When I tell fellow teachers that I teach 150-minute block classes synchronously to high school students on Zoom, I instantly win the pandemic who-has-it-worst competition. But the real truth is that I actually kind of love it. We recently went back to remote teaching for a week after several weeks of hybrid, and I was surprised at what a pleasure that was.
That’s not to say that I don’t miss all the casual interactions with students that come with being in the same physical place: kids eating lunch in my classroom, that one kid each year that always stays after class to talk about Star Trek or politics or dogs, watching my students turn into completely different people for plays, concerts, or football games, listening to them laugh together in the background while I’m teaching. And I should also say that this is my first experience teaching a true block schedule–where I see a small group of kids for a long time every day for an intense 4-week semester–rather than a modified block with longish classes every other day. I suspect that–when we’re not wearing masks and face shields, juggling kids who are physically present with kids who are faces on the computer, talking over noisy air purifiers, and fixed in place six feet apart–I would love the true block even more in person.
What I’m trying to say is that online teaching doesn’t have to be a misery. Nor does it have to be bad teaching. Synchronous teaching online is different from teaching in person, but it’s not inherently worse. It only felt that way at the beginning, because we all knew how to teach in person, and we had to learn to teach another way from scratch.
So, without further ado, here is my completely idiosyncratic list of things I’ve learned.
- Time building comfort and community is never wasted
Kids who meet each other online for the first time don’t have many of the ways to break the ice that they would have in person. Kids on Zoom can also opt out in ways they can’t in person–turning off their camera, taking multi-tasking to the next level, or slowly subsiding until only the anonymous top of their heads are visible on screen. My first task is to make class something they don’t want to escape and then, second, make it something they don’t want to miss. The social dynamics are key to both, and if those aren’t right, nothing else works. How you do that will depend on who you are, but here are my priorities:
Require authentic presence. For us, this means establishing and holding the line on certain norms: cameras are on and faces are visible (not back lit or out of the frame) when we’re together as a community, and everyone is part of the action (for me, this means cold calling people, which I rarely do in an in-person class. Rather than an intimidation tactic, I see it as offering and insisting on inclusion in the group–your ideas matter enough to me that I will ask you for them if I don’t hear them). The longer someone is a passive observer (or tuned out altogether) the harder it will be for them to come back.
Extend grace for everything else. The safer they feel, the more students will give you in a situation where they’re not obliged to give you anything. Be gentle in corrections. Praise risk taking rather than right answers. Model vulnerability, make mistakes, and call yourself out on them. Don’t sweat the small stuff. Small stuff may be different for every class. For me, it means that I don’t fuss if my students are in their PJs or rocking an inter-galactic background as long as they’re awake and participating energetically. I don’t mind if they’re eating as long as they’re also talking. These may be no-gos for you, but take conscious stock of what lines are absolutely necessary to draw in your class and then embrace individuality in the rest.
Pay attention to ambiance I spend a lot of time at the start of each year setting up my physical classroom to feel welcoming, exciting, personal. It’s easy to forget that work in the virtual world, when I’m just worried about whether all of block 2 will be kicked offline when I send them to breakout rooms, but it’s even more important there, where students feel less at ease. I look for any way to build shared experiences and set a welcoming table. Some of that involves creating rituals: I start every class with a moment of silent mindfulness, just as I do my in-person classes. I play with my own virtual backgrounds, and I slip in pictures of babies and puppies. When we come to lunch on the agenda, I have a running game of trying to find the most over-the-top Pinterest lunchbox photo. The times when people are signing on or returning from breakout rooms one by one always feel awkwardly silent, so I’ve started playing music–the more dated and corny the better. I invite students to choose music for the next class.
Encourage interaction Especially for students who don’t know each other offline, bonding is key to getting comfortable taking risks. Look for every opportunity to mix kids up–change groups and then change them again. Let them get off topic every now and then. Let them go to breakout rooms on break, hang out and talk during lunch, or celebrate the last five minutes with a conversational free-for-all. Build in small ice breaking activities or look for a social dimension to learning activities. It feels like wasted time, but the more comfortable they are with each other, the more they will learn in the time you have: it’s worth the investment.
Be exaggeratedly human Don’t stand on dignity. Help them take risks by being honest about the risks you’re taking. Pull back the curtain, talk about what you’re doing and why. Ask for advice. Invite feedback way more often than you usually do (it’s harder to read the room in Zoom).
2. Be much clearer than you think you need to be
I often feel as though I’m speaking a foreign language when I’m teaching 9th graders, but online there are far more reasons that things get lost in translation. Someone was distracted by their cat. Someone had connection issues. My voice was muffled through the mask, or my signal hiccuped. There is no such thing as too much redundancy when it comes to online teaching. I put all my plans for each day in a cumulative agenda (you can see an examples here). I spell everything out there: when it’s OK to turn cameras off, how long we’ll take for the task, whether it’s individual or collaborative. The link to the agenda never changes, it’s posted on my course page, and I still drop it in the chat at the start of every class. I also give each direction orally, project the screen for anything complicated, and add links to the chat. Maybe it’s overkill, but I’ve finally reached a place where no one interrupts me to say, “wait, what are we doing now?”
Having everything laid out like that, ahead of time, also adds to the sense of security. Students know what’s coming, they’re less worried about making a mistake, and the familiar rhythm of the agenda can be comforting. Interestingly, I find that some students are really bothered if I make a change on the fly, skipping over an item on the agenda in the interests of time, for example. Teaching is all improvisation when it comes down to the moment in class, and changes are part of that, but I try not to make unnecessary ones, and when I do, I make them decisively and echo them on the agenda–I’m prone to thinking out loud with students, but I find that, online, I need to keep that very short and crisp.
One final element of clarity may seem contrarian: limit the number of digital tools you ask students to work with. When we first went remote in the spring, I went a little crazy with platforms. There are a million cool collaboration apps and websites out there, and the ability to use them is one of the big upsides of teaching online. “This will be fun and different,” I thought. What I found, though, is that every introduction of a new tool is costly in terms of class time and, more importantly, momentum. Momentum is everything. Some students will have trouble setting up an account. Some will inexplicably encounter a pay wall. Some will encounter browser conflicts. Some will intuitively understand the interface, while others will be intimidated. All of that creates anxiety, shifts my focus to troubleshooting, and takes the wind out of an activity. That doesn’t mean I don’t use the tools that are out there. They’re great. Now, though, I ask myself if this is something I will use at least once a week. Or, if not, whether it allows students to do something critical to the learning that I can’t work around another way. If the answer to both is no, then I regretfully pass. The result is a smaller slate of tried and true apps, usually multipurpose ones, that I introduce in the first week and then use enough that they become part of our familiar furniture instead of a new hurdle.
3. Vary everything except tools and structures
I just said that routines breed comfort, but change creates energy. I’ve always thought of classes as many connected “chunks” of time, but online learning requires extra attention to that. I find the limit for a single activity is about 20 minutes before unhappiness sets in, and I try not to go for more than 45 minutes without a stretch break. (I teach 9th and 11th graders; your mileage may vary!)
I categorize activities in a number of different ways and then try to be very conscious of mixing each of them up during a class. The types of variety I think about are: activity (reading, writing, talking, drawing, watching/listening, or making something), group size (whole group, breakouts, pairs, 1:1 conferences with me, independent work), difficulty (easy wins scattered in with challenges), and energy level (creative/social/silly tasks vs. more traditional ones, “fun” stuff vs. work that requires them to dig down and persist. This is the category that varies most by class–a discussion may energize one class and be heavy lifting for another, but if you pay attention you quickly get an intuitive feel for what invites and what requires students to overcome: it is essential that students have both).
That all said, it’s also important to design the flow from one chunk to the next so it doesn’t feel chaotic. Help the kids see how the last task leads them to the next. For example, I like to set it up when I can so that the deliverable from one activity becomes subject of the next. task. I usually break my classes into approximate thirds with sharper transitions between those big divisions, like movements within a musical composition, and just signal those transitions extra clearly.
4. Trust the kids
Teaching remotely, you cannot compel engagement. (You can’t do it in person, either, but it’s easier to have the illusion that you can). Teaching synchronously online, at least in a long block, does not work very well if you feel you must have eyes on every kid every moment. At least it doesn’t for me. I want to check in one on one about writing and research. I want kids to work together in breakout rooms, and there’s only one of me. Sometimes I need to have students read something in class, and it seems a bit silly to stare at them while they do it. And finally, students need a pyschic break from their cameras or class starts to feel like the Opticon.
If students care about what you’re doing together, you can trust them to do pieces of it independently. That’s why I went so overboard on the previous points about shaping the feel of the class: every investment in engagement pays back in the possibility of more student freedom. If you’ve built a strong relationship, created a safe, comfortable, community, made the class engaging, and been clear about what the class is doing and why, students will work even when you’re not standing over them, and it’s good for both you and them to discover that.
I’m not saying turn them loose for hours on end. The 20 minute rule still applies (Ok, maybe 30 for a writing task), and accountability is key: every independent task should have a clear, immediate deliverable, even if it’s only an interim one. When something goes awry and the deliverable doesn’t appear, you need to talk about that, one one one or as a community–that’s teaching, too. But this experience has forced me to be much more intentional about the back and forth dance between scaffolding in a group, practicing independently, and coaching one-on-one, and I think that has made me a better teacher and my students better students.
5. Work with the medium instead of against it
You can’t do all the same things you did in person, and that’s OK. I can’t have kids arrange themselves in a timeline, align themselves physically along a spectrum of agreement, pass things around, or whip out their phones to film a quick group video.
On the other hand, I can change groups much more quickly than in a classroom, where all that dragging around of chairs gets everyone off task. I like to do discussion “speed dating” with primary sources–put pairs in breakouts to share their thoughts on a tricky question for two minutes, change the breakout rooms, change again, and so on. We can have private conversations within the structure of class in a way I couldn’t in person–I can pull someone into a breakout room for two minutes or send opposing debate teams into breakouts for truly secret planning. I can have groups discuss their opinions without them being instantly influenced by the groups around them. My students can collaborate in different ways online (granted, we could always hop online in real life, too, but pre-pandemic I didn’t do that nearly as often).
And finally, the thing I like most about Zoom teaching is that (if you’ve done all that groundwork), there’s a sort of intimacy to having everyone’s face right there that is, in some ways, even richer than when we sit around a physical table (at the table, there are always those dreaded corner seats!). I’m savoring that, for now, even while I’m waiting for spring musicals and lunch time conversations about Tolkein to return.
The funny thing is that when I started writing this post, I thought I had learned how to do a whole lot of new things over the past nine months. As I look back over this list, these are actually all things I also try to do in person, maybe taken to a greater degree. So maybe I don’t have any real Zoom secrets for you. What I really want to say is, don’t believe it can’t be done. Don’t let the venue get in the way of being the teacher you already know how to be–whether that’s like me or very different.
I have had 9th graders on Zoom discuss a primary source for 30 minutes without needing any guidance for me at all. I have had students more or less successfully recreate the Paris Conference on Zoom. I have had groups go away for 20 minutes and come back with a speech, having all stayed (pretty much) on task. I have had students say, “wait, class is over already?” after 150 minutes. I have been happy teaching on Zoom–some of the time, at least–just as I have been happy teaching in person. It can be done. Don’t give up.
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