Can Learning be "Virtual?"

Over the past few weeks I've been doing a lot of consulting work with several schools who are preparing for the fall semester. I've been doing some professional development for teachers, and helping school leaders think through some pedagogical and technological decision-making as they develop multiple options for what the fall might look like for their schools.

It's interesting to see what has been common experiences for many teachers in different parts of the U.S., and what is unique to particular places as well. Overall, I could summarize the online teaching experiences of teachers with whom I have interacted as challenging, exhausting, and not entirely pleasant. (And that might be putting it all very nicely, honestly!) Many educators have found the distance teaching adventure of Spring 2020 to be demanding, to say the least!

But one comment I heard from a teacher in one of these meetings really grabbed my attention. In fact, I paused to scribble it down right when this individual said it:

How to Manage Teaching Online

In this season of isolation and shelter-in-place, many teachers have suddenly found themselves teaching at a distance. There are all kinds of technological and pedagogical challenges for this, obviously. But working from home provides another whole challenge of its own.

I had an email from one of my grad students that named this challenge pretty squarely. He reached out, knowing that I teach online a lot, and wondered how I manage teaching online. I was glad he asked! He asked several questions, which I've included below, along with some of my thinking to respond to each of them. 

I should note that while some of these are aligned to research-based best practices, a lot of this is anecdotal examples of things that I have found that work for me. Consider this a case study in managing the work of teaching online, as developed through practice, experimentation, (some) research, and a bit of the school of hard knocks too.

Image by Thomas Lefebvre via Unsplash

Teaching at a Distance: Human Connections

Today is day one of our emergency distance learning adventure.* As I'm writing this, it's about 2:30 in the afternoon. So far, so good.

I've had about half a dozen emails from students so far today, mostly just checking in to make sure they understand what is expected of them for the work this week. One shared a concern for a grandparent who is ill--not COVID-19, but a broken hip and related complications. I've had a couple of colleagues check in to see how I'm doing, which was really nice and thoughtful of them. (Last week was a crazy busy week for me, helping many folks figure out new skills and strategies for engaging with their students from a distance. Don't get me wrong; it was a good week...but I crashed on Friday night and rested well over the weekend.)

As much as I'm working on helping my students keep learning--and my colleagues too--I recognize that am learning things throughout this process as well. Here are three things I've learned already:

The Emergency Pivot to Online Teaching and Learning

So.

Here we are.

This is a fascinating time.

It seems to me, based on what I'm reading online, that most colleges and universities in the US, and many (most?) K-12 schools have either already made the decision to suspend face-to-face meetings, or will very soon.

You might think, given my field (Educational Technology) and my particular interests in that field (Online Teaching and Learning, Social Presence Theory, Technology Integration, and Social Media for Learning) that I would be cheering for this whole scenario.

Honest answer: I'm a little worried about how this is going to go.

I say this because I know how much work it takes to teach online. It's not less work in any way than teaching face-to-face. And especially at the beginning, when you're first learning how to teach online, it might very well be more work--perhaps substantially more work.

And I also recognize that I'm biased in all of this, because I actually really like teaching online, and for folks who aren't already on-board, it's going to be even more challenging.

So.

How are we going to do this, folks?

Well, this post is just a place where I figured I'd share a few initial thoughts and resources. This is just my take on things, and a few ideas I've gleaned from other places and Twitterfriends. But if you're suddenly thrust into teaching online, and find any of this helpful, please feel free to run with it, okay?

When Should We Go Digital?

I'm teaching a course this semester ambitiously entitled "Teaching and Learning with Technology." It'a actually the...eighth time I've taught it, and I have it almost dialed in where I want it at this point. (But it's always a process of refinement, you know? Always becoming, and never arriving...)

A perennial question that comes up at some point each time I teach the course is along the lines of, "When should we use technology, and when should we avoid it?"

I love it when students start asking that question. All too often, I think we assume that technology is somehow going automatically improve teaching and learning. But I think that "when should we use technology" might be the wrong question, honestly. Probably this has to do with the fact that I tend to take a very broad view of technology; sure, computers and tablets and projectors are technologies. But so are books, and pencils, and crayons, and paper, and white boards, and scented markers, and play-doh, and protractors, and juggling balls, and...well, you get the idea? We use an awful lot of different kinds of tools to support and encourage students to learn. Some are digital. Some are not.

So the way I'd like to reframe this question is, "When should we go digital?" Here too, there are probably a variety of answers, and it's not always clear.

But tonight I was in on a Twitter chat with one of my all-time favorite groups of Ttweeting teachers, #iaedchat (Iowa Educators Chat--but there's a lot of folks from beyond Iowa who join in.) Tonight's chat centered around this idea of leadership and learning in digitally-enhanced learning environments. As part of the chat, one of my long-time Twitterfriends, Devin Schoening, shared this wisdom:

I've always had 3 Qs I use when working w/teachers re dig tools. 1. Does it make something more efficient? 2. Does it enhance something you are already doing? 3. Does it making something possible that otherwise wouldn't be? Have to be able to answer at least one "yes". #iaedchat

— Devin Schoening (@dschoening) February 24, 2020

I love this! Great advice, Devin. I'm going to pass this along to my students, and hopefully we'll continue to spread this wisdom into lots more schools as well.

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

Licensure, Testing Pressures, and Appropriate Teacher Pay

Oh. My. Word.

I just read this article from Education Week: You're More Likely to Pass the Bar Than an Elementary Teacher Licensing Exam.

There is a LOT in this article worth thinking about...but this jumped out at me: "Just 46 percent of teacher candidates pass the test on their first attempt—that's lower than the first-time pass rates for doctors, nuclear engineers, and lawyers on their licensing exams. In fact, the only lower initial pass rate is the multi-part exam for certified public accountants."

Whoa.

Your Classroom: Collecting Wood? Or Longing for the Sea?

A Twitterfriend shared this one last week...

"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea." - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

— Lynn Swaner (@LynnSwaner1) October 23, 2018

I love this word picture.

And doesn't it just capture teaching? Both the good parts, as well as the struggles?

There are some lessons that just feel like collecting wood. (I've had a couple of those in my Geography class lately, to be honest.) The discussions are halting and stilted. The students are going through the motions, doing the tasks and work assigned to them. But it feels like just drumming up people to show up and do it.

And then, there are lessons that feel like longing for the sea. (Thankfully, I've had a few of these this semester too!) The joy of learning is so obvious, so real...it's like you can smell the salt air and feel the wind in your face! And when we shove off from shore, we have a real sense of the immensity of the ocean of content we can explore!

What ships are you building in your classroom? And how are you approaching the shipbuilding? Do students feel that sense of longing, wonder, and excitement for the voyage? Or are they just looking for the next log to drag toward the beach?

Image by Alberto Jaspe [CC BY-NC-SA 2.0]

Planning for Day One

This one came across my Twitterfeed today (thanks to @justintarte for sharing!)...

Image by Jennifer Gonzalez @ Cult of Pedagogy. Used with permission.

Oh. Man.

What if every teacher took this approach?

The Importance of Considering Perspective

Happy Independence Day! (To my fellow Americans, anyway...)

Actually, that's the point of this brief post...

I've been thinking a bit lately about the importance of perspective, about the way our own experiences shape the way we perceive the world, understand things, and interact with the "other."

My Twitterfriend, Doug Robertson (@TheWeirdTeacher - if you're an educator, you definitely should hang out with him online) shared this one on his Instagram earlier today:

A post shared by Doug Robertson (@theweirdteacher) on Jul 4, 2017 at 12:36pm PDT

Learning from Students

My Twitterfriend, Maggie Bolado (@mrsbolado) shared this image the other day. I love it! She gave me permission to use it for this blog post. (Thanks a bunch, Maggie!)

Image by Maggie Bolado. Used with permission.

Opinions: Evidence of Thinking

"Hey, Professor Mulder...is this an opinion question?"

A few semesters ago, I had a student taking a test raise her hand to call me over with this concern. She was in the midst of of the test, doing her best to answer carefully, and the thought must have struck her that there were multiple "correct" answers to the question I was asking.

Not every question I ask on a test is cut-and-dried. Some are. Some questions are convergent: there is clearly one correct answer. Convergent questions are usually best for assessing relatively low-level knowledge and understanding. Can the students recall the facts? Have they mastered the vocabulary? Do they have an understanding of the basic concepts? Convergent questions are good for these sort of course material. By asking a convergent question on an exam, I am verifying that my students have mastered a particular concept. And this is valuable in it's way; there are concepts that I want all of my students to learn, and a convergent question is a way of focusing in on their knowledge of a particular concept.

However, I don't think that convergent questions are always the best questions, even on a test. I want my students to provide evidence of thinking, not just rote memorization. How will they use the basic concepts they have learned? I've written before about Bloom's taxonomy of cognitive objectives. Bloom's taxonomy is one way of thinking about different levels of thinking. Here it is in a nutshell:

What Kind of Work?

So.

It's time to have a difficult conversation, teacher friends.

Here goes...

We have to think about what students are doing in your class, and why they are doing it.

Educational Goals: Learning or Accountability?

In my Timehop today was a retweet of something shared this time last year by my Twitterfriend David Hochheiser (who is a wise, funny, generous educator--I've you're a teacher on Twitter, you should be following him.)

Here was the (re)tweet that caught my eye today:

I think he's right.

Homework: Comparing to Finland

Today I had two different friends share this same video on Facebook. It is a video comparing homework assigned in Finland and homework in the U.S. I hope you'll take a minute (literally) to watch it...

If you've been following my blogging over the past year, you'll know that I have a lot of concerns about the way teachers (often) assign homework in the U.S. The short version: I think that an awful lot of the work that is assigned is "crappy homework" that doesn't actually do what teachers think it does. We can do better, and I've been reading and thinking about this as I have time. Here are a few ideas for how we could improve homework.

I really appreciate that people are becoming more broadly aware of what Finland is doing in terms of education, and I truly appreciate the calls for looking to Finland for suggestions of education reforms in the U.S. as well. Finland does many things almost opposite of what we are doing in terms of education here in the U.S.--reducing homework, increasing recess time,  revising curriculum to include more topics that connect to students interests, increasing teacher pay and requiring all teachers to earn a Masters degree.

However...

Planning for Next Fall

Saw this one just a bit ago via Twitter...

How you feel when the lesson really engages learners. pic.twitter.com/yfxfVeXw78

— Teacher Goals (@teachergoals) June 7, 2016

Can I get an "amen" from my fellow educators?

I wonder sometimes why some of my lessons really "work" while others feel more lifeless. And, yeah...sometimes they totally flop. What makes a lesson really engaging? What makes a lesson...less engaging?

Doing What Is Best, and Not What Is Easy

Saw this gem on Twitter today...

Don't be afraid to be the elephant in the room. Stand up for best practices & what is best for kids. #teachergoals pic.twitter.com/3bDIBSxg8E

— Teacher Goals (@teachergoals) May 9, 2016

I am thinking about the teachers that just graduated from our program last week. I am grateful for the chance to work with them, to have deep conversations about what good teaching is all about, to mentor them. But I am also worried for them.

Your Worksheet Isn't Doing What You Think It's Doing

A certain middle schooler I know, somewhat disgruntled about doing his homework some time ago, snapped this picture and texted it to me:

This was part of a lesson in his English book about effective and ineffective summarizing strategies. While not a reading assignment, exactly, it prompted a conversation.

His argument went something like this:

Growing Dendrites

I had never heard of the book before today, but in an email hawking textbooks, I saw one title that caught my eye: Worksheets Don't Grow Dendrites by Marcia Tate. I cannot vouch for the book at all; I have not read it, and I don't know the author.

But this title rings true for me.

Dendrites, in case you haven't studied human anatomy and physiology lately, are the branches extending from neurons (nerve cells.) Every thought that you have is the result of electrical impulses traveling from one neuron to another, and it is the dendrites that allow for all sorts of communication to happen throughout the body as they connect the neurons. Each neuron can have thousands of connections to other neurons, and all of those dendrites matter for thinking and moving the body.

Image by The Journal of Cell Biology [CC BY-NC-SA 2.0]

Why bring it up? Best we can tell, learning happens as the result of new connections between neurons. The saying (attributed to neuroscientist Donald Hebb) goes, "Neurons that fire together, wire together." And the idea here is that learning is the result of growing new neural connections, new dendrites connecting, "wiring" with other neurons. (Yes, yes, I know I'm simplifying the science here. If you'd like to learn more, you can read this page about axons, dendrites, synapses, and neurotransmitters.)

Do You Have the Guts to Ask?

Image by Alan Levine [CC BY 2.0]

After my last post, I tweeted a series of questions, challenging teachers (I suppose) to try asking their students for feedback about their teaching. Here's one:

What do you think you would hear if you surveyed your students about your teaching? #edchat #elemchat #mschat

— Dave Mulder (@d_mulder) January 14, 2016

Satisfaction in Learning

My friend, Erik Ellefsen, recently tweeted this one to me:

@d_mulder @eckertjon What if we put these in classrooms? pic.twitter.com/rg7kQEIXzg

— Erik Ellefsen (@epellefsen) January 10, 2016

Interesting thought, isn't it?

To what degree should we be concerned with student satisfaction? As an instructor in higher education, I am acutely aware of my end-of-term evaluations, and sites like Rate My Professors (I don't look at my reviews there...yikes...) that allow students to sit in the evaluator's seat and give the instructor a "grade." It's a tricky dance; it certainly feels good to have students give you accolades about your teaching...but does that mean catering to what they want, to their whims? Or does that mean challenging them with what they need...even if they don't necessarily want it? What is the mark of satisfaction in learning?