Online Discussion: Making it a Conversation

In my last post, I shared some thoughts on why I think asynchronous discussions are a power tool for online teaching. Today, I want to address the biggest complaint I hear from instructors about online discussions: the fact that they usually aren't "discussions." What I mean is, often times instructors default to the "post once, respond twice" formula that turns a rich learning opportunity into a formulaic task for students to check off of their to-do list. So, how can we shift this task-oriented mindset toward conversation?

I want to be clear: students need a level of buy-in to make this work. In future posts, I'll share some ideas I've found successful related to how we can set a foundation for this kind of learning community. But the things I'm going to suggest in this post are also important parts of helping students develop as a community of learners. Let's first think about the prompt, and then some ideas for getting students to respond to each other, then a bit about right-sizing the groups for discussion, and finally some encouragement about how to move the discussion towards real conversation.

Photo by Christin Hume via Unsplash

Start off with a strong prompt

As I suggested in my last post, starting with an engaging hook is a key part of starting a real discussion. Giving students something provocative to read/watch/create before the discussion can help. So can a compelling prompt. And I think one of the best strategies is to ask a divergent question. A divergent question is one with multiple "right" answers, one that demands evidence and justification, one that demands more than just looking up a response in their text or via Google. This isn't foolproof, of course, but if you start with something students will find personally relevant and meaningful you're much more likely to have a compelling start to the discussion.

I have a few other ideas listed in my previous post that might be worth considering as well as you're giving students the nudge for how to begin the discussion.

Teach students how to respond

I think there are many things we instructors just assume students will be able to do. Sometimes we assume that students already have the background knowledge and skills needed to do the work we are asking them to do. This can be a tricky dance! We don't want to assume too much...but we also don't want to assume too little, that students are incapable of figuring things out on their own. That said, giving students a framework to use, and some explanation of your expectations can bring clarity for how a true discussion works. 

Thus, I want to suggest that taking time to teach students how to respond to each other makes all the difference in getting a real discussion to unfold. Depending on the prompt you use, there are probably a variety of different kinds of appropriate responses. If you want a general purpose strategy for how students can respond to make it a real discussion, consider the "FY3" strategy. I first encountered this strategy years ago in a newsletter from ASCD. I used FY3 in my face-to-face Methods of Teaching Science course, and somewhere along the way I realized it might be an excellent approach for strengthening online discussions. I adapted it slightly from the original newsletter article, and I have regularly made use of FY3 for almost every online course I've taught in the past five years. In my experience, once students learn to use this approach, the quality of discussions improves dramatically.

Here's how I explain FY3 to my students:

As you respond to your classmates, I encourage you to use the "FY3" approach for making this discussion a true discussion. In response to a classmate's post you might:

• Amplify - Give a further example to support the point being made and move the conversation forward.
• Clarify - Ask a probing question to ensure you clearly understand the point being made.
• Diversify - Respectfully offer an alternative perspective to enrich the conversation.

The hope is that this approach pushes students to get beyond the basic, "Great post! I agree!" sort of response that drives me bonkers. And, in my experience, most students get the hang of moving the discussion forward when I encourage them to use FY3 in their responses. Is this a bombproof, can't-miss strategy? No...but I would encourage you to give it a whirl in your own online discussions. I think you'll find it a promising practice!

Get with the group

Just a side note here, about the size of the group. There are times when it makes the most sense to have a whole-class discussion. There are other times when it makes more sense to arrange your students into smaller groups for the discussion. 

I think of whole-class discussions more like a cocktail party--you move through the room, catching snippets of conversation, and not getting too deeply involved with hearing from everyone in the room. This has its benefits! Sometimes I use this approach when I have a group of 20ish students, and I want them to all tell a bit about themselves, or share a story, or participate in some other whole-class learning experience. But it's hard to have a deep conversation in a cocktail party...

I like to use smaller groups for deeper conversations in online discussions. Most learning management systems (LMSs) have a feature that allow you to separate your class into smaller groups for discussions. In my experience, placing students into groups of 4-6 seems to make it more likely that they will engage deeply in conversation. The downside to this approach is that they only engage with a handful of their classmates this way, but the upside is the richness of the discussion, so I think overall this is a benefit.

When I'm using smaller discussion groups, I usually make the groups. Early in the course they might be randomly assigned, but as the course unfolds I usually rearrange the groups and I might make them more intentionally devised. I like the idea of getting students into several small groups with different classmates so they can engage with more of their colleagues throughout the course. I do usually keep discussion groups together for several weeks though. My hope is that this helps to further develop the relationships and the trust between the members of a group, so they start to have deeper conversations over time.

Shift towards real conversation

Using the "post once, respond twice" formula sometimes feels like the only way to ensure students will respond to a discussion prompt. (I've been there too!) But something I've been trying in the online courses I teach is to trust my students. I know, I know...maybe you feel like you've extended trust to your students before and been burned when they betrayed your trust. (I've been there too.) I know that my reaction when I've extended trust and had it broken is to become more protectionist...and maybe even more punitive (ugh.) toward students when this happens. And sometimes this feeling carries through beyond just one class into other courses, or other semesters. If you've been in this spot, I feel you. It stinks.

But I want to challenge you to try extending some trust to your students in what I hope is a low-risk way. If you're going to try some of the other things I'm suggesting, consider this a progression, okay? Start by using strong prompts to get the discussion rolling. Then maybe incorporate FY3 to encourage better responses to their classmates' posts. And then, once you have this cooking, maybe take a further step, and try to encourage students to take more ownership of the discussion, and form a more substantial learning community.

Here's how I have explained this to my students:

You've probably figured me out by now: I place a high value on true conversation and collaboration. So rather than prescribe a certain number of posts for this discussion, I will just say this: make it a conversation, and be an active participant! Think about how a conversation unfolds naturally: one person says something, someone else responds, a third person adds on, another asks a question...there isn't a particular formula to be followed, but people hear each other, and respond to the ideas being shared. That's what I'm hoping you'll practice in this discussion.

Ideally, I'd love to see you collectively--as a group--respond to the prompts below, but that doesn't mean each of you must start new threads for each prompt. You might start a new thread. You might respond to someone else by agreeing--or disagreeing! (kindly)--with their thoughts. You might raise questions, or answer questions. Carry the conversation forward, interact, and learn from each other through the discourse. 

I hope the prompts below will get some conversation started, but if you have other burning questions, or if you make different kinds of connections, or if you just want to put your own spin on things, please feel free to do so. That's the joy of being an authentic learner! :-)

I should note that I don't do this for the first few weeks of the course. I use a more structured post-and-respond approach that incorporates FY3. But by a few weeks in, if I can see that a learning community is starting to develop, I trust my students to try this approach. I figure that I can always go back to a more structured approach for future discussions if this approach falls flat. That said, I cannot remember a time that this approach did not work, once we had done a little work to learn how to respond to each other. I think that's the key: taking our time, and me being intentional about teaching students how to engage in an online discussion.

I hope that the ideas in this post spark you to incorporate more online discussions in your distance teaching practice! If you have other ideas and strategies, or if you have questions in response, please leave a comment below.

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(This post is part of a series offering tips on distance teaching. You can read more about this project here: Distance Teaching Tips. You can also read all of the posts in this series here: Distance Teaching Tips Series.)

Online Discussions: the Power Tool for Online Teaching

When teaching online, one of my go-to strategies is using asynchronous discussion forums to get students to share their thinking. I know that discussion forums can get a bad rap--from students and instructors alike--but like most tools in the teaching toolbox, how you use the strategy really matters!

You might be surprised then, to hear that I think of discussion forums as a power tool for teaching online, since they don't always get a lot of love. So if you'll indulge me, here are a few thoughts on why online discussions might be a key part of teaching at a distance.

What I like about online discussion forums is that they can provide a shared space for developing ideas. This does not always happen, of course. And it needs to be planned intentionally if we want this to take place! But there are a few real benefits of an online discussion that I think can make it superior to a face-to-face discussion, even though it is definitely different than a face-to-face conversation:

• In asynchronous discussions (meaning not "live, everyone-logged-in-at-the-same-time" discussions, but rather "login when it works for you" discussions") students have time to think about their responses before sharing their ideas. For some students, this thought-time is essential! And I think most of us have been in a discussion in a face-to-face setting where the conversation is dominated by just a few quick-thinking folks who speak up a lot. 
• Asynchronous discussions let me see what all of my students are thinking. In a face-to-face discussion, we might hear from 5 or 6 voices, but it's unlikely that everyone in the group will speak up, unless we put some sort of incentive in place to nudge reticent speakers into sharing.
• Discussions in an asynchronous setting gives more opportunities for students to respond to each other as well. Perhaps this is just in my own teaching practice, but "discussions" in my face-to-face courses actually function more like recitation: I ask a question, as student responds, I comment in response, another student speaks up, etc. It's more like a ping-pong match between me and the whole class, with speech going back and forth between us. In an asynchronous online discussion, students seem more likely to actually respond to each other, rather than just responding to me. (Certainly, this might just be about the way I tend to interact with students in a face-to-face environment, but I wonder how many other instructors might also find this to be true?)

Where to have your online discussion? There are several possibilities:

• If your school has a learning management system (LMS), I can almost guarantee that it has a discussion tool as part of that software platform. I've used many LMSs over the years, and Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle, Desire2Learn, Angel, and Sakai at least all have a discussion feature. (Some are certainly easier to use than others!)
• Microsoft Teams and Slack both use channels to have dedicated conversations. Either of these tools could be used to create an online discussion.
• I recently heard from a colleague who uses Discord to host class discussions. While Discord is primarily thought of as a place for gamers to chat, it definitely has the functionality to make this work!
• I know of teachers who have their students create blogs, and they use the commenting feature on the blogs to respond to each other, so this might also be a possibility.

The key I've found in making online discussions work well is hooking students' thinking with an engaging prompt--something that they will really want to talk about. Here are a few strategies I've used to hook their attention, with explanations of why I use that approach:

• "We watched the video about ____ to learn more about this concept. Tell us a story: where have you seen ____ in your own life?" (Have students make a personal connection with key concepts they are learning about!)
• "Before engaging in this discussion, be sure to read chapter 3 in our textbook. In this chapter, there are three things I really disagree with! What do you think they might be?" (Get them engaged in looking deeply at the text, and proposing their ideas!)
• "What was the biggest surprise to you in today's lesson? Why did you find that surprising?" (Normalizing "wonder" as a response to lessons is often an effective strategy...and asking "why did you think so?" questions in response pushes them to justify their thinking.)
• "Who else should read the article we read? How would it benefit them?" (Get them thinking bigger than themselves, and challenge them to carry their learning forward.)
• "Write a ridiculous poem to summarize what you learned from this lesson. A haiku, a limerick, a simple rhyme, and acrostic...choose a format that you like, and share your take aways." (Creating something in response is often a good strategy to give them another chance to think through the main ideas of the lesson...and adding a ridiculous twist sometimes disarms students.)
• "Draw a doodle that illustrates your thinking in response to this lesson. Snap a pic, upload it, and write a brief explanation (~150 words) of your doodle." (Again, a creative response, but one that gets them away from the computer for at least part of their learning activities, which I think is a good thing in an online learning environment.)

Image by Volodymyr Hryshchenko via Unsplash

Do you have great strategies you've used to prompt students to discuss? If so, please share it with us by leaving a comment below!

The biggest critique I have heard from my fellow instructors is that students don't really respond to each other; they don't really discuss things in the so-called "discussion." That is a real concern! And when a student writes a thoughtful articulation of their thinking, and the only response they get from a classmate is "I agree," well, that's just disheartening as an instructor. What to do about this?  In my next post, I'll share more ideas about how I get students to really start interacting in an online discussion.

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(This post is part of a series offering tips on distance teaching. You can read more about this project here: Distance Teaching Tips. You can also read all of the posts in this series here: Distance Teaching Tips Series.)

Distance Teaching Tips

I've been thinking a lot about what I have to offer my fellow educators in this season where so many of us are teaching at a distance. I like teaching online, and I feel like I've been equipped for this work--one of my areas of focus in my graduate work was online teaching and learning, after all. But the downside is, I know the things I know, and I know some of the things I don't know, but there are also the "unknown unknowns"--things I don't even know that I don't know. And...I'd hate to be seen as overestimating my own capability (because the Dunning-Kruger Effect certainly is a real thing!) So I'm a little apprehensive about sharing "here's how to teach online" sorts of posts.

But I've also had great feedback on posts I've shared in the past, such as this one offering tips on How to Manage Teaching Online. So, in that light, I'm going to try to share a distance teaching tip every day for the month of September. These will probably be relatively short posts, with just a quick blurb of explanation and an example or two from my own online teaching practice. My hope is that these will be encouraging for fellow educators who are teaching at a distance.

A couple of caveats before I begin:

• I'll call these "promising practices" for online teaching, rather than "best practices." Some of these tips have a strong base in research over the long term. Others are tips that I've adapted into online teaching from other learning environments. 
• Most of my online teaching experience has been at the graduate or undergraduate level. It's not that these things can't also translate into a K-12 teaching environment, but let's recognize that teaching adults or young adults might be different than teaching high school, middle school, or elementary students online. 
• I believe teaching is best viewed as a craft, not an "art" or a "science." It's the sort of thing where the more you practice, the better you get. If you try one of these tips as a one-off, it might work great, or it might flop. Chances are, like most everything in teaching, the more you practice it, the more success you'll find.
• These tips are based on my experiences teaching online. Your results may vary, so take these tips as what they are: stories of things I've been doing in my own teaching practice that have worked out relatively well for me. Use at your own risk, okay?

What kinds of things will I be sharing? Well, here's a sampling of the list I came up with just now for some topics I'll likely share about:

• Tips for engaging students
• Tips for motivation
• Tips for communication
• Tips for building community
• Tips for presenting content
• Tips for assessing learning
• Tips for managing the work of teaching online

In full disclosure, part of this writing project is that I hope to get back into the habit of writing something every day, and this seems like something that is both doable for me, and will potentially provide some benefit to anyone who might be reading along as well.

And...if you have questions, or things you'd like me to weigh in on, please drop me a line by either commenting in response, or tweeting to me at @d_mulder. I hope you'll read along!

Photo by Sergey Zolkin on Unsplash

Teaching in 2020

I want to make some kind of 20/20 vision joke as I start this post, but nothing is coming to me. I am a little overwhelmed with how this school year has started.

It's year 23 for me as a teacher, and year 9 for me at Dordt. I still love this work immensely. I still am learning all the time about how to do this work. I still am my own worst critic too--in my heart of hearts, I know that I'm fulfilling my calling in what I'm doing here, and yet, I see all my errors and missteps and agonize about these.

This feels like a confessional, so I'll keep going in that vein: I think that this has been the most ambivalent beginning of a school year for me in my years of teaching to date. Don't hear this wrong: I am THRILLED to be here, and ELATED to have students on campus again! That part has been so, so wonderful. I have thoroughly enjoyed meeting up with my new students, and reconnecting with students I've taught before. I don't have any brand new courses this year, so it's a year of revising, and refining, and a little re-imagining. And it's all off to a great start, honestly.

But...

On the other hand, teaching in the Age of COVID-19 is perhaps the most demanding thing I've done since those first years of bumbling through, when I learned something new about this arcane craft every day. Teaching in a mask or face shield ain't all it's cracked up to be. Teaching in two modes simultaneously (with some students in our face-to-face classroom and some joining in via Zoom) has an incredible cognitive demand. I am so grateful that I was scheduled to teach two of my courses online this term, because I have those ones more-or-less dialed in at this point, which frees up some more of my cognitive energy to focus on reinventing how I will connect with my students in my "face-to-face" courses. (Which are now hybrid format.)

It's not that I feel like a first year teacher again...but it is definitely a feeling of "unsettled" that I don't think I've felt since that first year.

And so I am calling this an "ambivalent beginning." The elation of being able to meet up with students again that I usually feel at the beginning of every school year is being tempered by anxiety about the unknowns and the ongoing extra work of retooling my teaching on the fly. And teaching with a mask and/or face shield, or hiding behind plexiglass at the podium? This is really cramping my style!

All of that said, I'm reflecting on the lesson I taught on day one of Introduction to Education, a lesson I revised a bit from the way I've taught it in the past to accommodate having students Zooming in, and teaching with my PPE in place. But the heart of the lesson was unchanged. Lesson 1 in Intro to Ed is this: "You Teach Who You Are."

Begging the question...who am I as a teacher? 

Does the mask, and face shield, and Zoom-split cognition, and weirdness of having students sitting six feet apart in our classroom define who I am as a teacher?

Not in the least.

This is a season of struggle for me, one that I hope to not repeat anytime soon. But I'm tapping into my creativity, my resilience, my flexibility, my empathy, my professionalism, my resourcefulness, my passion--all those dispositions that I hope to be fostering in my students--and I'm going to serve my students to the best of my ability, with all the care, and compassion, and responsiveness I can muster.

Why I (Generally) Prefer Asynchronous Online Learning

It feels like the scramble is on! So many educators are planning and preparing for fall, and now that August is just around the corner, it's starting to feel "really real"--and the pressure is rising on doing things well.

In July I presented a series of webinars about different aspects of online teaching and learning, as so many schools are working to boost their teachers' skills at leveraging distance teaching techniques. I am pleased that so many folks are "hoping for the best but planning for the worst." (I'm not convinced, personally, that teaching online is "the worst," but I know what they mean when they say this.) Over 500 teachers participated in the series of webinars, which was personally gratifying for me, but more than that, so many of them expressed gratitude for the sharing of tips and techniques to boost their skills.

But as a result, I have had a fair number of people reach out to me recently to ask about synchronous vs. asynchronous online learning, and which I would recommend. Synchronous online learning would be things like having class via live web conference (like the now ubiquitous Zoom.) Asynchronous online learning would be...almost anything else, that doesn't require students to all login at the same time. Overall, I am generally in favor of asynchronous online learning as a guiding principle, using synchronous meetings on an as-needed basis to support the asynchronous learning environment.

Why is that, you might ask? A school leader from an independent school in California recently emailed me to ask the same question. Here's part of what he said:

I've noticed over the past couple weeks the majority of private schools in this area start to release plans for distance learning.  Most of these plans involve students going through their schedules virtually.  In other words, if first period is from 8:30-9:15, the kids will attend a ZOOM session or Google Meets session for 45 minutes, and then transition to period 2.  Some schools are abbreviating their schedules a bit, but still having their kids attend 4-5 hours of live instruction via their chromebooks each day.  In watching your videos, you've made a few comments about favoring asynchronous instruction and limiting synchronous instruction.  This tends to be my view as well, but I'm curious if you would be willing to spell out your reasons for this a bit more.  Curious about your thoughts on the type of schedule I outlined above as well.  Finally, if you have any good resources which delve into the synchronous/asynchronous question, I'd be interested as well.
 

Any help you could provide would be greatly appreciated.

I definitely have opinions about this! I hope that these opinions are generally grounded in research and reflect promising practices, but this is a case of "pretty-sure-most-of-the-time, but-open-to-revision-as-I-keep-learning, and somewhere-on-the-road-to-sanctification." Here is part of what I emailed back in response:

You’re right; I do generally advocate for asynchronous instruction. The reasoning for this is three-fold:

1. There is a fairly substantial (and growing) body of research that suggests that web-conference (e.g., Zoom) meetings are more psychologically taxing than face-to-face meetings, because of the extra cognitive load of trying to manage the weirdness of the
2. Planning for the majority of teaching to be via synchronous instruction demands that teachers and students have a massive amount of screentime every day, and this leads to an equity problem for some (but certainly not all) students. In the case of schools that have a 1:1 program with Chromebooks or other devices, this is less of a problem, assuming that there is robust internet access at every home. But there are quite a few schools that leave families to their own devices (literally)—which might mean students needing to share a limited number of devices. Bandwidth is an issue for many families as well. Anecdotally, we found this the hard way this past spring, as we don’t have super-fast internet access at home, and with my wife and me and both of our kids all working online at the same time we often found frustration, particularly when it came to uploading files.
3. Beyond the equity question, I’d rather have students doing a variety of different things throughout the day instead of just listening to teachers talk on Zoom. I think of this as the pedagogy question: what do we believe effective pedagogy looks like? If sit-n-get, lecture dominated instruction is the go-to strategy, replacing this with a series of live Zoom meetings makes some sense. But if we view real learning as more than information-transfer…having a variety of tools in the pedagogical toolbox is probably a better strategy. Live meetings can be part of the mix, and I would say the are valuable! But they aren’t the only strategy. I always go back to John Van Dyk’s 60% rule: “No teaching strategy should be used more than 60% of the time or it becomes ineffective.” I think this is true irrespective of whether we’re teaching in a face-to-face classroom or an online classroom.

 
Anyway, those are a few of my thoughts on this. I am glad to hear you thinking this through! It’s not easy for school leaders to have to make these decisions, for sure. And when you add to the mix the fact that most teachers have been prepared for, practiced in, and been resourced and equipped for teaching in face-to-face classrooms, the pivot to teaching in an online classroom feels all the more daunting.
 

Blessings to you as you continue to make preparations for the new year!

What do you think? Do you have strong preferences for synchronous or asynchronous online learning? Which do you prefer, and why?

Photo by cottonbro from Pexels

 

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:

So Many Thoughts: Planning for Fall

There is an old saying that "crisis doesn't create character, it reveals it."

I am not sure if this is completely true, but I've been thinking a lot about this in light of how our emergency distance teaching adventure has unfolded over the past weeks and months.

This has been an educational crisis, for sure. And it hasn't all gone well, at least in my own teaching practice. There are plenty of things that I would have loved to do over, from the kinds of assignments I gave in some situations, to the way I communicated my expectations to students, to being a little more proactive in reaching out to a few students. It all ended up well enough in each of these situations, and we made it through. I feel like I'm still kind of catching my breath after the hectic pace and uncertainty of the end of the spring semester. I suspect many educators are feeling that way.

But the fall semester is out there on the horizon, and soon enough it will be here. And as much as I wish I could take more time to rest, to regroup...I think planning for fall has to begin now.

I know many schools already have those kinds of planning sessions underway, but I'm thinking here about teachers in particular. What can we do to be best prepared for teaching this fall? Here are six things that I think educators should think about. I don't mean this list to be a prescriptive "here's what you gotta do if you're going to be teaching this fall," but more of a "here's what I'm thinking about and I hope this might help spur your thinking too." I'd love to hear your thoughts in response.