Teaching in Higher Ed

Structuring Synchronous Classes for Engagement

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Structuring Synchronous Classes for Engagement

I still feel a bit wobbly in my teaching this semester. Students’ facial expressions typically provide me with so many cues in my teaching. It leaves me wondering if I’m reaching them during our synchronous sessions since I have to rely on other gauges for assessing their engagement.

It has also been a tender time. Many of the students are graduating in December and wondering what life after college, during a pandemic, will be like… Some have been told that they need to leave home, not knowing where to go. Others have faced losses of loved ones or told there are only a few months left, at best.

Despite feeling like my class is less engaging than in other seasons of my teaching, the students have shared that they feel like the time we are together passes so quickly and that they are learning a lot. Here’s a look at how most of my synchronous classes are structured, in case it is helpful.

Before Class (10 minutes)

I start playing music about ten minutes before class. There will always be 3-4 people who join, but who typically leave themselves muted and have their cameras off. Sometimes, one of them will have a question, and that’s why they came on early. But it is mostly quiet, except for the music.

I run my class off of a web browser, for the most part, with the occasional .jpg graphic or short slide deck. I’m teaching a Hyflex class, which means that these synchronous classes are not required. Students have the flexibility to participate in an asynchronous activity that is not identical to the synchronous one, but addresses the same learning goals. Before class, I open all the tabs I will need during the class and place them in the chronological order they will be used. 

I have found that if I build all the asynchronous activities, first, and then adjust them to be more suitable for a synchronous class session, it becomes a lot easier. I’ll write more about how I am developing asynchronous activities in future posts, but for now, the important thing is that there needs to be alignment in learning goals. Thinking that we can have identical experiences between asynchronous and synchronous experiences is not realistic and not a helpful aim.

Examen (5-10 minutes)

Each class starts with everyone answering two questions. They can answer aloud, though most choose to answer in chat (either publicly or privately). Each question starts the same way: Since we last met… Then, the second half varies:

  1. What brought you life?
  2. What took life away?

I share my answers to those questions, as well, and comment on some of the answers that were shared with the entire group. This has helped us bring community into our learning, during a time when it is harder than usual to get to know each other in this context.

One thing I already know I need to improve for next term is to incorporate this practice into the part of our learning community that engages asynchronously. I would ideally like it to be something that could be perceived as not taking a lot of time, but would give them the opportunity to share either privately or to the entire class. I tend to move away from discussion boards, since most learners have had such awful experiences with them that there’s so much unlearning to do in order to get going with them that I often consider other options, first.

Some kind of ongoing way of documenting our collective answers to these two questions might be interesting, using maybe Padlet or some other kind of more visual tool.

Review (10 – 15 minutes)

This class has a fair amount of new vocabulary for the students. We often begin by doing retrieval practice. I have flashcard decks in Quizlet that we will work through to review by playing some of their solo games, or by doing a few rounds of their Quizlet Live game.

A listener recently recommended Quizizz, recently, and our daughter has loved getting to experiment with it (she’s playing a game right now, in fact). I have been reluctant to try it in my current class, though, since we are in a groove with Quizlet and there’s no need to change things up at this point.

Dave recorded some short videos that teach them how to memorize the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. They can list them 1-7, or descend from 7-1. They instead can have a number listed off and they can tell you the corresponding habit. Or, if you state one of the habits to them, they know the associated number. Dave learned about peg words from when he worked at Dale Carnegie, though mnemonic peg systems come up in other contexts, as well. Sometimes, we get started in the larger group and then go into breakout rooms for further practice.

Main Activity (20 minutes)

The vast majority of the time, the main activity for the session is building upon something they have already learned a little bit about. For example, they recently read the chapter in the Getting Things Done book about reviews, which emphasizes a process called the weekly review. All reading assignments in this class are expressed in the form of a quiz in Canvas (our LMS). By this point, they will have uploaded their notes on the chapter inside the quiz, along with some questions that test for understanding and some reflection prompts.

I mentioned no longer being able to get as many cues from facial expressions. Instead, I structure exercises to make their learning more transparent, often through some kind of a collaborative document they work on with others, or an editable document they work through on their own. In the case of the collaborative document, I can see their work as they engage in it. When they work independently, I have them export their work as a PDF and upload it to our LMS, partially as a means for taking attendance – but mostly to be able to see their learning process more clearly. 

Most weeks, I set up a set of Google slides that have permission for edits to be made. Then, I share the entire document to the class and have them work in breakout groups on some portion of the slide deck. Alternatively, I edit the link to the document to say copy instead of edit at the end, which means that anyone who clicks the link will be given the option to create a copy of the document (instead of messing with my original).

Link with edit at the very end of it
Remove the edit at the end (including anything after the word, such as this pound sign) and add the word copy.

In this case, students started building their weekly review process in class. They are accustomed by now that any text that is highlighted should be deleted and replaced with their information. They also are used to the fact that I will often have sample screenshots of what my process looks like, which can then be replaced with screenshots of their weekly review, as they build it.

Sample weekly review

If you want to try this kind of activity, you can learn more about it from Teaching Effectively with Zoom, by Dan Levy. We talk about this approach in episode 324 of Teaching in Higher Ed and he also shares about it on the Teaching Effectively with Zoom book resources website. The most common mistake I have made so far is sharing the file with students without first changing the settings to allow for others to edit. It’s an easy fix, of course, but I would always still rather have it set up correctly to begin with…

Change permissions to allow for editing

I write more about this process in my post: How Do You Make Zoom Breakout Rooms Less Boring, if you want to learn more.

Class is officially over at this point. I only have about 20 students in the class, so taking attendance at some point along the way is relatively easy. I let them know that their participation points will be recorded and that the official part of class has concluded. I let them know what chapters we will be covering in the next segment and ask students to give some kind of indication if they’re planning on coming back after the ten-minute break, so I know about how many to expect.

The After-Party (45 – 60 minutes)

I was intrigued by Mike Wesch’s mentions of how he creates a single .MP3 of all the reading for his classes each week. Given that he is the author of his textbook (The Art of Being Human), I suspected he didn’t have as much of a challenge trying to navigate copyright issues the way some of the rest of us might. Still, I knew that especially since the context surrounding the Getting Things Done book was likely so unfamiliar to many of the students, it would be good to help them through that.

I decided to do an abridged version of the assigned reading, with stories from my life of how the concepts have impacted me. We go through the questions from the quiz, together, though in a couple of cases I ask them to still provide answers, if it turns out to be essential that I get their personal reflections on a particular topic.

The feedback from students on “the after-party” sessions has been edifying. They tell me that blocking off this optional time helps them to get a jump start on the week’s assignments. They like learning in community and appreciate the way in which I make the reading more personal by sharing additional stories.

The After-After-Party

There is almost always someone who would like to stay after the after-party to talk one-on-one. These are some of the most life-giving conversations I have had in recent months. 

Next Steps

I’m reasonably happy with the structure as I have it. I wish I had more polls populated in advance, but there hasn’t been enough time for everything I would like to try. I’m also intrigued by streaming platforms that take the possibilities beyond Zoom. One I have been experimenting with is called OBS Studio.

I also would like more times to bring the students’ stories into our learning community, from the pre-work they did prior to class. If I were going to do that, I would need a streamlined way of determining, in advance, if I had the person’s permission to share their example. When I have done things like that in the past, I would either ask via email, or one-on-one – just prior to the start of class. These days, I would need something more automated, perhaps by asking within the quiz (a question that the “right” answer could be either yes or no, potentially).

What about you? What's working for you with how you're structuring your synchronous class sessions? What challenges are you experiencing? 

How Do You Make Zoom Breakout Rooms Less Boring?

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How Do You Make Zoom Breakout Rooms Less Boring?

This article is part of the guide Toward Better Teaching: Office Hours With Bonni Stachowiak. on EdSurge. It is reposted on Teaching in Higher Ed with permission. It is the latest installment of the Toward Better Teaching advice column. You can pose a question for a future column here.

A conversation broke out on Twitter last week. How do you make Zoom breakout groups less boring? Robin DeRosa, director of Plymouth State University’s Open Learning & Teaching Collaborative, posed the question and committed to sharing her findings via a presentation soon.

My first recommendation was to keep the breakout room time-frames short. If we allocate too much time, some groups will be done with the exercise with lots of time left, which can lead to social awkwardness. My preference is to have a few, shorter breakouts instead of one long one.

The second recommendation I had was around making the students’ work more visible when they are in the breakout rooms—through the use of an editable, shared document of some kind. I have seen a number of faculty recommend this approach in the past, but it has been most visible to me, lately, in Dan Levy’s “Teaching Effectively with Zoom.”

Levy teaches at Harvard University’s Kennedy School, and his book offers a resource packed with practical ways to facilitate student interaction, to be engaging as a presenter, and to combine synchronous and asynchronous online material. Levy writes of his aspirations in releasing the book and its associated online resources:

“Whether you are new to online learning or a veteran, I hope you will find something of value in the book. If you are new to teaching online, my hope is that you will find a few ideas, try them out, and then experiment with additional ideas later in your journey. I also hope that this book will help you focus on what is important and provide a roadmap in your efforts to learn how to teach online. Hint: Spending 15 hours arranging monitors on your desk, wondering how to set up the various Zoom windows, and experimenting where to put your microphone is not an efficient use of your time. I learned this the hard way! If you are an online teaching veteran, I hope that some of the meta-advice here will be helpful and that you will pick up a few tips to improve your already well-developed practices.”

One of the people engaging with us on Twitter asked me a follow up question in response to my second recommendation about making students work more visible:

“How do you give them a link to the Google document where they share answers? I’m not really clear on how that would work.”

We first need to identify a good activity to have students do in breakout sessions. Do we want them to discuss their responses to three questions about what was just shared? Are we asking them to predict what they think will happen in a given scenario? Is this a good time for them to practice solving a problem using a specific model we have shown for them a couple of times now?

At a recent faculty gathering at my university, I had our faculty read an article by James M. Lang offering a guide to how to teach a first day of class. He has four key areas of focus: curiosity, community, learning and expectations. I planned to have four breakout groups discuss these recommendations and record what else they would add to the list of ideas.

Then, it is time to set up a shared document for each group to use to make their collaboration visible. Levy recommends using Google Docs or Google Slides, because of their ease of use and ability to create a public link that does not require contributors to log into Google while typing right into the document.

Once the document is set the way you want it, go to Share-Get link and change the setting to allow anyone with the link to edit the file. As soon as I provided the link, people clicked on it in the Zoom chat box and could instantly type into the shared file.

Share Google link with students

Levy emphasizes the importance of having a title slide with instructions for students on what they are expected to do in the breakout groups. On the book’s website, he offers these sample slides to show you how you might approach giving instructions and providing separate slides for each breakout group to discuss the various topics.

When working with our faculty, I thought I would be all fancy-pants and skip the part about having a slide devoted to instructions. Then, I promptly proceeded to send them into the breakout rooms without ever telling them what group they were in and where in the Google Slides they would find their group’s topic. I am not even sure I gave them a time frame, though at this point I have tried to put it a bit out of my mind. Let’s just say that Levy is right to stress having a slide for breakout room instructions.

Once students are in the shared document, you can see icons representing them on the screen. Since they aren’t required to login with Google, they are assigned different fictitious identities in place of their real ones. I always find this part amusing, as names like the following come up in rapid succession when you sent them over to the collaborative document: Anonymous hedgehog, anonymous tiger, anonymous giraffe, etc.

Anonymous person typing in shared document

As individuals navigate within your slide deck, you can see their fictitious identities appear hovering below the thumbnail of the slide they are viewing. Using this approach, you are able to see what is emerging from all the groups’ collaboration in one place. That gives the instructor more visibility into what groups are working on than might be possible for you to observe in a face-to-face class.

screen shot
Animal icons showing up on the slides to which each person has navigated.

As the exercise concludes, you now have an artifact representing the groups’ collaboration. Students can also save the file to contribute to their own collection of notes for the class. I did a version of Levy’s recommendation this week in my class, though I had a separate slide for each student.

It is a relatively small class, so going into breakout rooms seemed a bit much for this particular activity. There are so many variations to this technique, though, that I recommend starting with something similar to what Levy suggests (as well as being sure you have an instructions slide).

Episode 324 of my Teaching in Higher Ed podcast spotlight’s Levy’s Teaching Effectively with Zoom. I also highly recommend visiting the Teaching Effectively with Zoom website to discover more resources.

Is There Such a Thing as Too Much Curation?

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Curation: Is there such a thing as too much?

This article is part of the guide Sustaining Higher Education in the Coronavirus Crisis. on EdSurge and is reposted here with permission.

Dear Bonni,

I have heard you recommend that we think more about being content curators, instead of creators. I am excited about the possibilities. Do you have a recommendation for how much should be curated in online classes vs. how much should be original and created by the instructor? In other words, is there such a thing as too much curation of existing content?

—New to online teaching and thinking like a curator

As universities around the world attempted to move in-person classes into the online environment at the start of the pandemic, faculty quickly became overwhelmed at all the tasks that needed to be done. One mistake all too many make is to think that we have to create all the content for our online courses when there is an abundance of material already available.

Content creation takes considerable time and resources. While I typically post an informal video each week in my classes (recorded the day prior to the start of the week), I do a tremendous amount of curation for the majority of the class content—meaning I’m recommending articles, podcasts, videos and sites elsewhere on the internet. Here are just three examples of how professors might curate podcast episodes to use in different disciplines.

  1. I teach business classes, and I find the Planet Money podcast to offer engaging episodes that heighten the listener’s curiosity. Episode 216: How Four Drinking Buddies Saved Brazil recounts a currency crisis the country experienced where the value of items fluctuated radically on a daily basis. The government brought in four economists to advise them on how to solve the problem. I usually have students share how they think Brazil resolved the lack of confidence in the country’s currency and get the students thinking about the challenges involved.
  2. Podcasts extend well beyond the business realm. The producers of RadioLab state that the show’s mission is to explore a strange world. These masterful storytellers have taught me so much about science over the years, as well as encouraged me to have more of a childlike curiosity coming into a topic I know less about. The episode titled Patient Zero begins with the story of Typhoid Mary and explores other public health crises, such as AIDs. This is just one of many of RadioLab’s rich podcast catalog that would apply in nursing, anthropology, public health and other programs.
  3. The humanities also have a deep well to draw from in podcast back-catalogs. NPR’s More Perfect podcast began by exploring interesting supreme court cases and their relevance today. Then, the show launched into an incredible project. They partnered with an eclectic set of musicians to produce an album with songs written for the 27 amendments to the U.S. constitution. The “liner notes” were the podcast episodes, where they shared the history of each amendment’s formation, as well as music from More Perfect: The Album. Dolly Parton belts out about the 19th amendment: “We had to fight for womens’ rights; They said we couldn’t vote.” Flor de Toloache, an all-female mariachi band, sings in English and Spanish about the 2nd amendment. The entire podcast series and the accompanying album would be excellent content in law schools, history courses and political science seminars.

You asked if I thought there was such a thing as too much content creation for someone teaching a class, and you may already be predicting my answer: No. The role of a teacher is to facilitate learning, not “deliver” content. So I like to think of myself as co-designing experiences—much of which will draw inspiration from sources outside of my own creative capabilities.

The first step to becoming a content curator is to use a digital bookmarking service. I like Pinboard.in, but there are plenty of options out there. Once I find information that may relate to one of my classes, I save it to my bookmarks and enter tags to help me retrieve the information later on. The Planet Money episode I mentioned earlier about the Brazilian currency crisis got tagged with: #economics (topic), #BUSN114 (a class with at least one learning outcome related to the topic of the episode), #audio (format), and #planetmoney.

Once you build up different types of content (videos, articles, podcasts, exercises, activities, case studies and so on), you can start bringing them into your classes. I like to ask myself what I want students to do with whatever content I am bringing into the class. Do I want them to reflect on what they heard? Differentiate between two things (perhaps the United States’ price stability versus Brazil’s at that time)? Use the concepts learned in a different context? My role as a teacher becomes one of a translator. How do I help students take what was shared in the content and apply it in some way?

Well before COVID-19 entered the world, I was doing extensive curating on a daily basis. Some of what I save has nothing to do with teaching. Our family just got a bread machine, so there are a lot of recipes being saved these days. I enjoy learning about politics, so there are many bookmarks saved on that topic even though I don’t directly teach it. When it comes to my teaching, however, I always have a set of resources that I can search for by type of content, topic, person and class number.

There’s no such thing as too much content curation, as far as I am concerned. We just need to take it to the next step and determine how to facilitate learning from those wonderful resources we have collected.

Care, Voices, Screen Time, and Zoom Settings

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Computer screen with blog title

I have been treasuring the opportunity to read about other educators’ lives during this time, as they share with such rawness and candor. It helps to feel less alone.

Here are just some of the posts that have touched my heart and ignited my imagination in some way.

Care Is a Practice; Care is Pedagogical, by Jesse Stommel

Jesse shares about his Mom’s health challenges that drew their family to move across the country and their daughter’s early understandings of the permanence of death. He also describes the ways in which the Open Online Office Hours have brought educators from around the world together in solidarity.

During one of the office hours sessions, they learned that Jesse's husband was being laid off, news which is normally delivered in person, but came via a webcam this time. Finally, he recommends we carefully read our institutions reopening plans and attempt to discern the values being expressed and enacted.

Voices First, Faces Second: Beyond the Tweet, by Maha Bali

I used to require my students to have their camera on during classes. This was in the context of teaching doctoral classes and I packed all kinds of privilege in my choice to establish those rules. Now, I can see things in a lot more nuanced of a way, though I always allow students to make that choice for themselves.

Maha reveals her own desire to be able to see the students she is teaching, but she also knows some of the reasons they may prefer leaving their cameras off. She describes other approaches we can use to have those more human connections beyond a stringent requirement. She asserts that we should first center students' voices, then attempt to get to see their faces. “Voices first, faces second.”

Flipping the Screen Time Conversation into a Meaningful Activity Exploration, by Maha Bali

Dave and I used to have very different approaches to our kids’ screen time than we do now. It was a maximum of one hour per day, with some days not having any time in front of screens at all. Now? Let’s just say they are engaging in school remotely right now – and have what we call “choice time” around here in the afternoons, which usually results in playing Minecraft. A lot of Minecraft.

Maha changed the conversation for me around screen time by thinking through it in the context of what is being done with those screens. Our kids have had the opportunity to play Minecraft with Maha’s daughter (“O”) probably ten times by now. We were able to connect them right as “O” was just starting Minecraft. At first, I was concerned about the many cultural differences I knew would pop up in there. But Maha’s humor and direct communication style made me less afraid and more excited about the tremendous opportunities before us all.

I think about context pretty much every day of my life.

We create way too many dichotomous choices in our lives and the lives of others. Context seems to always be the road toward better-discerned decisions and greater opportunities for connections with people who view things differently than we do.

Video: Recommended Zoom Settings, by Teddy Svornos

I almost didn’t watch this video, thinking that I have settings pretty figured out on Zoom and so do my students. However, I was in for a treat. In two minutes, Teddy shares how he recommends his students set up their Zoom settings within the context of using a smallish laptop so that they can actively learn while participating in class.

Here’s a taste of what he recommends, but I totally think it is better to watch it.

  • “Keep video on, if your circumstances allow.”
  • “Each class revolves around a handout” (and how to not have it take over your entire screen, when he is sharing it)
  • Make these non-full screen settings permanently, in settings
  • Use gallery view, while he is sharing the handout, and side-by-side mode (change the size of that portion of the window, using the slider bar)
  • Merge to meeting window – chat and/or participants (only works if you’re not in full screen, which I didn’t realize)
  • Change to speaker view when he has a camera on his whiteboard

I recommend you subscribe to Teddy’s Tech Notes in your RSS reader of choice, as he is excellent at providing guidance on teaching, educational technology, and productivity.

If you aren’t yet using an RSS reader/aggregator, check out Inoreader. Laura Gibbs is the person who first told me about Inoreader. She has this post from 2015, which still reads as very relevant (in terms of Inoreader tips) today, about how she organizes things in Inoreader. I use folders, subscribe to all “email newsletters” now via Inoreader, so they come into my RSS reader vs into my email, and read/unread.

These are just a few articles (and one video) that have stood out to me in recent weeks. I'm grateful for the generous ways educators are acting in solidarity with one another during this awful time. I can see so much life and beauty amidst the pain and devastation. 

What Homeschooling During COVID-19 Taught Me About My College Teaching

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homeschooling graphic

This article is part of the EdSurge guide Sustaining Higher Education in the Coronavirus Crisis and is reposted here with permission.

While I have always wanted to be a parent, I've never wanted to homeschool my kids. At the university where I teach, a number of our students come from a homeschooling environment. This educational context, so different from my own growing up, has always intrigued me. As students would share their experiences, I often realized that the home schools in my imagination were vastly different from what these young people described.

My husband, Dave, and I have now been thrust into the role of teachers for our two kids—one in kindergarten and the other in second grade—for the past couple of months. Their actual teachers are amazing. They have been working incredibly hard to make the switch to an online environment. The best thing about the experience for us has been getting to overhear their teachers referring to our kids by name and addressing their unique challenges and passions.

What has been less fun has been trying to come up with a set of systems that work for us. As we near the end date of this school year, I have been reflecting on the lessons that these experiences can provide for how to improve my own teaching going forward.

Less Is More

I don’t like to admit this, but at first in the homeschooling experience, I was too concerned about what the kids’ teachers would think about us, as parents. I wanted to ensure that each of the boxes got checked on the kids’ schoolwork, including the optional ones for music, the library and social/emotional content. The pressure to perform to some imagined level concerned me on a daily basis.

Finally, I reached a place where there just wasn’t any room to reflect on this as much anymore. I’m on our university’s COVID-19 leadership team, which means I’m in daily meetings and making recommendations to the executive team regularly. This role also has me reading around 20 articles a day and attempting to synthesize what I learned in some meaningful way. Additionally, I am responsible for leading our faculty development team and teaching classes of my own. Increasingly, the pressures of my work overshadowed my desire to ‘perform’ as an excellent homeschooling teacher.

The kids’ teachers did a good job of telling us what assignments or activities were most important, from their perspective. There are a couple of apps that gear the lessons to the kids’ knowledge and skills and prescribe interactive content based on their performance. I eventually got to the point where I would prioritize those activities over others. And I grew to understand that If we didn’t get to everything, it wasn’t going to cause irreparable harm to the kids’ learning.

As soon as I changed my perspective on quality over quantity, everything shifted. If the kids asked if they could go outside, my answer was always yes. I would take a lawn chair out front and enjoy grading in the shade of one of our trees. The kids were always able to focus more once we returned inside for more of the formal learning. Every Thursday, we have decided as a family to do themed school days. Their most recent theme was Minecraft day. Dave, my husband, shared that when the kids asked if they could record a Minecraft podcast that morning, he quickly agreed, even though that wasn’t anywhere on the calendar. He said to me later, “I threw out the planned curriculum the moment I saw how excited they were to create something together.”

This less-is-more approach has been cascading into my teaching more in recent years. I taught a business ethics course this semester in which I had honed the learning outcomes down into the most essential ones. This meant that when the pandemic struck, the current events were able to flow much more regularly into our class discussions. I modified the final assignment to be a manifesto. The ways in which students synthesized their learning was phenomenal. Many of them mentioned feeling equipped to continue learning about what they had discovered in the class much more than in other courses they have taken.

One of the students who just wrapped up my business ethics class, Hannah Clark, really exemplified these opportunities for deeper learning. Hannah and I discovered our shared love for the television show The Good Place during the first week of class. Each time I would see her after our initial meeting, I would ask if she had seen the latest episode, and we would talk about our favorite plot developments and characters. In Hannah’s manifesto project, she shared about five people she learned about in class who influenced her. Number one on her list was Immanuel Kant, who showed up both in our class content and in The Good Place TV show. Hannah was able to take what she was learning in the class into her entertainment choices, her work and her life. She regularly shared memes with me during the semester that related to the topics from our class, as well as articles and even songs.

It’s Harder Than It Looks to Avoid Transactional Approaches

When it comes to homeschooling, our kids want more than anything else to play Minecraft, Mario Kart or to watch television. When they were at their normal school, “choice time” meant they could choose from a number of activities within their classrooms. Their options always seemed to fit into something school-related. At home, it translates one hundred percent of the time to “screen time.”

I find myself slipping into transactional thinking on a regular basis throughout the day. “Once you finish your 30-minutes of iReady Reading, then you can take a break for a bit.” “Watch the video from your teacher and then come back and show me what you practiced. Then you can do something else for a while.” My ultimate desire is for them to be enjoying learning for learning’s sake. We most often get there these days on things that have nothing to do with school.

Most of us who teach yearn to have students who engage in the class well beyond the point of earning grades and checking boxes. Proponents of the ungrading approach argue that they can get there much more effectively because they remove grades from the equation all together. Jesse Stommel, digital learning fellow and senior lecturer of Digital Studies at University of Mary Washington, shares his rationale for ungrading on his blog:

“In short, the act of grading does harm to students and causes teachers unnecessary stress. Research shows grades don’t help learning and actually distract from other feedback/assessment.”

Other proponents of ungrading are make a case that grades can be, in many ways, arbitrary. The cutoff between a B and a B-, for example, seems so subjective, they assert. In her book, The New Education, Cathy Davidson describes how people in the meatpacking industry found that letter grades didn’t even adequately satisfy their needs to differentiate one cut from another, let alone trying to have grades measure something as complex as humans’ learning. While I haven’t fully adopted an ungrading approach in my teaching, I do often create assignments in which students either met the criteria, or they didn’t (known as specifications grading). This approach tends to contribute to less transactional relationships between me and my students, though I know there is still room for me to grow in this area.

Structure Matters

The most frustrating part of homeschooling for me is how hard it is to organize everything. The teachers have done a good job sending PDF documents that lay out most of the kids’ school activities. However, each of the sites they are directed to navigate to have separate logins and passwords. Our firewall that is intended to protect against any of us inadvertently visiting inappropriate sites often generates false positives for the kids’ schoolwork. This translates to them not being able to view the web pages where assignments are stored.

The school my kids attend stresses the importance of the social-emotional growth, so it sets up one-on-one meetings between kids on a weekly basis. After some parents expressed concerns about their kids spending too much time on screens, the school added some screen-free exercises to its website, which parents can print out to let kids complete them by hand.

My husband and I both work remotely, and we trade off leading remote schooling and focusing on our own job duties. So we try to set up a schedule for the kids so that they can move through a few school tasks at a time without us needing to guide them. We do our best to schedule related tasks together in the hopes that they can move from one activity to the next without us always needing to stop what we are working on to guide them. Our attempts work less than 20 percent of the time.

That means that Dave and my professional work contains constant interruptions. At least we have each other working from home, which allows us to rotate homeschool teacher duty between each other. We keep trying to tweak what we are doing to provide for less of a need for radical context shifting. I also realize part of this is the very nature of six-year-olds and eight-year-olds. Try not to laugh at me too much here.

Reflecting on the challenges my kids face in their remote schooling, I realize the students in the university classes I teach face similar challenges. The learning management system (LMS) I use allows the instructor to see the course from a student’s view. And I used to spend a great deal of time considering how to set up pages, assignments and other content from within my course, only to discover that the vast majority of students never saw the fruits of my labor. Instead, they looked at the centralized due dates from all of their courses, consolidated on the main login page. They rarely clicked sequentially through the items the way I had constructed them. I found it was more helpful to think about the cadence of due dates and breaking larger assignments into smaller tasks whenever possible.

I have also learned to think carefully about how I label each assignment in the LMS. The goal is to indicate whether what I am posting is something they should take a look at, or something that requires some kind of action on their part. I use names like: “SUBMIT: Paper” and “READ: Chapter 4,” in an attempt to make it was clear as possible what is required.

My goal is to have as much contained within the LMS as possible, too. Most LMSs can be set up to integrate with external tools, making it easy to make use of preferred educational technologies without students having to remember another login and learn an entirely different system. Quizlet, a tool for creating digital flashcards, is an example of an external tool that is also available within our LMS. Students never have to leave the LMS to review the flashcards for our class, or to play the associated review games.

Minecraft shirts - brother and sister

I mentioned our kids’ love of Minecraft and how that’s often the reward at the end of their time spent on schoolwork. This week, on the themed Minecraft day, our son decided to loan his sister a Minecraft shirt so she could better celebrate the day with him. They read Minecraft books and played a Minecraft tag game outside. When it came time to do his assigned poetry lesson, he decided to write it on—you guessed it—Minecraft. I share his poem, below, with his permission.

Minecraft day
At school
I loan
My sister
Creeper
Shirt
For Minecraft day
The best
Day.

It has been quite an experience navigating homeschooling along with helping our entire university transition to remote teaching. It has caused me to reflect on much about teaching and learning these past few months. I have felt like a failure some of the time. In other cases, I have been elated at catching glimpses of the power of learning—and its messiness.