To get kids talking, try smaller
groupings, or one-on-one conversations.

Stevenson, who's teaching one group of students in
the physical classroom concurrently with an online
class, used to hear crickets from her remote students
when she asked if anyone had questions-though her
in-person students didn't hesitate to speak up. But once
she started one-on-one meetings with the online students, she found that they would use that space to ask
questions and talk about their thinking.
Hines, from the Chicago area, cut down on the number of students she put in breakout rooms from five to
two or three, after having trouble getting students to engage in conversations in the bigger groups. The smaller
groupings made the teenagers less intimidated to unmute and contribute, Hines said, and they also lowered
the chances that one or two students would dominate
the conversation while the others stayed silent.

6.

Craft an intentional, inclusive camera
policy for synchronous learning.

Some teachers never asked students to turn their
cameras on-like Hines, whose district had a policy
against requiring it. Instead, she found other ways to
hear students talk and get a sense of their personalities. She asked them to send her video responses to a
prompt via the app Flipgrid, allowing her to " meet " her
students while still giving them control over when and

10 | EDUCATION WEEK | April 21, 2021 | www.edweek.org

how they portrayed themselves on video.
Bender, in South Carolina, struck a compromise: She
doesn't ask students to turn their cameras on during regular class periods, but does ask students to appear on camera if they're performing a poem, or a scene from a play.
In Wiley's class in Tennessee, students are required to
keep their cameras on. But, she gives them other options
to contribute as well, like the chat box on their video
meet. " A lot of students might be shy, so they would
rather type it in, " Wiley said-again, a strategy she
would consider using, alongside face-to-face class discussions, when she and her students return to the school
building full time. Offering nonverbal methods of class
participation, like typing into a chat box or private messaging a teacher, was a common tactic-67 percent of
teachers said they encouraged students to do this more
now than they did at the beginning of the school year.

7.

Give students more time than usual to
talk about what's going on in the world,
share their feelings, or just vent.

" Sometimes we want to just jump into those lessons, "
said Wiley. But she's tried to spend more time at the beginning of classes talking with students-with some, about
how they like virtual learning a lot; with others, about how
they miss their friends and in-person pep rallies.
With the pandemic, the movement for racial justice, and
ongoing economic uncertainty, this has been a difficult
year for students, said Bender. She's tried to open up opportunities for students to process these events together.
She's invited students to share with her the small things
that are bothering them that they feel like they don't have
any control over right now. She remembers one student
who talked about constantly being late for track practice,
because the virtual school day ends after the in-person
day. The coaches were giving him a hard time about it,
Bender says. Still, she remembers him saying, he felt bad
complaining-this was right after a massive winter storm
hit Texas, and he didn't want to sound ungrateful when
so many people had lost power and water. " That doesn't
mean that what you're going through needs to be minimized, " Bender remembers telling him.

8.

Celebrate the new skills students are
learning.

Manning, the Colorado teacher, knows that her students aren't getting exactly the same chemistry course,
or earth science course, that they would have during a
regular school year. But they're also gaining experiences
and learning skills they wouldn't have done in the physical
classroom: using shared online documents to collaborate
with their peers on written work, interviewing scientific
experts over Zoom.
" When it comes down to this narrative of lost time,
lost learning, I'm irate from that. It's so negating, " Manning said. " I feel like my students did a lot of learning
this year. "
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Education Week - April 21, 2021

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