Taking e-learning back into the classroom

Last bimester, I struggled to get to grips with e-teaching. I felt confident using Google Classroom and Zoom, but I was not prepared in the slightest for the practical considerations of running an entire teaching programme from these platforms.

Classroom management at first appeared to be a huge improvement. The monitoring features are fantastic: in Google Classroom, I can see students complete work in real time using Docs, and in Zoom, I can control low-level disruption simply by muting the class. However, I quickly realised that using these features is no guarantee of engagement, and at the end of the day, we remain at the mercy of the students’ willingness to participate or not. If students turn off their cameras, disappear from the Google Doc or fail to reply to our emails, we have no recourse to the sanctions or even simply the face-to-face contact which is essential for building rapport and trust with the students. This was made more difficult in my case because I was new to the school, and barely had time to get to know my classes. It was also a challenge because we were rightly asked to be flexible with students to allow them to adapt to this new style of learning.

Even though this has been a steep learning curve, however, I feel like the tools, resources, and techniques we are learning during this process will be invaluable for teaching when things go back to normal, assuming they will. This new dispensation holds much I can learn about how to drag my teaching kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century.

In this video, Prince EA compares a telephone, a car and a classroom from now and 150 years ago. The kicker moment (at least according to the canned gasping that we hear from the crowd) comes when the classroom is revealed to be almost the same. The message: we are stuck in the past. And if some are dubious of taking lessons from the millennials, boomer Ken Robinson has made similar criticisms of educators, primarily taking aim at our tendency to stifle creativity at every turn. And although he has been criticised for being “all too willing to slag schools off as prison ships of doom and not really offering meaningful, scalable alternatives", I still think there is some truth to what he says, and really it is up to us teachers to find those alternatives.

I am excited to get back into the classroom, not so I can leave Zoom et al. behind and never have to think about any of it again, but because I am eager to see how I can adapt these newly-learned tools to a physical classroom context. I think this combination of electronic and bricks-and-mortar teaching, so-called blended learning, is ripe for the picking. It’s not that these methods were not available to me before; rather, I think I have been too afraid to experiment with them, but thanks to COVID-19, I have had no choice.

In English, I have learned many simple but effective techniques for facilitating textual analysis. There is huge scope for creating interactive or collaborative worksheets using Google Docs, allowing students to share ideas, and for me to step in and give effective formative feedback. The comment feature also allows for guided annotation of texts, and you can incorporate links to explanations of grammatical, rhetorical or literary concepts, which encourages independent learning. The use of voice recording and Screencastify allow for the students to present to the class, but in a way that can be shared and kept for future reference, and this still has utility for revision purposes once back in the classroom.

The lockdown has taught me that there are many ideas out there to enhance my teaching, and this situation has given me the confidence to experiment with and embrace them. However, it has also taught me that there are real drawbacks to virtual teaching, primarily because of its impersonal nature and the difficulty of ensuring student engagement. The sooner we get back into the classroom the better.