Apollo-13ing Teaching During a Global Pandemic

The 180-degree spin to a distance learning environment in a spectacularly swift time frame has been challenging. I am currently proceeding through trial and error. The superhuman efforts demonstrated by the entire global teaching profession under these trying circumstances have been impressive. There is a steep learning curve, online fatigue needs to be managed, and I have to rethink how to engage students. My online teaching skills are evolving and I am sort of enjoying the stimulation, collegiality and creativity of this steep professional learning curve.

My students are adapting the ways in which they learn and this has been a large adjustment for them. They have been demonstrating independence, developing their ability to self-regulate, and coping with frustrations. When I asked them for one word to describe their feelings about distance learning, replies included: “neutral”, “open-minded”, “curious”, “different”, “interesting”, “excited”, “isolated”, “relaxing”, “flexible”, and “unsure”. 

My teaching colleagues have approached this with a mix of reactions. Some are finding it fun or a new challenge. Most are quite overwhelmed, have never worked so hard, and are totally reworking everything they do. Teaching at the moment is hard. We are all trying to work out how to provide a rich experience to students without a teacher standing beside them in class. 

As I have adapted my teaching to a distance environment, three principles have framed my response: 

1.     Keep it simple. Pedagogy over tech tools.

2.     Keep the workload light and stick to the essentials.

3.     Focus on connections and relationships – that’s what matters.

There is a big difference between effective face-to-face pedagogy and effective distance learning pedagogy. Face-to-face pedagogy is mostly about synchronous learning, distance learning is often more about asynchronous learning, neatly shown in the image below.

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I know that the learning experiences I design on campus cannot be easily replicated through distance learning. I am learning to balance synchronous and asynchronous connections and this has pushed me further along the continuum of the third Cultures of Thinking in Action principle - to create a new story of learning we must change the role of the student and the teacher. As my students have suddenly had to rely less on me and more on their ability to problem-solve, their ability to direct their own learning has sharply increased, by necessity. I have quickly learned not to set myself up as the first port of call when students have a question. “See 3 Before Me”, which many teachers use in class, applies equally to the online environment. Some students have begun self-organizing and forming study groups with their friends (I didn’t have the drive or initiative to do this until I was a postgraduate student). 

In a distance-learning environment, knowing our students becomes even more important. One of my teacher colleagues commented to me that she was very grateful to have had seven weeks to build rapport with her classes before distance learning commenced. The fourth principle of Cultures of Thinking in Action states that students learn best when they feel known, valued, and respected by both the adults in the school and their peers. I am having to learn quickly how to cultivate trust in an online environment. This week we started a class video conference with a silly hat competition. I wore a Vietnamese soldier’s helmet (I’m a history teacher after all) and my students all wore different hats. One of them had a dress-up chicken head on. We laughed and connected and then got on with the lesson, with the same connecting banter we would have had in our face-to-face classroom. For our check-in next week, students will introduce us all to their pets. Building these positive relationships with students both individually and collectively keeps them engaged and connected. 

Yesterday I held a video conference for my Grade 9 class. They arrived having read an article on Turkish perspectives of the Gallipoli campaign in 1915. I used a Google doc to facilitate the Three Levels of Text protocol and the class collectively built a detailed understanding of the Turkish perspective of the war. The sixth principle of Cultures in Action states that learning and thinking are as much a collective enterprise as they are an individual endeavor. I am learning how to design online lessons around interactivity so that students can learn through active discussion and exploration. This increases their engagement and builds a learning community. As a regular formative check on student understanding, I ask them to post on the Learning Management System ‘Social Stream’ and then respond to one or two peers. The following Online Dialogue Toolkit from Project Zero is a helpful way to guide student posts and interactions on social streams and forums. Designing intentional peer-to-peer interaction takes pressure off the teacher and is good distance learning practice. 

The second principle of Cultures of Thinking in Action is that we can’t teach dispositions, we must enculturate them. At the moment we can afford to think less about covering curriculum content and preparing for high stakes tests, and take this as an incredible opportunity to focus more on the development of crucial success skills. This is an opportunity for teachers to model adaptability, flexibility, and agility, and kill off the frustrating claim that teaching is stuck in an industrial factory model. It is an amazing opportunity to set our students up with dispositions that will support their learning and thinking for the rest of their lives. What will young people remember about their time in Covid-19? It won’t be lists of facts from their school subjects. What will endure are the dispositions and habits that a good education is based on – independence, resilience, self-regulation, problem-solving, and collaboration. The enculturation of these dispositions will define how successfully educators enable students to not just cope but thrive with the isolation imposed by Covid-19.

Finally, we have pivoted so hard and so fast, it is only natural that we have fallen back on some old habits. I have noticed the language across my school quickly revert to the language of ‘work’. We set work, we collect work, we ask students about their work. When I find time to breathe I will be reminding myself to watch my language and to focus on ‘learning’ and ‘thinking’, not just ‘work’. My role as a distance educator is to keep students thinking. Distance learning should not be a passive space. Principle 5 of Cultures of Thinking in Action is that learning is a consequence of thinking. As I head forward into the uncertainty of the coming months of self-isolation, I aim to scaffold the thinking my students need so I can help them deepen their understanding and focus more on the learning than the just completing work.

Stay strong, stay safe, take care and pace yourself.

Cameron