Teaching in Masks!

As schools in South Africa begin a phased re-opening, those of us who have been teaching remotely for the last two months, will need to get used to teaching some of our students on campus, and some remotely. South Africa has decided to send our matriculation and grade 7 students back first on 1 June, with other grades following in a staggered manner. But the situation is complicated by the fact that some students may elect to stay at home rather than come in to school, some may be ill and are advised to stay at home, and some may be fragile and attend school intermittently. To be frank, as teachers we do not know what to expect. How many of our students in any class will be on campus? How many at home? But we must be prepared to teach them one way or another.

When schools closed as the lockdown was announced I think we had a fairly good idea as EdTech champions as to how to help teachers prepare for teaching remotely. We were able to train those staff who needed help using the school Learning Management System. Were able to suggest software options for recording lessons, adding whiteboards, setting up online assignments, launching meetings, and so on. I do not feel as confident in any advice we can give for teaching half your class face to face, and simultaneously half of it online! This is completely uncharted territory!

Some teachers have explored Flipped Classroom models in which students watch or read instructional materials at home and then do worked activities in the classroom with the support of the teacher. This flips the traditional model where the teacher introduces concepts at school, and students do exercises which explore and consolidate the concepts at home. It seems to me that the only viable way of teaching simultaneously face-to-face and online needs to take this model as a starting point. If a classroom has an interactive whiteboard, the teacher can use the IWB and display their Learning Managment System, be it Google Classroom, Teams or Moodle on the board so that it can be seen by students in the classroom and by students at home. The teacher can then help both students in the classroom and those at home complete whatever tasks have been set. If the teacher themselves has to be at home, they can broadcast to the classroom in the same way, with a substitute teacher on site to manage the classroom. Having a web camera installed on your IWB to capture the classroom would help here as well.

This forms a very general infrastructure which could allow for a variety of pedagogical approaches to be explored by teachers. Teachers are used to adapting to changing circumstances, and will find ways of making it work. In larger departments it might be possible for teachers to team teach, one on site and one at home. Likewise I believe that it would be beneficial to use students’ personal devices in the classroom to pair up students on site and those at home to help work through activities that combine classroom and home-based activities. For example one student on site and one remote could discuss a text, or work on a shared Google doc, communicating via the LMS chat or apps such as whatsapp.

I do not think any of this will be easy, and will be open to all kinds of technological glitches, but I do believe that we will find ways of working that not only make the best of a bad situation, but also open up ways of working that will add tools to our armoury as teachers that we can use once things return to normal.

If they ever do.

 

On-Line Learning: Out of the Google gallimaufry

A thoughtful and necessary intervention, and a really cool new word to add to our vocabulary!

There's a Hadeda in my Garden

You will be forgiven for not knowing the meaning of the word gallimaufry. I didn’t before I read this piece. The definition, ‘a confused jumble or medley of things’ can sometimes be applied to education, especially during this period of emergency remote teaching. Lester Lalla, Headmaster at St John’s Preparatory School, offers a way through the confusion.

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The sudden closure of schools and the race to online learning has been a mammoth task for educators across the globe. I maintain that the dedication and devotion of teachers is incomparable. I am very proud of my profession. 

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  Lester Lalla features in Tom Sherrington’s, ‘The Learning Rainforest Fieldbook’ , published January, 2020

Educational technology has been a game-changer. It has enabled us to engage our students remotely and enabled us to teach in both synchronous and asynchronous ways. However, while EdTech is an enabler, it is not a substitute teacher. A growing…

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Thought Experiments on Why Face-to-Face Teaching Beats On-Line Teaching: We are Humans, not Econs

Computing Education Research Blog

With everything moving on-line, I’m seeing more discussion about whether this on-line life might just be better. Amy Ko recently blogged (see post here) about how virtual conferences are cheaper, more accessible, and lower carbon footprint than face-to-face conferences, ending with the conclusion for her “it is hard to make the case to continue meeting in person.” My colleague, Sarita Yardi, has been tweeting about her exploration of “medium-independent classes” where she considers (see tweet here), “Trying to use the block of class time just because that’s how we’ve always taught seems like something to revisit. Less synchronous time; support short, frequent individual/small group interaction, less class time.”

It’s hard to do on-line education well. I used to study this kind of learning a lot (see post on “What I have learned about on-line collaborative learning”). I recently wrote about how we’re mostly doing emergency remote…

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Teacher, you are doing a good job, even if you don’t think you are!

As Thoreau noted, we all live lives of quiet desperation, and yet if you go on social media, all you see is happy, successful people boasting of their achievements! During the time of coronavirus this is especially the case. We are daily reminded that Shakespeare wrote King Lear in quarantine, and that we could all be learning Madarin, or composing symphonies, or at the very least baking industrial quantities of banana bread! It is easy to believe that everyone is coping better than you are, that you are the only one who hasn’t used this time productively. For teachers, we hear colleagues telling us how well their remote classes are going, how engaged the students are, what good results they are getting. How easy it is!

I would take this talk with a healthy pinch of salt. I am sure that some classes do go well. Teachers are doing an amazing job at transferring online. For some teachers just getting online has been a major triumph! Many new tools have been tested and creative and innovative ways of teaching trialed and worked at. This is in the nature of teachers, it’s what we do. We are used to handling disaster, of having our careful planning disrupted by sudden fire-drills, or an unwanted invasion of wasps or bees in the classroom! We cope, we adapt, and we deliver.

But we tend to imagine that every lesson, except for our own, is perfect. We magnify the little hiccups, and imagine nothing productive has been achieved. If I know anything about teachers, and I’ve seen some terrible ones, and some great ones, most of us have been muddling along just fine. We have had days when only a handful of students have made contact, and we’ve felt like a complete failure. We’ve had our screens freeze and our Internet connection go down half-way through an almost full class meeting when we were just about to make a break-through, and we’ve despaired. But we’ve also had days in which things went OK, and students submitted work, and it was OK! And we’ve seen students make progress. Nothing whizz bang maybe, but the kind of slow solid progress that gets made and suddenly we wake up one day and realize how far we’ve come!

And we don’t have to compare ourselves to anyone else, especially the ones with the loud mouths. All we have to compare ourselves to is how far we’ve come and how much effort we have made. Some teachers have small children and spouses who work from home and elderly relatives and sick cats and we may have experienced loss. Some teachers have no Internet to speak of, or have to share devices. I’ve heard horror-stories about hard-drives packing in, or keyboards that stop working. We have all had our little moments of panic while teaching remotely. I have a small house and at times my wife, who also teaches, and I have had to out-compete with each other to be heard, while my sons have been on calls with their university lecturers next door! We have had to deal with any number of issues, while our normal routine has been disturbed and learning new things, all at the same time!

I sense that many teachers feel they have done a poor job either because they are comparing remote teaching with classroom teaching, or because they they are trying to stretch the boundaries of what online platforms can do too far. A great deal of teacher angst seems to revolve around the limitations of online assessment. How can you make sure the students all do the test at the same time, that they don’t cheat, that it’s not the parents doing the work? These are all valid concerns, but my advice would be to set aside all notions of doing exactly what you do in the classroom in the online space. Rather look at what the online platform allows, and focus on building learning experiences around the strengths of online platforms. Rigorous assessment is not a strength of the online space, so why stress so much about trying to replicate it online? Rather ask yourself if you really need so many tests or exams. Maybe a project submitted on trust that it is the student’s work is more than sufficient. If you set more collaborative projects and mentor students in online meetings you will have a good idea of what each student has done. Maybe online tests are not necessary.

Most of all, I believe that if teachers trust their own instincts, stop measuring themselves against some imaginary yardstick, and do what they can, they will be alright! More than alright!

 

 

Does The Great Onlining Offer Opportunities to move from Teaching Content to Teaching Thinking?

One often hears the view expressed that one of the benefits of the enforced move to teaching online is that it will entail a move away from teaching content, and open up opportunities for a new vision of teaching that foregrounds students’ problem-solving skills. One of the many educational trends that have been rained down on teachers like the ten plaques of Egypt, is the idea that content is outdated, and that what counts in the Twenty First Century is Problem-Solving or Thinking Skills. It is an idea that has become all pervasive. At every Educational Technology Conference I’ve ever attended, at some stage a keynote speaker will express this point of view. Especially if they come from industry. “What we need is not people with paper qualifications,” they say, “it is people who can think and problem-solve!”

But can thinking be distilled from all context and taught as something discrete? Knowledge is changing so fast, the argument goes, that it will become outdated as soon as you teach it, and therefore what we need to be doing is teaching students to think, rather than teaching them content. This idea is seductive because of course it appeals to a kernel of truth. Knowledge is changing really fast. What I learned about the structure of the atom in high school is certainly not what is taught today! And yet the notion that somehow education’s core business has suddenly changed is somewhat ludicrous. Did teachers not teach students how to think pre-millenium? What does thinking that is separated from content look like, anyway?

My own career as a teacher has been affected by this movement towards explicit teaching of thinking. I teach a class called Thinking Skills. In this class we use problem-based approaches together with introducing the Harvard Visible Thinking Routines and cognitive tools such as the De Bono Thinking Hats, David Hyerle’s Thinking Maps and Costa and Kallick’s Habits of Mind. These thinking tools and strategies are embedded in every school subject, but the purpose of the Thinking Skills class we do in our grades 8-10 is to give importance to thinking itself, and to provide a platform for explicit teaching of the range of cognitive tools we use across the school. I am in two minds about how effective this is as an approach. Thinking, after all, is always about something. Thinking divorced of content makes no sense, and thinking always has a context. How you think as an historian, a musician or as a scientist is different. Learning to think in one context surely confers benefit, and surely fuels habits and dispositions which are transferable to other contexts. But how this happens is not easy to pin down, or easy to demonstrate. Nor is it automatic. We assume that it happens, but we cannot definitively demonstrate that it does. We hope that an awareness of different cognitive tools, and familiarity with using different thinking strategies will improve our students’ thinking skills. We try to teach them to notice when they need to reach into their cognitive tool kits, and develop their capacity to reflect on their own thinking, and to become better at choosing appropriate cognitive strategies. But all the documentation in the world does not add up to proof that this is effective. And as much as I think the Thinking class I teach is useful, I do not believe it supplants Maths or English classes in any way. Students still need to learn to think like a mathematician, or think like an artist!

There is some anecdotal evidence of course, that our approach to cognitive education does work. Visitors to the school express amazement at how well our students engage with problem-solving tasks. As encouraging as this feedback is, it does not amount to proof. The benefit of an explicit Thinking course is not really about improving performance in other subjects, the aim is to improve the ability to think in any context. I think what students enjoy about it is that they get to think about real-world problems without the pressure of assessment or swotting. I think it is also important in that it signals that what the school values is thinking, and the development of thinking dispositions. I believe that this approach has benefits because solving problems helps improve the ability to solve problems. Not least it builds confidence in the ability to solve problems. As anyone who has ever tackled problems like crossword puzzles, for example, will know, once you start to understand how the puzzles are set, and develop strategies for solving the clues, the easier it becomes to work through the clues. And even a difficult seven across will be tackled with a level of confidence that it can be solved given enough time. The ability to solve crosswords does not necessarily make one a better problem-solver in another context, such as Chess problems. One can be quite good at solving one type of problem, but quite bad at another. In our class we try to tackle different types of problems and help students develop strategies and tools for approaching problems. The hope is that each student will develop a sizable toolkit of cognitive tools, and an awareness of which tools are good in different situations.

So, whilst I believe that teaching Thinking has value, I do not believe it can be done divorced from the curriculum. At my school the explicit teaching of thinking is limited, we wish it to be embedded in our curriculum, rather than becoming the focus of the curriculum. It would be lovely to believe that the move online would allow teachers to throw off the yoke of curricula and standardized testing and teach students to think, to problem-solve. Sadly I do not think that it does. It is rather naive, to believe that students, simply by doing an online project rather than more formal classes, will develop thinking skills miraculously. Thinking skills need to be carefully scaffolded and nurtured. Even in a Thinking class tasks are contextualised and we seek to draw students’ attention to opportunities for transferring their skills across the curriculum. As any teacher who has ever set an open-ended project will know, the success of the project depends on how carefully it was scaffolded and supported. Remote learning will not suddenly unlock hidden abilities in our students. If we want those abilities to emerge we need to put in the pedagogical work to develop them. And remote teaching is hard, it is hard enough teaching the regular curriculum.

Doing the kind of work needed to foster advanced thinking skills over Zoom?

I don’t think so.

 

Why Online Teaching is so Taxing!

Teachers who have been doing remote teaching over the last month or so report complete exhaustion. Not just because they needed to take time to re-design their curricula for remote platforms. Not just because they needed to record videos or re-purpose learning resources for an online platform. Not just because online assessment is a nightmare. But chiefly because of the exhaustion involved in conducting online lessons. And all this at a time when many teachers have to look after their own children and families, when they themselves are experiencing all the stress that we are all going through at this time.

So, why is online teaching itself so taxing? In the classroom you see your class for a set period of time, and you do what you can during the time you have with the class. Your energy goes into being present for your students, either in how you present content, or how you guide and shape their understanding of that content. You have to read the faces in front of you, notice who is beginning to goof off, who wants to ask a question, but needs encouragement, who has a puzzled look on their face, or who is clearly engaged in something else and needs re-directing. From the nods of understanding, or the expressions of sudden realization, you know when you can go on, or whether you need to try explaining something in a different way. You can judge whether or how long to wait after asking a question, or whether to rephrase it better. Face to face interactions require a great deal of work, and it can be exhausting in itself. Teachers suffer a great deal of cognitive overload. You have to keep not only the content you are teaching in mind, but also all the questions around how best to teach it. It is exhausting! But bells ring, and the day has an end. As exhausting as ordinary teaching may be, the week ends, and eventually the term ends. I have always thought that the length of a term is designed precisely to wring the most work out of students and teachers without completely destroying them in the process.

But online work demands a different level of presence. To be digitally present is to be available long beyond any scheduled lesson, worrying about those who never showed up to any online check-in, or who have missed a submission deadline. Teachers online don’t receive absence notes from parents explaining that a student is down with something, or will be away for a few days, but will catch up the work. Often all we have online is a silence that begins to prey on the mind. As emails expressing concern over a student missing in action go unanswered and days become weeks, the mind begins to invent all sorts of explanations, fears of all sorts and grieving for lost time and contact. Teachers are concerned about reaching all their students. But during a lock-down, if emails go unanswered, this concern can become all consuming!

Furthermore, students check-in at all hours of the day and night, with queries and concerns. I had one student ask a question at 2 am in the morning. There is far less of a switch-off point. If you are expecting students to work asynchronously, you more or less have to expect to maintain an asynchronous digital presence yourself. You may have announced that you will be keeping office hours, but if students have been missing in action, when they do pop up at an ungodly hour, it is hard not to respond immediately.

When you are teaching synchronously, reading the room is not easy, either. All the usual cues are largely missing. Facial expression and body language are harder to read, and a great deal more effort needs to go into understanding who wants, or needs to speak. Even managing conversations is more difficult with the false starts and technical glitches that bedevil meetings on Zoom, or whatever platform you are using. As someone who finds it difficult enough to read social cues under normal circumstances, learning how to do it all over again online is a nightmare!

All of these things make teaching remotely particularly taxing intellectually and emotionally. The cognitive load is much higher than in face to face teaching. It seems to me that the only way to cope with this added stress is firstly to recognise it, and secondly to begin to re-align our expectations and curriculum planning to accommodate this new reality. Most syllabi stress a relentless loading of content, breadth not depth has always been the name of the game. School administrators, districts and examination boards need to reassure teachers that the same coverage of content will not be expected during this period. Educational aims can still be met, but expectations around curriculum content needs revision. Is there really a need to study 18 set poems, perhaps covering 12 meets the same aims!? Perhaps one major piece of writing can be assessed rather than three? Perhaps some units of study can be left out, and more time spent on the remaining units?

We all need to go easier on ourselves, or teachers will be facing major burnout by the end of the school year!

 

 

The Importance of Teaching Media Creation Skills

There is an abiding myth that kids today are born digital natives. Anyone who has ever taught ICTs in any form will know that this is simply not the case. Digital skills very much have to be taught! Kay and Goldberg have described computers as a metamedium, a medium, in other words used in the creation of other media. As such it would seem axiomatic that computing should be taught to everyone. And yet this is far from the case. All over the world computing has to fight for a space in the curriculum. No doubt much of this contention stems from the expense of acquiring computing resources, and from securing adequately trained teachers. The great onlining of education has shown us the importance of computers as a medium of communication, but as a medium of creativity it can scarcely be less important. I have taught PhotoShop, Flash and Dreamweaver for many years, often in the context of web design, or game creation. I find that it is an excellent way to segue into coding for middle school students. Computers can be used to create all manner of digital content, but games are particularly alluring for students.

In this blog post I would like to walk through my thoughts about how the nature of remote teaching will have to change my curriculum and instructional design. I would like to cover the same basic concepts: namely photo-editing and game design introducing elementary programming procedures.

Starting with image manipulation in PhotoShop one can teach not only photo-editing skills, but also copyright issues. I usually teach students to use the Creative Commons Search Engine to find suitable images to use that are copyright free. There are many plarforms available for games creation. Up until last year I used Flash, despite the increasing difficulties as the platform becomes less and less supported. I have been considering using Scratch instead, but the seamless integration inside websites and the ability to run in a browser still made Flash a viable choice. My school had an Adobe licence, so justifying that expense was also a concern. I usually teach students how to create buttons in flash and use interactive behaviours. This requires starting to use ActionScript. We use existing scripts and learn how to tweak them. After a few tutorials I get the students to design their own games and then help them get it to work. The graphic shows one of the games created by students which depended upon drag and drop behaviours to work.

So, here’s my problem. I am due to start teaching this unit in May with my grade 8 class, and yet we are likely to be on lockdown, and I am wondering if it is a unit of work I can teach remotely. Certainly not with PhotoShop and Flash, as students are unlikely to have the Adobe Suite. But apart from the problem around access to the software and the necessary data or devices – most of my students use iPads if they do not have a laptop. This presents a number of problems. Firstly, I will be really sad not to have the linkage between image editing and games creation. Realizing that everything about remote teaching and learning takes longer, I will have to concentrate on the game design alone. For remote teaching an online Photo editor such as Photopea appears to work well. The crucial skill is removing a background and saving as a gif with transparency. I am not sure that I will be able to adequately support students through photo-editing online, and the games design, however. So I will have to play this aspect by ear.

In my experience getting students to the point where they can design their own games requires a good few basic tutorials teaching base skills, and then a great deal of scaffolding the process of discovery, especially where it requires coding beyond my own capacity! Tackling this online presents problems. It is difficult to help students debug their code when you can’t see their screen, or where you have to reconstruct it to test it on your own screen! It also needs to be something that can be done on an iPad if a student does not have access to a laptop or pc. It should also not involve any downloading of software or purchase of an app.

So I have decided to use Scratch on the MIT platform which works inside a browser, and apparently works fairly well on an iPad and allows students to use a free account. Students can also share their projects with others. This is crucial because I would like students to work in small groups. I usually get students to do a few tutorials online and then set the project as a group project. Working with groups might prove tricky during remote teaching and learning, but might also help overcome some of the isolation of working from home.

To test the versatility of the platform I created a quick pong game and a tamigotchi game, and it seems to me that Scratch works very well at enabling game creation. The platform also has tutorials which allow for students to work on their own, and develop capacity beyond any tutorials and tasks I create for the class. It also has an extension for the BBC micro:bit controller, which I use for robotics. I have not been able to explore this, but it seems to me that it creates some potential tie-ins, which is important. I also use the MIT platform for mobile app design with my grade 9s, so using Scratch on the MIT platform to introduce coding seems a good fit all round.

To my mind the key to instructional design in a case like this is to have a programme in mind which can be cut short, or can be extended, depending upon the time available and the capacity of the students. In this case the vagaries of remote teaching becomes a particular concern. I will write a follow up post after completing the unit.

Bibliography

A. Kay and A. Goldberg, “Personal dynamic media,” Computer, 1977, pp. 31-41.