Online lesson planning
Why do some teachers find remote teaching so difficult?
Professional inquiry: Talking to colleagues who are Heads of School it is clear that some teachers are more easily rising to the challenges posed by remote teaching than others. So what makes a good (online) lesson?
With school campuses closed even the most experienced teachers are having to learn new skills as they design virtual lessons. It is extremely challenging especially for teachers who are finding that they cannot just replicate what they would do in a physical classroom, We look at key professional lessons we are learning at Lessons we are learning about teaching and learning online.
This is an opportunity to rethink what makes a lesson effective. It is an opportunity to pair back, and only keep hold of the things which make lessons effective and apply them to both the virtual classroom and the physical classroom. On this page I argue that the ingredients of an effective online lesson are the same as a face-to-face lesson, but remote learning requires teachers to be exquisite at executing these essentials.
Summary: Ingredients of effective (online) lessons
- Connect: with learning goals, clear purpose and identify each students' starting points.
- Personalise: learning is built on what you know about students through diagnostic data and their interests.
- Engage: through sensory hooks and appropriate pace and challenge.
- Teach less: focus on depth and mastery rather than breadth of coverage.
- Formative: Reflection and self-assessment is built in.
Start with the WHY?
Re-examine your curriculum content - every lesson needs to connect with students. Don't allow students (and teachers!) to get lost in technology.
- Connect with learning goals - make it clear what success looks like and how students are going to achieve it and be assessed. It's important that you share the 'big picture' with them so they understand the direction of travel, and it makes sense to them.
- Connect with purpose - make it clear why students need to achieve the learning goals and why the learning will be useful to them. What's the benefit of them learning this? It is important that students can see the purpose in order to be engaged.
- Connect with students' starting points - what prior knowledge (what do I already know?) and skills do the students already have and which of their interests does the learning build on?
Know each student
- Establish high expectations for all and structure lessons on how students can achieve mastery of the learning. Only move on once all students have mastered the content.
- Use diagnostic tools such as pre-tests and low-stakes multiple choice quizzes to identify gaps in student learning. Provide targeted intervention to fill the gaps.
- Provide a choice of how students can demonstrate their learning (e.g. graphics, recordings, written work).
Find the hook
Don't be tempted to use ed tech 'gimmicks' because they are fun. Instead, select your hook carefully. Everything has to be so much clearer in online learning.
- Use hooks that grab students' attention from the start and makes what is to be learnt interesting and relevant: thought provocative questions, intriguing problems.
- Structure curriculum content around intriguing inquiries. Frame the key messages around a problem to be solved or an inquiry to be investigated and answered.
- Make curriculum content tangible (relevant to life), satisfying (an inquiry they want to find the answer to) and clear (always focused on the key take-away messages).
Focus on mastery not coverage
This is very relevant to online learning where everything takes so much more time. So it is really important to streamline the curriculum down to the really important stuff.
- Focus on the big ideas and questions (inquiries) around which the content is framed. Think very carefully about what the essential content is. Cover less curriculum content but focus on the main ideas in depth to develop understanding. What kinds of knowledge, skill and routines are prerequisites for a successful student outcome? What kinds of tasks and activities will help students develop and deepen their understanding of key ideas?
- Repeat key learning so it goes into students' long-term memories. Use retrieval exercises to check.
- TEACH students how to transfer what they have learnt by showing how ideas are connected and can be used. Provide multiple examples. Ask them to practice making connections with what they learn and provide personal feedback.
Build metacognitive skills
- Provide opportunities for students to rethink and reflect on what they have learnt. Do not adopt a complete linear approach to content - i,.e. learn it once, test it and move on to the next content.
- Build in opportunities for self-assessment: students taking stock of what they have grasped and where they feel they have not fully understood.
- Use students' 'burning questions' (what they have nmot fully understood) as a starting point for next piece of learning.
Natalie Wexler has written a helpful article providing 7 tips to help make remote learning effective. Onder Sit, IB DP Coordinator at Zafar College, Ankara, Turkey, has created this very helpful infographic based on natalie's ideas.
I like this quick lesson plan reminder from Colegio Gran Bretana, Bogota, Colombia:
Rebecca Winthrop has written a helpful article on 5 traps that will kill online learning (and strategies to avoid them), 1 May 2020. The 5 traps are:
The Content Trap: Learning content is one small fraction of an effective learning experience
Don’t just upload scanned textbooks and worksheets and think it’s going to be a good learning experience. To avoid the content trap, consider all of the critical elements of learning and think about how to design them for a virtual space. For example, what do virtual conversations look like, or virtual art projects?- The One-Size-Fits-All Trap: Why expect all students to learn in the same way? Online learning can really personalize learning in a way that can be more challenging in the classroom. There are a lot of digital tools to facilitate this.
The Isolation Trap: In a physical classroom a student can work together as well as have mentoring from adults. However, the trap is to make teaching and learning a one-way process when it goes online.
There are many online tools that can facilitate collaboration without some of the challenges, like noise. You can collaborate with students all over the world as well as incorporate experts into the learning space (invite a book author, engineer or a legislator to engage with your students directly).The Teaching Transfer Trap: just because a teacher is good in the classroom does not mean they are a good teacher online.
For example, if you are trying to assess student learning online, a teacher who does not have experience teaching online might revert to using multiple choice tests or uploading worksheets. In the virtual classroom, there are far more options for assessing learning than there are in the traditional classroom, but no teacher is born knowing how to do this. Teachers need support to learn skills like authentic online assessment.The Learning-is-Serious Trap: In a physical classroom teachers can make learning interesting and fun. New ways have to be found when teaching online.