Reflections on Online Teaching

Like many of us I’m sure that your strategy for online learning has changed numerous times over the past 5 weeks. I wanted to take this time to reflect on how my teaching has evolved throughout this time and two major misconceptions I realised I had with regards to distance learning.

Everything takes longer than in the classroom.

It seems obvious but I committed two educational cardinal sins here:

1. I fell into the trap of thinking topics were easy just because I knew them (I am extremely ashamed of this one, especially as it is a common error I have seen many times and promised myself I would never commit).

I found many students were becoming disengaged as initially I was going through topics too quickly, worried about getting through content, and they were not really grasping the concepts underpinning the science. This was overcome with a more relaxed pace, Zoom meetings where we discuss topics more, breakout rooms for mini tasks, introducing topics, giving students easier tasks that increased gradually to more complex ones and extension topics for more gifted students to move on with if they finished tasks ahead of schedule.

We used GoFormative before Covid-19 came along to assess our students for spot checks but this now forms an integral part of our assessment. Within the webpage you can create quizzes (like many other sites), which are self marking so then these can be used to target areas/questions students find difficult. I try to make a formative for most lessons and make sure we go through the questions showing my classes actual answers from students (there is the option to remove names to ensure no one feels embarrassed when looking at the answers).

Downside at the moment is that there may be a bit of “GoFormative fatigue” but I am reluctant to change as students seem to like the system and are used to using the program now, however I am open to change if anyone recommends any others (currently investigating Edupuzzle, Socrative)

2. As a science teacher I love practical work. Introducing topics and gaining understanding by actually carrying out experiments and collecting data, this is what learning is all about!

However, without those experiments you gain a lot of time so we can get through more content...or can you?

I underestimated the value of practical work. Students gain a huge amount of knowledge by observing and interacting with experiments, a slight change to an angle of a slope and now their car is travelling at a greater velocity. I assumed this loss of practical work could be replaced with theory and we could move onto practising exam questions and other exciting tasks. Not the case, I am spending more time explaining concepts to students in multiple ways to help their understanding. Luckily there are a number of excellent simulations for many experiments (PhET, The Physics Aviary, eChalk, thinkIB and so on) that can generate perfect data for many practicals we would carry out in the lab. However these often may not be as easy to use so need some time and explanations (and quite frankly playing around with) to get to grips with. They also produce data that is often too perfect so imperfections have to be manufactured or in often I will generate flawed data sets for students to analyse after carrying out the simulation.

The classroom is a social environment

No matter how much of a disciplinarian you are, students interact with you and with each other in the classroom and this is an equally important part of education as calculating resistance in parallel circuits.

I was planning on having very few Zoom meetings per week, minimise screen time by setting work at the beginning and then collecting, assessing and finally going through the work in later Zoom meetings. I now have a Zoom meeting for most classes, admittedly some may only be 10-20 mins but I try to build in social time into these classes. Group work assigned randomly and also in friendship groups, breakout rooms, individual work with a Zoom meeting running so students can pop in and out to ask questions and discussions. Whether it be about energy transfers, the Zoom animals meme, how much homework students are being set, single slit diffraction and the sneaky questions IB sets you about it, which member of their family is annoying them the most, how tasty a nice ceviche would be...

I think we will all agree that this is probably the part of our job we miss the most, the daily interaction (both positive and negative) with our students. I read somewhere that humans generally think they are very good at reading faces but we are actually pretty poor at it. Well its even harder via a camera or if a student doesn’t have their camera working due to internet connection or because you’re sharing your screen and can’t see people directly.

These are just two misconceptions I have actively been working on over this quarantine period, but there are more. Hopefully we won’t be in quarantine much longer for me to work on the others.

See you all soon.

Luke