Teaching

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.

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.

Dear Bonni,

How can I design my class sessions to fit the available time? I never see this discussed in resources for effective teaching, but it has been a big challenge for me for many years. I'm always concerned about having too much or too little material.

With any interactive or active form of learning, so much of how a class goes depends on the students. So it's not like presenting a speech where you are in complete control of the time. Any error causes problems that ripple through the semester, especially when I'm teaching multiple sections that need to stay in sync. And any change in the course coverage or how I construct the classes makes prior years' experience largely irrelevant.

—Kevin Werbach, professor, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

The fears about not having enough material to fill a class, or in getting behind with what you planned, are common. Peter Newbury, director of the Centre for Teaching and Learning at University of British Columbia Okanagan, recalls such a time for him.

“A memorable teaching experience for me was the day I ‘lost control.’ The students were so engaged in discussions, I had no authority. It was awkward. And awesome. In hindsight, I created a safe environment, posed good questions, and gave them agency. I prepared to do nothing.”

Below are five approaches to use regarding the time-based aspects of class planning. I recommend making use of a timer, having an established end in mind for each class session, erring on the side of student engagement versus “covering the material,” having plans for extending the learning if activities are shorter than planned and leaving room for metacognition, meaning, leave time to talk about the learning process.

Begin with the End in Mind

Before we get to the details about what will be explored in a given class session, it is time to stay broad. The leadership author and speaker Stephen R. Covey always stressed the importance of beginning with the end in mind. In his case, his advice helps us to formulate personal mission and vision statements. In the case of teaching, the axiom helps us to be intentional about the most important things learners will walk away with as a class finishes.

In the book What the Best College Teachers Do, Ken Bain describes how sustaining students’ attention helps to facilitate learning. He describes how a longitudinal study explored the ways in which expert teachers keep their focus narrow. Bain writes, “Teachers succeed in grabbing students’ attention by beginning a lecture with a provocative question or problem that raises issues in ways that students had never thought about before, or by using stimulating case studies or goal-based scenarios.”

When we begin with the end in mind in our teaching, our class planning becomes more flexible. We have a core question to explore, or a goal to pursue. The emphasis becomes on putting on different lenses in viewing the same set of ideas. What does this concept look like in different contexts? Where might there be confusion on the students’ part?

Use a Timer

There are many good reasons to use a timer while teaching, and one is simply maintaining awareness. When I am teaching a class for the first couple of times, I print out a copy of my slide deck with nine slides per page. I write on the printout how much time I plan to take for each section of content and for each interactive exercise. Then, I set a timer on my Apple Watch, which gives me nudges throughout the class to keep me on track of when I need to be moving on.

Of course, an Apple Watch is not required for this purpose. There are plenty of smartphone apps that work just fine. Microsoft PowerPoint has a timer built into the presenter’s view. There are also physical time clocks that some faculty like to have separate and apart from their computer setup.

Another reason to keep a timer handy during class is to facilitate exercises with students. I sometimes use a timer that has numbers large enough for students to see. I give them periodic reminders regarding how much time is left in the exercise and visit with those groups that have finished early. I ask them if they had any surprises as they went through the exercises, and how confident they are in their answers.

Err on the Side of Engagement

Whenever I hear faculty say, “I am just having so much trouble covering all of the material in this class,” I know that it is quite likely that they are spending an overabundance of time strictly lecturing and not enough time assessing the students’ understanding and retention of the learning.

In an hour-long class, I seek a way to gain the students’ attention in the beginning. Can I make them laugh? Feel some other kind of emotion? Draw them into a mystery we will be unraveling for the rest of the class?

Then, I often do something to get them talking and potentially moving around the class. Sticky notes are a favorite way of mine to accomplish both of these aims at once. I describe more ways of using sticky notes in teaching over on my blog, if you’re interested. I then might lecture for around 15 to 20 minutes. But throughout that time, I am asking the students for examples and posing other questions to them about how what we are talking about fits with prior learning from past weeks. The last third of the class is spent getting students talking with each other, reinforcing what they’ve learned, and seeing where there might be misunderstandings.

One resource I have found particularly useful in dissecting the questions around what topics need to be covered comes from Maria Anderson, CEO and Cofounder of Coursetune. She has proposed what she calls a learning lens for the digital age: ESIL. As we work through examining our goals for a given course, we can ask ourselves how deep the students’ learning needs to be around a given concept. Do they just need to know that it exists (E)? Or should they be able to perform a given task or provide an answer with some support (S)? Perhaps the learners need to be able to demonstrate something independently (I), or even have a deeper understanding of the concept that will persist for a lifetime (L). The ESIL lens can be useful when thinking through how much time to spend on each part of a class session.

Determine a Way to Extend the Learning

Even if we are making use of active-learning approaches, the interactive exercises we plan can take less time than we planned. Judith Dutill, a communication educator and instructional designer, recalls a time when a lesson she had planned about words and meaning went far faster than she had anticipated. She had brought in words from different decades and had the students match the word to the decade of the dictionary entry.

“We flew through it,” Dutill admits. She then had them get into groups and asked them to create a list of dictionary entries that could be added. In her case, she did this exercise more on an impromptu basis. However, now she has it to use the next time she teaches the class, if the same thing happens.

When I am teaching foundational courses with terms that are likely new to students, I tend to make use of Quizlet, a flashcards app. Quizlet has a test feature that generates a collection of matching, true/false, and fill in the blank questions. I will often have print outs of a couple of the tests from Quizlet, for when a quick opportunity for review emerges. I also highly recommend the Quizlet Live feature, which I have written about previously on my blog. I have only played Quizlet Live games with groups of up to 40. However, the makers of Quizlet say that they have seen it played with groups as big as 150 people.

Leave Time for Metacognition

Instead of just covering material, we need to get our students to be thinking about their learning. Metacognition is thinking about our thinking. As we have our students engage in metacognition, they are more readily able to take what they have learned and apply it in different contexts. As a result, they are able to determine their strengths and weaknesses and use strategies to figure out how to adapt their learning strategies accordingly.

Having students share the muddiest, or most confusing, point at the end of a class is an opportunity for metacognition. So is having students keep reflective journals to gauge their own learning.

The author of Creating Wicked Students, Paul Hanstedt, reminds us of the importance of structuring opportunities for reflection and metacognition. He suggests that we ask our students what seems most important to them from what was addressed in class. Among the specific prompts Hanstedt proposes: “What did you struggle with and why? How does this connect to X, Y, or Z? How would you explain this to someone not in this field?”

I recently taught my first class of the semester. It was a three-hour class, which gave me plenty of time to work through a number of interactive exercises to grow the students’ curiosity. The good news is that the students were far more vocal than I am accustomed to having undergraduates be that early in the semester. I did an exercise with sticky notes and then picked a couple of students to go stand next to each sign and recap the themes that emerged. It all went well.

However, I ran out of time to do the case study I had planned. Since I am not teaching multiple sections of the class, it easy to decide to let the class out about 15 minutes early, leaving time for a handful of the students to stay back to share some connection they had made during our time together.

One of them mentioned growing up in the same town I did – and noting how much that place reminds him of his grandmother, who has since passed away. Another mentioned his love of podcasts and asked if I had any other recommendations for him, beyond the ones I mentioned in class. I asked another young woman to stay after a bit, so I could thank her for the contributions she made during class and saying how much I was looking forward to getting to know her this semester.

If I had been teaching a class session that was closer to an hour in length, it would have been more important to use a timer and to keep things more structured during the interactive exercises.

We want to be able to leave enough room in our teaching for what might emerge, but without leaving behind the essential opportunities for our students to practice what they are learning.

Photo: Luke Chesser on Unsplash