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An Educator's Guide to Cultivating a Digital Presence with Purpose 

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An Educator's Guide to Cultivating a Digital Presence with Purpose 

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By: Dr. Vanessa Monterosa

When it comes to online engagement, the first stakeholders that come to mind are our students. What immediately follows this thought are horror stories of young adults posting content without considering the ramifications of their decisions. After seeing the many examples of cyberbullying , admission offers being rescinded, and job opportunities lost, it's no wonder there has been a plethora of resources designed to support teachers in building the digital literacy capacity of our students. However, opportunities, resources, and research focused on digital literacy for education leaders are limited.

Educators are wary of engaging online for fear of saying the wrong thing, reflecting poorly on their school community - or worse - getting fired. Across our nation's schools, we find there are very few system-level examples of district leaders incorporating robust digital literacy programs into educator guidelines or training. For example, talking about social media as an instructional opportunity remains a gray area for countless education leaders. Yet, we know our students are already in those spaces; how can we best support them if we aren't in those spaces as well? As resources continue to be developed to support students, where are the resources for the education leader?

Through my research , I identified this gap and have been working toward addressing it by designing an educator-focused professional learning experience that positions social media as a critical space for professional growth and engagement.

Having a digital presence with purpose is critical to our development as 21st-century education leaders. Some may consider this an exercise in personal branding. However, branding often connotes competition, differentiation, and establishing a loyal base. Reframing from branding to "digital presence with purpose" is to focus on contribution, community, and connection. A digital presence with purpose is more than having a static online profile with a few basic details about you as a professional; it requires being engaged, visible, and authentic.

To invite educators to explore what online engagement means for them, I designed the Digital Presence Framework , which focuses on practices of contribution through sharing knowledge, sharing evidence, and sharing resources. While the three areas that comprise the framework have many commonalities, I provide examples of how to use this framework to begin your "digital presence with purpose" journey.

Sharing Knowledge: This sphere invites educators to contribute their learnings at a training session or conference event into meaningful, relevant examples that other educators could benefit from. For example, many of us are currently attending countless webinars to understand how to navigate our remote learning circumstances. Have you gained valuable insight into how you will approach remote teaching and learning this fall? If so, this is an opportunity to share your knowledge and how you plan to implement key strategies to support students.

Sharing Resources: This sphere invites educators to connect with others in sharing artifacts, research, or other media informing their thinking and their practice. More importantly, your digital footprint begins demonstrating your growth mindset toward your identity as an education leader. Sharing resources that add value to your instructional or leadership practices demonstrates your commitment to your craft and can inspire others to do the same.

Sharing Evidence: This sphere invites educators to uplift their school community by showcasing the rigorous, relevant instructional leadership activities they support through media-rich content. Pre-pandemic examples would include video of school-wide events; pictures of culminating student projects; or sharing certificates of trainings you completed. However, in our present-day circumstances, such contributions can be screencasts of students presenting their learnings; screenshots of Zoom meetings with colleagues as you plan to work through remote teaching; or a link to a webinar you led about a topic that resonates with your leadership approach.

The Digital Presence Framework ultimately provides a space to consider your work, insights, and professional interests as your source material for your online engagement and contributions.

I originally piloted this framework in August 2018 through a training with 27 instructional coaches who had varying levels of online engagement interest. At the end of the 2018-2019 school year, nearly all pilot participants had established a digital presence with purpose and continue to leverage their digital footprint to connect with their school community, amplify their contributions to their content areas, and collectively demonstrate the #EdTech expertise that exists in the nation's second largest school district.

When debating whether or not to take the leap and establish your digital presence, remember that countless students can benefit from observing your digital leadership and engagement, especially as a Latinx educator. In addition to cultivating community, connection, and contributing your voice, you also ensure greater representation and visibility of our efforts as educators. As our nation's school leaders work toward bridging the digital divide, the participatory divide awaits to be addressed as well. Our youth need role models that are accessible and savvy when it comes to participating in our digital economy, and this starts by establishing a digital presence with purpose as a 21st education leader.
Dr. Vanessa Monterosa is a digital strategy and communications expert supporting the system-level implementation of digital citizenship across the nation's second largest school district. Her superpower rests in synthesizing research, policy, and practice to design and amplify programs grounded in praxis. As a 2014 Education Pioneers Fellow, she co-authored the district's 1st Social Media Policy for Students in addition to designing and implementing district-wide strategic instructional technology programs. Most recently, Dr. Monterosa has served as the Latinos for Education Los Angeles Regional Captain, responsible for cultivating and connecting Latinx educators across southern California via EdCentro.

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An Educator's Guide to Cultivating a Digital Presence with Purpose - Latinos for Education

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By: Dr. Vanessa Monterosa When it comes to online engagement, the first stakeholders that come to mind are our students. What immediately follows this thought are horror stories of young adults posting content without considering the ramifications of their decisions.

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7 Activities to Build Community and Positive Classroom Culture During Online Learning

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7 Activities to Build Community and Positive Classroom Culture During Online Learning

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Ideas for creating authentic connections, meaningful relationships and classroom camaraderie through the screen.

When schools transitioned to remote learning in the spring, teachers worked quickly to adapt lesson plans and curriculums for virtual classes, while also trying to maintain community and connection. This fall, not only will many educators continue that same work, but they will have the added challenge of building community with students they've never met.

To support educators who are trying to do this, we've compiled a list of strategies that can foster meaningful relationships and authentic connection in the virtual classroom. They come from the community building exercises we used during our three-day virtual New York Times Teaching Project summer institute. After several participants told us they planned to start the school year with some of these activities, we thought we should share them with all of our readers.

How are you planning to get to know your students while teaching remotely this school year? Let us know in the comments.
Please note: The activities we describe below were all conducted via , but many other video conferencing platforms have similar capabilities.

We started off our first professional development session with a series of discussion questions to get to know one another. Before the session, we selected a handful of questions from our daily student writing prompts that we thought would give participants an opportunity to learn something new about one another, while remaining low-stakes - no one had to share anything too personal.

Here's how it worked: We shared a question on the screen, then sent participants into breakout rooms with one other person to discuss. After four minutes, we brought them back to the main Zoom room. We shared the next question on our screen, then sent them back into a breakout room, this time with a different partner. We repeated the process a total of three times.

This quick game allowed for short but meaningful conversations and, at the end, participants had gotten to know three new people.

If you want to try this with students:

The teacher will need the ability to create breakout rooms and assign students to them on their digital learning platform.

We put participants in groups of two, but if you're starting the school year with this activity, consider that students might feel most comfortable talking in a group of three or four.

We gave participants four minutes to chat. Your students might need more or less time.

If we were doing this with students, we might give the class two minutes to write down some ideas in their notebooks before pairing them up to discuss.

"I have two cats." "I love eating Oreos dipped in peanut butter." "I speak two languages at home." These are the kinds of personal statements participants shared during our game of That's Me.

To set up the activity, everyone started with their cameras and microphones turned off. Then, one person came on camera and shared a statement about themselves like, "I have a sister." Anyone else who had a sister turned on his or her camera and said, "That's me!" Then, everyone turned their cameras and microphones back off and the next person made a statement.
If you want to try this with students:

Teachers need to have a remote learning classroom space that allows individual students to control their cameras and microphones.

If you're concerned that students might have trouble coming up with statements about themselves, you can provide the class with a list of possibilities from which to choose: "I like mint chocolate chip ice cream." "I have never tried surfing." "Math is my favorite subject. ..."

Instead of having students jump on the mic whenever they have a statement, you might have them use the "raise hand" icon or group chat to volunteer. Then you call on them one at a time.

This activity works best using the "gallery view" or something similar so you can see all participants.

A screenshot of some of the introductory videos Teaching Project participants made using FlipGrid.

Flipgrid is a video discussion tool that allows you to have face-to-face conversations without being in the same place at the same time. It's easy: You create a discussion topic. Share it with your class. Then, learners record and share short videos to respond.

Before our summer institute began, we asked our Teaching Project participants to create short Flipgrid videos introducing themselves, including their name, pronouns, subject area, location and the answer to a fun question of their choice:

What's your favorite show to binge-watch?

If you had to eat one thing for the rest of your life, what would it be?

What's one thing that people don't know about you by looking at you?

After they posted their own videos, we asked them to reply to at least one other person's introduction. It was a way for participants to get to know one another and make connections before the sessions even started.
If you want to try this with students:

Teachers will need to create a class Flipgrid account. It's free.

The default video length is 90 seconds, but you can adjust it to anywhere between 15 seconds and 5 minutes.

Start by posting your own video answering the questions you ask students and reply to them as they post their own.

You might be familiar with the game Human Bingo: students walk around the room and mingle until they find someone that matches the facts listed on a bingo-style sheet. The student writes down the person's name, and the first student to get five in a row - or fill out the whole board - wins.

Well, we adapted this for the virtual classroom: We used the Flipgrid introduction videos to populate a Bingo board, with each space including a statement about one of the participants. Then, we displayed the board on a shared screen and invited participants to write, using Zoom's annotation tools, the correct names in each square. Participants discussed the answers in the chat and on the mic. The only rule was that you couldn't write your own name.

This can be a great follow-up to the Flipgrid introductions to see how many students watched their classmates' videos and remembered what they shared.
If you want to try this with students:

Zoom, and Google Jamboard all offer built-in annotation tools that students can use. We had participants practice by writing their names first so we could make sure everyone knew how to access the tools.

If you don't have access to a meeting annotation tool, then students can share answers in the chat or on the mic while the teacher writes them on the board.

If you have a large class, you can split students up into small groups in breakout rooms. Make it a competition: Whichever team completes the card first wins!

A screenshot from our one-word reflection activity at the end of the first day of our 2020 Teaching Project summer institute.

As a daily closing activity, we invited participants to sum up their reactions to the session on a written sign, then hold it up for everyone to see. The first day we asked them to describe how they were feeling in one word. Another day, we asked them to find a New York Times headline that reflected their moods. On the last day, we asked them to craft their own headlines, ones that captured how they felt and what they had learned after the three-day session.
If you want to try this with students:

For this activity, everyone will need to be able to see everyone else's screen. It works best in "gallery mode" or something similar.

Students will need a piece of paper and a marker so their text is easy to read on the screen.

You can use this activity to get a sense of students' emotional well-being at the end of each class or as an exit ticket to gauge their understanding of academic content.

What's going on in this picture? Look closely at the image above or view it in a larger size, then tell us what you see by posting a comment. On Thursday afternoon, we will reveal more about the image and its origins at the bottom of this post.

After participants had gotten a chance to get to know one another via the community-building activities, we introduced them to " What's Going On in This Picture? " one of our most popular Learning Network features. It encourages communication and collaboration - and teachers tell us it's fun for students too.

We sent participants into breakout rooms to look closely at the Times photograph above and discuss the three questions we ask every week as part of this activity:

Participants chimed in on the microphone and in the group chat to share their observations, offer their interpretations and build on one another's answers, while a facilitator summarized their responses and kept the conversation moving. This exercise isn't about getting the right answer; it's about examining an image, looking for details, practicing inference skills and then, based on the clues, drawing a conclusion.

If you like What's Going On in This Picture? then you should also consider trying What's Going On in This Graph? - its sister feature that we run with the American Statistical Association.

If you want to try this with students:

You can also put students into small groups in breakout rooms to discuss while viewing the image on The Times's website. Have them come back to the main room to share their conclusions with the rest of the class.

Participants from the Teaching Project they plan to use this activity in their classes to create a predictable weekly structure and as a warm-up activity to get students thinking and engaged before diving into academic content.

Sitting at a screen all day can be tiring and physically uncomfortable - even if the lessons or conversations are engaging. Throughout our Teaching Project, we tried to hold space for this reality by sharing a mindful moment together once a day.

One way we did this was by practicing different breathing techniques and mindfulness meditation. We practiced box breathing (exhale for four counts, hold for four counts, inhale for four counts, hold for four counts, repeat) and a five-minute body scan, like the one below.

Body Scan Meditation

A 12-minute practice involving the whole body, led by Tara Brach.

If you want to try this with students:

"How to Meditate," an article from the section, offers a step-by-step guide with various techniques, as well as audio guided meditations. You can start with a one-minute meditation and work your way up to 15 minutes.

You can play one of the guided meditations by sharing your audio on Zoom or lead your own.

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7 Activities to Build Community and Positive Classroom Culture During Online Learning (Published 2020)

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Ideas for creating authentic connections, meaningful relationships and classroom camaraderie through the screen. When schools transitioned to remote learning in the spring, teachers worked quickly to adapt lesson plans and curriculums for virtual classes, while also trying to maintain community and connection.

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Education today is not just about the transfer of knowledge. The social process that allows students to learn from their teachers and peers-to develop their social skills, mindsets, and capabilities-is just as critical. Students need a supportive community and a safe learning environment in which they can socialize emotions such as fear, anxiety, and frustration, and where they can cope with and recover from a crisis like COVID-19.

As schools move their classes online, they must realize that properly supporting learners and teachers during this challenging time involves addressing these social aspects. While virtual learning communities can certainly be as strong and solid as face-to-face environments, migrating to an online education model involves more than simply replicating face-to-face activities in front of a webcam or recording a short lecture and publishing it on an educational platform. We must account for the differences between in-person and virtual learning.

To help, we offer the following 10 suggestions for building and strengthening these digital learning communities-all based on our many years of first-hand experience teaching online. For example, one of us (Professor Venuti) quickly reorganized his courses and trained colleagues during the spread of COVID-19 across Italy in late February.

1. Plan and Establish Community Norms

As time permits (and we realize that many of you are moving exceptionally quickly), avoid simply transferring online the same activities, methods, materials, and approaches that you employed in face-to-face learning. What could work for in-person programs may be ineffective in a digital community of learning.

If you can, try to design a community from the outset by re-engineering, re-thinking, and re-programming as much of your course as you can. The first step is to prepare a new schedule; split the sessions into shorter ones (online teaching is both more tiring and more difficult on students' concentration) and give additional pre-readings and assignments for each session. Consider providing links to some tutorials, too.

Additionally, set clear, precise, and defined rules of behavior. Like any community, a good digital community of learning should have a set of rules. Make sure that everyone knows, understands, and respects these rules. For example, set expectations around when and how people can talk or ask questions. Declare that when a student is speaking, everyone else should keep their microphones off to avoid background noise. Have students use the hand raising function available on most online platforms, which allows the moderator to "call on" a participant to speak. If you are delivering a lecture, you can also ask students to post their questions in the chat instead of raising their hands. Then, at the end of the lecture, you can go through the questions and answer them, ask students to comment on the questions, or have students ask the questions others have previously posted (this is particularly effective for large classes).

Other rules can define the following: preferred times and methods of interaction, such as online forums, chats, video or telephone conversations, or emails; and the appropriate use of polls and emoticons.

2. Provide Extra Emotional Support

At a time of extreme uncertainty, emotional reactions may affect the well-being of the communities where people live and study. Educational institutions should provide students and educators with emotional support to help them manage emotions such as fear, anxiety, and grief. This support is especially critical for students who are afflicted with COVID-19 or who have close family members or friends who are sick or who have passed away.

There are different tools available to provide this type of support. Taking the example of Employee Assistance Programs, which some employers use regularly to support their employees through crises, there may be emotional assistance guidance through helplines and support groups. These mechanisms can be enabled virtually with the involvement of psychologists, counselors, mentors, teachers, or coaches who have been trained in providing emotional support. In some countries, governmental entities also provide mental support services; you can provide students with links to these services in your online learning platform.

3. Allocate a Space for Informal Interaction

On Moodle, for example, some universities have created a "Students' Cafe" section for informal interactions beyond the content of their academic courses. Other platforms allow you to break participants into smaller subgroups to promote both formal and informal discussions, fostering the relationships between participants. In other situations, a specific discussion forum or a private chat uniquely dedicated to the members of the community (your students) can be created for informal interaction.

As you develop your online courses, think about where you can promote a more relaxed environment and plan some lighter activities for students to enjoy.

4. Employ the Right Tools to Organize Team Activities

Online team-building activities can help your students come together. There are many tools available-such as Google Docs, WhatsApp group chats, Instagram stories, Canvas, and Slack-that help students contribute in online environments in real time. One example is to simply share a Google Doc word file and ask each student to add one sentence that summarizes the lecture and the major ideas conveyed in class. Each participant contributes one short sentence and, together, they prepare a summary of the lecture that anybody can then use for studying and revision.

Another example is using stories on social media to prepare students for a case study. You can post pictures with questions, data, and information about the case you are going to discuss in the following class.

Using these tools also helps create communities that strengthen the group's shared purpose, vision, and goals. Such activities are important because it can be harder for digital communities to perceive common goals than it is for physical groups.

5. Take Advantage of Gamification and Nudges

Recent psychological insights emphasize the value of catching participants' attention and gently pushing-or "nudging" -them toward realizing community objectives. Video games, which enhance the potential for students to interact and play in a virtual space, are a good way to strengthen the bonds between peers and teach a variety of content.

For instance, a simple Kahoot! may promote fun competition and facilitate knowledge transfer. Still other online platforms promote and include the use of games, contests, and trivia questions to keep students engaged.

6. Stimulate the Senses

Learning experiences can target all five senses. Although stimulating all of the senses at once may be difficult in a digital community, using podcasts, video, and digital reading can increase students' engagement.

Augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR)-while not likely feasible as a short-term option or in locations where internet capacity is currently an issue-can also allow your students to get much more involved in the learning process. VR, for instance, enables participants to perceive when other community members are present. This technology is almost ready for mainstream use and will likely become widely available at affordable prices (or perhaps even for free) soon.

There are tools that allow you to not only virtually see other participants, but also see yourself in specific settings. With AR, for example, you can actually explore places like a factory. Last September, Professor Venuti and his master's students virtually visited the production plant of a food company located 500 kilometers away from campus. They were able to practice using the plant's machinery and equipment-all through AR and VR technology.

Migrating to an online education model involves more than simply replicating face-to-face activities in front of a webcam or recording a short lecture and publishing it on an educational platform.

7. Consider the Crowd

Technology has expanded the potential for crowd-sourced learning. For instance, the World Health Organization has compiled scholarly publications that address the global COVID-19 crisis. On a smaller scale, schools and universities can post challenges that learning communities can use to address and promote discussion about the complex problems currently affecting them.

Some universities around the world have organized virtual hackathons to address COVID-19 challenges. As another example of the use of massive open online courses (MOOCs), edX launched a Remote Access Program in response to the crisis. This initiative was designed to help the learning community address the challenges they are facing by providing their students with free access to courses and programs not just from their own universities, but also from edX partners participating in the initiative.

8. Promote Peer Learning

Peer learning offers more democratic ways to process information and share knowledge than do hierarchical models of knowledge, in which you control access to information and choose which knowledge to disseminate to students.

For example, many online platforms allow the moderator to split the participants into virtual groups where they can interact together (to work on a case or to discuss a topic or problem presented by the instructor). In many types of classes, particularly those using the case method, it is very useful to split students into subgroups to let them debate. The instructor can join the groups to see how the discussion is progressing and eventually (if necessary) drive the discussion or stimulate it. After the subgroup discussions, you can have one representative from each group share in a plenary session the major points/conclusions reached in the group.

Those who teach intercultural skills, for example, use peer learning to promote soft skills like open-mindedness, tolerance, acceptance of others, and diversity management, among others.

9. Use Humor to Reduce Tension

Humor and laughter can ease tensions, promote health, and strengthen human connections during periods of uncertainty. As you develop your online courses, think about where you can promote a more relaxed environment and plan some lighter activities for students to enjoy. Consider using memes to help infuse some humor into class, for example; they can communicate concepts and ideas to students in a humorous way. It is, however, important to respect cultural differences; these may be more difficult to perceive in digital environments.

10. Embrace Art as a Way of Learning

Using of art in pedagogy can be helpful in uncertain environments. For instance, the Canadian scholar Catherine Etmanski explained the use of art in community-based research and how it generates a collective consciousness and communication beyond words: "Symbolism can go straight to the heart; arts-based methods are powerful in revealing our shared humanity and therefore helpful in building understanding, empathy, and trust among research participants." Music, poetry, painting, and film can be good resources to consider in digital learning.

Above all, take time to reflect with your students and fellow faculty on what is happening with COVID-19. Listen and learn from what they share. We all need to do our part in developing resilient and sustainable communities, now more than ever. The best way to do that is to join together to prepare for, respond to, learn from, and recover from this unexpected situation.

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Education today is not just about the transfer of knowledge. The social process that allows students to learn from their teachers and peers-to develop their social skills, mindsets, and capabilities-is just as critical.

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Trauma-Sensitive Remote Learning: Keeping Connections Strong

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Trauma-Sensitive Remote Learning: Keeping Connections Strong

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Students, families, and educators alike are facing stressful challenges resulting from sudden school closures and abrupt shifts to remote learning. Recently TLPI convened a group of trauma-sensitive school leaders to listen to the many ways in which they are using the trauma lens to buffer the traumatic effects of these challenges and guide their work in these difficult times. Please read more about their thinking and guiding questions here. We plan to share the document with the MA Department of Elementary and Secondary Education to help inform their COVID-19 response.

Keeping Connections Strong

Trauma-sensitive school leaders emphasized the urgency of connecting with each student and family to re-establish the all-important relationships that can sustain students through the crisis and make sure families are safe by providing referrals to resources. As one school leader stated: " We using whatever means possible and we're not stopping until we make contact with every family in the district." Once the connection is made a major goal is ensuring that students understand through regular contact that they continue to belong to a caring school community. Maintaining the ongoing connection can help to buffer the traumatic stress, help students calm themselves to learn, and encourage them to look forward enthusiastically to returning to school.

As the leaders described their roles in the current crisis, it became clear what a critical role schools continue to serve in the safety net for vulnerable students and families in this unprecedented time. Please read more here.
We are grateful to the trauma-sensitive leaders who shared their wisdom and insights with us.

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Trauma-Sensitive Remote Learning: Keeping Connections Strong - Trauma Sensitive Schools

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Students, families, and educators alike are facing stressful challenges resulting from sudden school closures and abrupt shifts to remote learning. Recently TLPI convened a group of trauma-sensitive school leaders to listen to the many ways in which they are using the trauma lens to buffer the traumatic effects of these challenges and guide their work in these difficult times.

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Language for Forging Online Connections With Students

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Language for Forging Online Connections With Students

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Language for Forging Online Connections With Students

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In online teaching environments, educators must be more intentional about checking in with students.

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Helping Students Make New Friends During COVID Is Possible

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Helping Students Make New Friends During COVID Is Possible

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"I might be one of the few people coming out of the COVID-19 situation with more friends," said Karine Durand.

Durand's words have stuck with me for months. This past June, she and I were both speakers on a JFF Horizons conference panel focused on the power of investing in students' social capital to break down barriers to opportunity. Durand explained to the audience that in her day job as a nanny, she hadn't spent much time building a professional network. But since enrolling in Climb Hire, a program preparing working adults for jobs that require a background in using Salesforce, her network had started to look remarkably different. And bigger.

Climb Hire's premise-upskilling working adults to help them compete for better jobs-is not unique. An array of players from coding bootcamps to corporate reskilling initiatives look similar on paper. But Climb Hire isn't betting on skills alone to help nontraditional candidates get ahead. Instead, it ensures that its students, which it calls "Climbers," have access to and the ability to mobilize social capital.

Out of necessity, at the start of COVID-19, the San Francisco-based company transitioned its community-building and learning programs online, and kicked off a series of virtual events geared toward connecting Climbers to local tech professionals.

After the first few online sessions, Climb Hire's founder, Nitzan Pelman, was taken aback. Climbers were managing to continue to build strong friendships with their peers and coaches, all of whom are Climb Hire alumni themselves, even online. At the same time, virtual volunteer rates skyrocketed. "The hidden blessings of COVID-19 is that it has helped us see that we can build a thriving community online and that doors are opening for the Climbers through virtual cocktail parties and coaching events," Pelman said.

Durand shared Pelman's surprise. "COVID hit and I thought, 'This is awkward... it's going to be hard to get to know people online.' But it's been the absolute opposite," she said. Even amidst the chaos of the pandemic, she and her peers stayed up late coaching one another on homework assignments and job search activities over Zoom. And the new connections she made at Climb Hire's virtual events were begetting more connections. "I've already met three people, two of whom have followed up with me and connected me with people in their jobs and their circles," she shared on the panel.

Fast forward to today, and one of those three connections ended up offering a job to Durand.

Making Friends on Purpose

Climb Hire isn't the only organization seeing unexpected success forging new connections online.

nXu, which helps high school students explore their purpose, has seen similar results. Its original program consisted of a region-specific, in-person fellowship for high schoolers recruited from a diverse range of district, charter, private and parochial schools. In addition to helping students articulate and pursue their purpose, nXu's premise is to create friendships among students that bridge race, gender, and class lines.

In past years, according to nXu's own surveys, over 90 percent of participants not only reported that they felt more clear about the direction of their life but also that the program had enabled them to build friendships and connections they would not have otherwise made.

nXu's founder Yutaka Tamura was skeptical that his team would be able to reproduce those results online. "I was particularly unsure about our ability to create a climate of emotional safety and vulnerability to allow students to share their stories," said Tamura in an interview. But after the shift to virtual last spring, Tamura and his colleagues began seeing that the survey data coming out of nXu's online programming-in terms of growing both students' sense of purpose and their friendship networks-was nearly identical to the in-person experience. "It turned out our online experiences could scale authentic connections," Tamura said.

What's Driving Successful Connections? Relationship-centered Design and Data

There's a healthy skepticism in education circles today that virtual connections are as good as face-to-face ones. But organizations like nXu and Climb Hire are seeing firsthand how the relationship-focused designs and measures they had created prior to COVID-19 are good enough to transcend technology's real limitations. Long before the pandemic, both organizations were deeply focused-and data-driven-on relationship building as a core component of their models.

For Climb Hire, that meant being explicit about the often implicit role that social capital plays in job-getting, and creating repeat opportunities for Climbers to foster connections with peers and prospective employers alike. "The key thing that we do is explain how social capital works," said Pelman, who starts the program off by highlighting LinkedIn's data on the prevalent role that referrals play in landing a job.

Climb Hire has also formalized a pay-it-forward spirit inside its own culture through its staffing model, which enlists recent alumni to serve as Fellows who teach incoming Climbers the technical and professional skills they mastered over the last six to 12 months. "With the Fellowship model, Climbers have a built-in alumni network and a community of support," Pelman said. "They help one another master the content and they serve as a network for referrals." Climb Hire even pays a $1,000 referral fee to alumni who successfully refer a fellow Climber into a job that pays $45,000 or more.

Climb Hire also makes building social capital an explicit goal among its volunteers. "We offer Climbers opportunities to interact with volunteers to get feedback on resumes or conduct mock interviews. But that really isn't the point. The point is to build connection and connectivity...and the real outcomes are when those connections open doors for Climbers to secure interviews at companies where their resumes wouldn't get noticed by applying cold, " Pelman added.

For nXu, relationship-building is likewise integrated into the program's curriculum, culture, and facilitation. One of the program's very first activities consists of an interview with a peer. Students also create individual "life timelines" that they then share with others, allowing participants to learn about each other in a deep and holistic manner. Approaches like these have all carried over into nXu's Zoom breakout rooms.

"Given [that] we intentionally designed community building strategies into each experience from the inception of nXu, we've been able to focus on how to translate those strategies into an online context rather than to figure out how to foster community from scratch," Tamura said.

The Long-term Upsides of Online Networks: Scale and Diversity

Although neither Pelman nor Tamura anticipated it, the pandemic hasn't just shown them that their approaches could survive the shift online. It also shed light on new possibilities for expanding their reach and impact.

Climb Hire is currently hatching plans to quadruple in size over the coming year, and will likely launch virtual cohorts in cities beyond the San Francisco Bay Area. nXu is not only offering an online purpose bootcamp, but is also creating shorter experiences, such as introductory workshops, for hundreds of students around the country.

And by unlocking new connections between students who might otherwise not meet in person, the virtual approach also stands to supercharge both organizations' ability to diversify their networks. Climb Hire brings together job seekers from a variety of backgrounds, uniting them around a shared mission and pay-it-forward culture. It has also seen volunteers who didn't have time prior to the pandemic willing to engage virtually, and has managed to recruit volunteers from across the globe to its social capital events. And over the summer, nXu recruited students nationwide for its purpose bootcamps. It will do so again this fall with the goal of forming both geographically and racially diverse cohorts. In other words, a virtual approach can unlock new, meaningful connections with people students might otherwise not meet.

Technology alone has its limits, and it may not unlock all of the connections and friendships we need or replicate the personal interactions we want. But in a year short on support and inspiration for too many of us, organizations like these are showing how strong, relationship-centered designs can create new virtual programs-and friendships-that can outlast the crisis.

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Helping Students Make New Friends During COVID Is Possible. Two Programs Show How. - EdSurge News

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"I might be one of the few people coming out of the COVID-19 situation with more friends," said Karine Durand. Durand's words have stuck with me for months. This past June, she and I were both speakers on a JFF Horizons conference panel focused on the power of investing in students' social capital to break down barriers to opportunity.

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With Stress in Schools Increasing, Simple Strategies to Stay Calm

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With Stress in Schools Increasing, Simple Strategies to Stay Calm

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The 6-year-old boy's eyes welled up with tears. His teacher, 30-year veteran Leigh Yelton, could see the explosive anger building in the first grader. After his mother died unexpectedly in his kindergarten year, he struggled with what his grandmother called "mommy days," or periods during which he would often cry uncontrollably. Instead of asking him what was wrong or trying to distract him, Yelton asked him to do something simple and unexpected: go to a private part of the room and push against a wall. It worked.

Yelton learned the technique from a resilience training program that shows teachers how to help themselves-and their students-calm the central nervous system. Stress and trauma can trigger a response in the amygdala, the part of the brain that sends the body into fight, flight, or freeze mode, hijacking the rest of the brain so it becomes focused solely on responding to or fleeing the perceived threat.

"Our thinking brain is where we process language, so if I have flipped my lid, and you talk to me, you sound like the Charlie Brown teacher," says Ann DuPre Rogers, executive director of Resources for Resilience, the nonprofit organization that conducts the training. When a person is triggered and can't be reached through conversation, the training directs them to take a sip of water, press against a wall, or try a quick walk while paying close attention to their physical sensations.

For example, when drinking a sip of water, a participant might try to feel every droplet of water in their mouth. How does it feel as it passes over the lips? Is it cool or warm? Does it have texture? This process of closely examining sensory details called sensing-in is similar to mindfulness practices which are increasingly backed by research, and even prescribed by doctors, for addressing acute stress and trauma.

"You notice all the sort of sensory elements of the sip," said Rogers, explaining one of the strategies that allows teachers and kids to calm their brains and bodies. Once the amygdala is calmed, she continues, "then the brain can come back and we can talk it through. We can make a plan."

Understanding Triggers

The simple techniques, called rapid resets, are designed for "anyone with a nervous system," Rogers says, but they can be especially helpful in the school setting where teachers and students of all grade levels experience different levels of stress and trauma. Students or teachers who have had many adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), such as living in an abusive household or having an incarcerated parent, may be more easily triggered.

Rogers and her staff train teachers, counselors, and other school personnel to recognize the triggers that cause a person to "flip their lid," or activate the stress response. Triggers in a classroom can seem minor: a student takes another student's pencil or a student teases another student about their appearance. But even these events can spark a response rooted in mounting frustration or underlying trauma and disrupt learning-for both the student and the wider classroom.

While the methods tackle the immediate problem-getting the child to calm down is the first step-the program advises teachers to follow up and address the deeper issues as soon as they can. Getting brains back "online" is a vital prerequisite for exploring the student's challenges and making plans to help the child or teen self-regulate in the future.

"These are quick strategies that you can implement into your classroom with a little effort, but get a big response," says Susan Puckett, a counselor at Forest Park Elementary.

Put On Your Mask First

Despite initial skepticism, Yelton calls the training "the most valuable workshop experience that I have ever been to." Like the flight directive about putting an oxygen mask on yourself before helping a child, the training encourages teachers to use the strategies for their own fight, flight, or freeze responses before teaching them to students.

After learning the rapid resets, Yelton tried them first on herself and then her husband. When she found herself growing angry, she would practice the grounding technique by focusing on the sensory experience of feeling the floor beneath her feet. The strategy brought Yelton back to a place where she could interact again.

The skills she learned in the training had immediate application in her classroom and transformed how she relates to her students. She taught her kids to imagine that their amygdala-which produces the first inkling of anger or anxiety-is like a barking dog. When the "lid is flipped," the dog barks to alert the rest of the brain to fight, flight, or freeze, and getting children to recognize the presence of the dog is a necessary prerequisite for getting them back to a place where they can learn. In her class today, Yelton's students use hand signals to demonstrate that a dog is in the house, periodically gesturing to indicate that they are starting to get anxious.

Before the training, if a child became upset, Yelton might ask "What's wrong?" and press the student to articulate the reason for their discontent. "Often I would say, when kids were really flipping their lids, 'Give me your words. Use your words and tell me,' not really thinking that they can't do that at this point," she says.

The training sparked a paradigm shift in Yelton's interactions with her students. Instead of trying to fix the problem, she approaches triggered students with a new sense of patience and understanding. She realized that "when they get that out of control, they're not in a zone where they know what's happening. They are so amped up or so shut down... and they can't hear you. They can't listen."

Yelton related to the grief of her young student who lost his mother in a different way than she would have before the training, acknowledging his anger without trying to distract or control him. "He was angry, and he had every single right to be angry. I never tried to change that," she said. "You have a right to be angry. I get it. I understand where you're coming from. I would be upset too."

Over time, the student's crying became less frequent and he began to self-regulate, taking time-outs when he felt himself getting triggered. The young boy moved at the end of the year, but Yelton feels she sent him off with a toolbox of tactics he could use to deal with some of the effects of the trauma he had experienced.

Changing School Community

The shift in Yelton's classroom is just one of many in the Kannapolis City School system, a small district in the central part of the state that began training school personnel in the resilience practices in 2016.

Teachers and staff appreciate the simplicity of the practices and their easy implementation in the classroom. "I remember walking out and thinking I can use this tomorrow. I don't have to wait," says elementary school psychologist Amy Roberts. "I don't have to prepare anything. I don't have to make anything. I can just do it."

The practices have created a positive shift in the overall school culture at Forest Park. "Teachers would come to my office and say, 'I did this and this worked for these kids. I haven't seen anything work like this before,'" says counselor Puckett.

The shared practices have created a common language in the school community. Fourth grade teacher Kelcie Lewis says her students know the strategies and respond when they observe her using them. "If I am getting frustrated waiting for them to pay attention or if they're not getting a skill, I might just go over and lean against the wall and they're like, 'Uh oh, guys, Mrs. Lewis is about to blow her lid,'" she says.

Bringing themselves back to a calm state is critical for teachers to avoid exacerbating triggers students may be experiencing. "Through the training, I learned that even the way that you approach the room can make such a difference," says Martha Motley, principal of Forest Park Elementary. "If you get called if there's a fight, a disturbance, or a student being disrespectful, and you show up... escalated, even from the quick walk there, then kids are going to respond differently."
Kelcie Lewis
When school takes place in-person, Forest Park teachers create physical space for students who need to take a break and reset. Lewis set up a corner of her classroom for her students to try the strategies with a wall adorned with posters of typical emotions along with more specific synonyms. If a child says, "I'm mad," she asks for a more nuanced understanding of their feelings-are they betrayed, frustrated, or annoyed? For kids who can't yet read, Yelton uses a board with emotion words, coupled with pictures depicting a range of emotional states.

"The student knows that they can go to the calm down corner and do those strategies without the teacher, or they can let the teacher know that they need help," says teacher Lindsay Stowe.

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With Stress in Schools Increasing, Simple Strategies to Stay Calm

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In North Carolina, a program offers 'rapid resets' to help teachers and students calm their minds and bodies and get back to learning.

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How to Maslow Before Bloom, All Day Long

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How to Maslow Before Bloom, All Day Long

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How to Maslow Before Bloom, All Day Long

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Morning meetings are a good place to start, but what you really need is a toolkit of strategies to meet your students’ social and emotional needs all day long.

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Is Learning on Zoom the Same as In Person? Not to Your Brain

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Is Learning on Zoom the Same as In Person? Not to Your Brain

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Is Learning on Zoom the Same as In Person? Not to Your Brain - EdSurge News

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At this point the Zoom call has almost come to define learning and working in the age of COVID-19. But a few months ago, people began realizing that ...

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With Safety in Mind, Schools Take Classes Outdoors

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With Safety in Mind, Schools Take Classes Outdoors

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Sara Allis' fourth-grade classroom looks pretty nontraditional this year: For several periods each day, her students are now scattered throughout a clearing in the Maine woods, sitting atop five-gallon buckets spread six feet apart.

This is how some schools are mitigating the risks of Covid-19 transmission as they reopen for the new year, creating outdoor spaces that classes can use as needed by erecting tents, setting up benches and whiteboards, and marking asphalt with tape or paint at six-foot intervals.

Learning in the great outdoors isn't a new phenomenon, but with the CDC suggesting that school leaders look for opportunities to take learning outdoors more frequently-and with some states like Indiana issuing strong guidance in support of the approach-schools across the country are experimenting with fresh-air instruction in ways they've never tried before.

New York City's Department of Education launched an Outdoor Initiative, for example, encouraging schools to consider using public parks or closed-off streets as exterior classrooms-and many schools are planning ways to implement that when they reopen for in-person instruction. Even Dr. Anthony Fauci, who heads the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, has weighed in on the matter: "Get as much outdoors as you can," he said in a recent conversation with Rhode Island Gov. Gina Raimondo about reopening schools. "If you look at the superspreader events that have occurred, they're almost always inside."

It's the kind of guidance, of course, that can drive teachers to distraction. In conversations we've seen on social media, some educators are highlighting shortcomings such as a lack of funding for outdoor gear like tents, seating, and rain wear, for example, or the challenge of weather conditions.

"Not every school has a lot of outdoor space," says AM Pines via Twitter. "I taught at Pittsburgh Public [Schools] for a bit and most of our outdoor space was a parking lot with parked cars. What do you do about the weather? It rains in a lot of the country. What do you do if there are wildfires and bad air quality?"

Prior to the pandemic, though, Allis and her fellow teachers had already hatched plans to build more sustainable outdoor spaces, breaking ground and erecting the basic structure for an outdoor pavilion. Now, even though the project isn't entirely finished, teachers are using the pavilion for outdoor lessons. They're not alone: Schools across the country are building structures in schoolyards and parking lots to accommodate outdoor learning-from simple tarps to elaborate platforms with roofs.

Meanwhile, in Winnipeg, Canada-where the average high winter temperature hovers around 26 degrees-gym teacher Jesse Klym is repeating the mantra, "There is no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing."

Educators at Marshwood Great Works School in South Berwick, Maine, tend to agree and plan to take classes outdoors frequently, even in some conditions that may look intemperate to others. "We're lucky that we're already teaching kids sports and activities because this is where we live, and we want them outside no matter what. We go outside year round," says Allis, the fourth-grade teacher. "Our kids sled every day in a normal year. They come prepared and dressed for recess."

Before heading outside, Allis' students fill their five-gallon buckets-donated by a local business-with supplies: slates, dry-erase markers, water bottles, and clipboards. Allis has made a few simple adjustments to her instruction-such as using a small voice amplifier to project in the outdoor spaces. So far, it's working: "They're happy, and I'm happy out there," she says. And kids are continuing to learn: On the day we spoke, her students studied place values, read stories, and wrote in gratitude journals.

At North Rowan Elementary School in Salisbury, North Carolina, three basic outdoor classrooms provide space for kids to take a break from wearing masks in a safe, socially distanced way. "I always believe less is best. It's nothing fancy. It's a platform," says principal Katherine Bryant-Thrower. "And then I also believe in utilizing what we have in our earth. So: a cut-down tree is used as the ledge for the benches, and then the wooden seat part is just nailed to it."

Bryant-Thrower is urging her teachers to think about outdoor instruction as a way to expand student perspectives and explore new pedagogical methods. Teachers determine if and when to use the outside space, self-schedule their rotations in the outdoor classrooms, and make adjustments depending on weather, learning goals, and student interest.

Using the environment as a teacher-one of the key principles of the Reggio Emilia approach-is vital to learning at Children First, a small preschool in Durham, North Carolina. Founder and director Donna King acknowledges that taking learning outside creates logistical issues, but the challenges can produce new ways to think about how students learn. "A huge value for us is a healthy relationship with risk, so we have a lot of building stuff that lets kids build high or erect their own obstacle course," says King.

Taking students outdoors doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing strategy. At Bryant-Thrower's school, teachers determine if and when to use the outside space; self-schedule their rotations in the outdoor classrooms; and make adjustments depending on weather, learning goals, and student interest.

"Think about it as a work in progress always," King says. She says that having "systems for everything" can help teachers keep transitions running smoothly, but in the end, "you try something. You watch what happens, and then you adjust. Then there is incredible joy in problem-solving."

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With Safety in Mind, Schools Take Classes Outdoors

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Sara Allis' fourth-grade classroom looks pretty nontraditional this year: For several periods each day, her students are now scattered throughout a clearing in the Maine woods, sitting atop five-gallon buckets spread six feet apart.

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Using Themes to Give Young Students a Sense of Purpose

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Using Themes to Give Young Students a Sense of Purpose

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Digital learning can get old. It can become harder and harder to vary without complicating our lives or our students'. This feels especially true for younger learners, who might struggle with navigating multiple apps or who need parental support for learning.

Fortunately, our younger learners have one great asset we can't overlook-massive imaginations. The beauty of preschool and early elementary content is that it can easily be applied to any theme-and kids tend to be happy to play along when a topic interests them.

This spring, my kindergartener really struggled with distance learning. As a former teacher, I began to explore how we could dive into the curriculum in a more meaningful and engaging way.

Themes have been our solution. Themes enable students to create a narrative thread that binds the week's content together, giving it a greater sense of purpose. One week we're secret agents, the next ocean explorers. Covering content in this way has enabled us to breeze through standards in a fraction of the time and in a more hands-on way. Most important, it makes learning more exciting and turns each week into a new adventure.

Keep It Simple

Right now we're in a time when less is more, so focus on keeping it basic. Suggest that students read anything that goes with the theme. Incorporate math concepts where they naturally fit. For example, measuring cups lend themselves to using basic fractions, which is perfect for a food week theme. For a secret agent theme, addition and subtraction answers can form a secret code.

Suggest extra activities that parents can lead at home to address standards, along with any extras you might not be able to get to in class. In fact, organizing learning into themes can help narrow down the search for supplemental activities and keep the prospect from getting overwhelming.

Right now, some parents of younger learners are sitting close by, so they might be happy to take on some easy activities and give their children a break from the screen. But make sure to communicate to parents that if that's not their situation, it's perfectly OK.

Here are a few ideas on what themed weeks might look like in kindergarten or first grade-and most of these will work in preschool as well.

Vet Week

Literacy: This week, the focus is on books about pets, animals on the farm, and animals at the zoo. Students do one drawing and one sentence a day in their journal related to the theme (e.g., "Pretend you're a zoo vet. Draw a picture of the monkey's cage. What did you put inside to make him/her happy?")

Math: Students classify their stuffed animals into categories (e.g., pet, wild, farm). They pretend to be vets, first measuring the animals' length and then weighing them. Vets give the stuffed animals a checkup, tallying who's sick and who's healthy.

Science: We talk about parts of the body (e.g., muscles, bones) and compare humans with different animals. We use an app called Pet Vet to take x-rays of animals.

Social studies: We make a map of the zoo, tracing the path the vet takes to visit the animals. Students make a map key.

SEL and art: We discuss how to care for and treat animals, emphasizing kindness. We draw some animal doodles with Mo Willems on YouTube.

Chef Week

Literacy: We focus on books about food and cooking. Students write one sentence plus one drawing per day in their journals using prompts. For example: What do you think is the best dessert in the world? What's your family's favorite thing to eat?

Math: We go over basic fractions using measuring cups and bake cookies. Later, we play store so that we can sell our cookies. We look in our cupboard for other snacks we can sell at our store and draw price tags for each so that we can practice using each type of coin.

Science: We create a food group scrapbook by cutting pictures from grocery ads and pasting them on sheets of paper. We do a blindfolded taste test to learn the five types of tastes. We also take out glasses of water and use food dye to test out what colors are created by mixing primary colors.

Social studies: We discuss foods from around the world and look at the map to see where certain dishes originated.

SEL and art: We discuss how food brings people together. We also attempt some food doodles using how-to videos from YouTube.

Using themes makes each week feel special and breaks up the monotony. Honestly, it's even refreshing for the teacher. It helps make planning time more efficient-plus, it feels good to design weeks you know the kids are going to love. We all know there's nothing like hearing a student say, "I can't wait for next week!"

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Using Themes to Give Young Students a Sense of Purpose

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Digital learning can get old. It can become harder and harder to vary without complicating our lives or our students'. This feels especially true for younger learners, who might struggle with navigating multiple apps or who need parental support for learning. Fortunately, our younger learners have one great asset we can't overlook-massive imaginations.

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Why We Need Differentiation Now More Than Ever

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Why We Need Differentiation Now More Than Ever

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These are trying times for all of us. Pervasive school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic have left many teachers and administrators feeling fearful, anxious, and acutely missing their students and staff. As a professional development facilitator, I severely miss face-to-face time with my students: teachers and instructional coaches. Not to mention that it is very hard to juggle homeschooling my own children and designing professional learning for those I serve.

The strain of tending to intensified personal needs and serving our school communities makes differentiating instruction likely the last thing on anyone's mind. However, it may be the single most important instructional move right now.

You're likely working as hard as you can to teach in this unfamiliar, virtual environment and feel that you "can't possibly add one more thing." For many educators, differentiation can seem like "one more thing," when actually it just means focusing on our students' needs.

Learning and Belonging

High-quality differentiation focuses on learning rather than doing. COVID-19 forced educators to quickly assemble distance learning opportunities for students. Initially, the default was to give students something to do. For example, a week after schools closed, The Today Show shared a list of tools educators and parents can use under the umbrella of "websites to occupy kids". But in order to ensure the social-emotional and academic growth of our students, we must do much more than keep them busy. Now, more than ever, learning must be anchored in a sense of belonging.

A sense of belonging is a "fundamental human motive," says clinical psychologist Paul Rasmussen in The Quest to Feel Good (2010, p. 43). On a typical school day, students learn alongside peers, work with partners, and collaborate in small groups as they progress toward mastery of learning goals in multiple content areas. However, in a pandemic-altered learning landscape, academic objectives can feel cold and sterile, and inadvertently cause disconnection. At this time, every student at every level has a similar learning objective to belong to this learning community. How will we know if students feel connected or not? In short, we ask them.

Assess for Connection

My colleague and mentor Carol Ann Tomlinson calls formative assessment "the lifeblood of differentiation." Formative assessment is frequently thought of as a quiz or test. However, anything that gives teachers insight into where their students are emotionally and academically and enables teachers to plan instruction is formative assessment. Our go-to measure during remote learning is the question, "How do you feel?"

This simple question will elicit lots of one-word responses from students-good, bad, bored, fine-which give teachers an opportunity to probe further: Tell me why you feel good. What is different about learning from home that you like? What is something about school that you miss? The key here is not to try to fix anything but to ask follow-up questions that empathize with students and ensure they feel heard. This process promotes dialogue between students and teachers, forges connection, and gives teachers guidance on how to plan academic instruction.

Tip: Give students the option of responding with emojis, hand signals, or drawings instead of words. This is an especially good option for younger students and students who have difficulty expressing their emotions.

An Academic Map

After gaining insight into how our students are feeling, we can determine which academic objectives (derived from grade-level standards), activities, and groupings are most appropriate for students. For example, if two students share that they are "lonely" or "bored," you may plan ways for those students to have additional interactive time-pairing them to work on a text together or to collaborate on an activity.

Insights students provide during community-building activities will help teachers set learning goals that are compelling to students (e.g., "My goal is to is to bake banana bread. I need to double the ingredients to feed my whole family. Therefore, I will learn how to add or multiply fractions.")

Additionally, not every student will have access to a parent or caregiver to support at-home learning, and parents are not teachers. Parents have massively different capacities to facilitate remote learning due to their own education level, native language, number of children at home, whether or not they are also trying to work remotely, and level of stress due to the other effects of COVID-19 (economic, caretaking of elderly family members, etc.).

Finally, we do not know how long schools will be closed. We must plan remote learning for students that is sustainable and engaging or we will lose our students and their parents.

With this in mind, there are some ways educators can use differentiation to guide learning opportunities that are equitable and accessible for students and their caregivers.

DIFFERENTIATION FOR REMOTE LEARNING

Learning Environment: The culture and climate of student/teacher interactions

Do: Provide interpersonal communication opportunities. Do: Personally connect with each student twice a week or more. Don't: Worry about making things "equal." The length or frequency of interactions matters less than the quality.

Remote conferring: Connect with the whole class, small groups, or individual students via phone, app, or online platform. Letter writing: Students also practice addressing an envelope properly.

Content: What students learn

Do: Promote student engagement by ensuring students understand concepts' and skills' relevance. Do: Focus on exposing students to concepts and skills and practicing them in ways that allow for your feedback. Don't: Worry about students having a deep understanding of all content.

Choice: Students choose from texts, concepts, ideas, or skills within a content area. Targeted questioning: The teacher chooses the content or text but differentiates the focus for students (e.g., some find text evidence to identify the setting while others find text evidence to determine the theme). Flexible pacing: Allow students to spend longer or shorter time with content depending on their interest.

Process: How students acquire learning

Do: Ensure access to reliable resources to practice skills and concepts. Do: Focus on skills that apply to all content areas (i.e. cause and effect, claim and evidence). Don't: Give students long packets of work. We run the risk of having students practice skills incorrectly or quickly becoming disengaged.

Video conferring Live-streamed lessons Video recordings of lessons: These can be teacher-created or -curated. Shared/interactive documents Simulations/experiments: For example, instead of completing a worksheet, students could find the area and perimeter of something in their own homes. Short, targeted practice Skill-based graphic organizers

Product: How students demonstrate learning

Do: Encourage students to share authentic examples of learning. Do: Ask students questions about their learning and provide opportunities for them to share with classmates. Don't: Worry about grading. Students must be successful if we want them to continue learning from home.

Student choice and interest Virtual collaboration: Students work with one another. Feedback: Differentiate delivery and depth. Task-related feedback helps students understand the concept or skill (right/wrong, yes/no, stop/go). Process-related feedback identifies progress and errors, relationships between ideas, and next steps. ("What strategies did you use?" "What is/isn't working and why?") Self-evaluation supports students who can self-direct learning by providing prompts that deepen reflection. ("How does this compare to ... ?" "How have your ideas changed?").

Remote Instructional Tools

Some of the tools and resources that can support you as you differentiate to meet students' needs remotely include

Video-conferring or live-stream apps like Zoom, Google Meet, and FaceTime.

Sharing platforms such as Otus, Google Classroom, SeeSaw, and Flipgrid.

Digital resources familiar to students (e.g., Kahn Academy, NewsELA) and anything accessible to students (books, articles, newsfeeds, their backyards, TV shows, their imagination, family members, etc.). Remember, too many choices result in indecision. Three or four digital resources is more than enough.

Aim for Growth, Not Perfection

People always ask me, "Am I doing differentiation right?" My response is always the same: There is only one way you can mess differentiation up, and that is knowing that your students need something but not trying anything to meet their needs.

We don't always succeed in our attempts to meet students' needs. In a remote learning environment, there are likely to be even more failed attempts. The goal is not perfection. The goal is to reflect on what is working and what isn't (for teachers and students), adjust, and keep going. As we do so, have compassion for your students and yourself. Everyone is doing the best that they can.

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Why We Need Differentiation Now More Than Ever - ASCD

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These are trying times for all of us. Pervasive school closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic have left many teachers and administrators feeling fearful, anxious, and acutely missing their students and staff. As a professional development facilitator, I severely miss face-to-face time with my student

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Why Grading Policies For Equity Matter More Than Eve

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Why Grading Policies For Equity Matter More Than Eve

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For the fourth quarter, San Leandro's secondary students will receive a "pass" or "incomplete" instead of a letter grade. In his guidance for grading during COVID-19 closures , Feldman recommended this model for schools that cannot drop grades entirely. It differs from the more familiar pass/fail model available in some colleges , because it does not punish students who cannot keep up during school closures. At San Leandro, students who receive an incomplete can finish their work during the summer or within six weeks of schools reopening. After that, the mark would become a "no pass."

Patel noted that some districts have decided to let third quarter grades stand in for the final grade, but she said that's a disservice to students who were not passing at the time that school buildings closed. In contrast, San Leandro will convert third quarter scores to a pass/no pass to be combined with the fourth quarter pass/incomplete for the overall semester grades of high schoolers. This approach gives students the opportunity to raise their grade either during distance learning or within six weeks of schools reopening.

Feldman said that educators may be tempted to add a "pass+" option to recognize high-achievers, but he advised against it, saying that "the only students who can take advantage of that are the ones who have supports." And Eakins noted that asking students to choose between a letter grade or a pass/incomplete option similarly replicates disadvantage.

Multiple Forms of Feedback

At San Leandro's elementary schools, instead of grades, teachers will issue third trimester report cards with only narrative comments. They also will hold phone or video conferences with parents to discuss how a student is doing, next steps for the summer and what support might be needed in the fall. At all grade levels, high-quality feedback makes a difference in student learning. Continuing to give that feedback is one of Feldman's recommendations for grading during COVID-19. Focusing on that, rather than on the pressure that is often associated with grades, he said, sends the message that teachers care about what's happening in students' lives.

Patel said that figuring out how to maintain the loop of teacher feedback and student growth during distance learning is as important as deciding whether to assign letter grades. She noted that while educators already knew that relationships matter , "Right now it's just an absolute gatekeeper. If kids don't want to open up that Chromebook to get in a Zoom with us ... they can completely shut down." San Leandro's emergency distance learning plan asks teachers to check in with students twice per week.

An opportunity to rethink grading

For the past three years, San Leandro's administrators and teachers have worked with Feldman to adopt equitable grading practices . That work put them in a good position to think critically about grading during a pandemic. For others, coronavirus is shining a new spotlight on disparities that affect student outcomes. Eakins and Feldman hope that spotlight will stay on when schools reopen . Many districts have distributed laptops and wireless hot spots to families without Internet , for instance. Will those supports continue to be available after coronavirus? "We could easily go back to business as usual, " Eakins said. "This is a time for us to create a new normal and plan ahead. We can really start challenging the inequities that have been around pre-COVID-19 and move forward."

Feldman hopes that this crisis will prompt educators to reflect on the purpose of grades. Behavioral metrics, such as homework completion and class participation - what he referred to as "all that bean counting that teachers normally spend a lot of time on" - do not assess what students actually know, he said. They also make grades susceptible to implicit bias. With some of those metrics gone during distance learning, will teachers consider eliminating them altogether?

From his research all over the country, Feldman knows that even talking about changing grading practices can be contentious . But Patel, whose district has done it, considered the process worthwhile. "That work wasn't just about being intellectually interested in grading," she said. "It came from a lived teacher and family experience of wanting to make sure that grades are authentic."

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Why Grading Policies For Equity Matter More Than Ever | KQED

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For the fourth quarter, San Leandro's secondary students will receive a "pass" or "incomplete" instead of a letter grade. In his guidance for grading during COVID-19 closures , Feldman recommended this model for schools that cannot drop grades entirely.

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New Research Makes a Powerful Case for PBL

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New Research Makes a Powerful Case for PBL

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When Gil Leal took AP Environmental Science in his junior year of high school, he was surprised by how different it was from his other AP classes. Instead of spending the bulk of the time sitting through lectures, taking notes, and studying abstract texts, his class visited a strawberry farm in the valley nearby.

It wasn't just for a tour. Leal and his peers were tasked with thinking about the many challenges that modern farms confront, from water shortages to pest infestations and erosion. More surprising to Leal: Students were asked to design their own solutions, incorporating what they had learned about things like soil composition, ecosystem dynamics, and irrigation systems.

Now an environmental science major at UCLA-and a first-generation college student-Leal sees the visit as a pivotal moment that led to his decision to pursue science in college. He had never visited a farm before, and was used to a traditional sit-and-listen learning model.

"In other classes, it was lecture, readings, test," said Leal, "but in AP Environmental Science we worked on projects with other students, discussed our ideas, considered different perspectives-and I learned so much more this way."

Leal's AP class, taught by Brandie Borges, is part of a new generation of classes that transform traditional teacher-led instruction into a more student-centered, project-based approach-requiring students to work together as they tackle complex, real-world problems that emphasize uncertainty, iterative thinking, and innovation. Proponents of project-based learning (PBL) argue that it fosters a sense of purpose in young learners, pushes them to think critically, and prepares them for modern careers that prize skills like collaboration, problem-solving, and creativity.

Critics say that the pedagogy places too much responsibility on novice learners, and ignores the evidence about the effectiveness of direct instruction by teachers. By de-emphasizing knowledge transfer from experts to beginners, the critics suggest, PBL undermines content knowledge and subject fluency.

While project-based learning and direct instruction aren't incompatible, evidence that might settle the deeper controversy over PBL's effectiveness has been sparse. Only a handful of studies over the last decades have established a causal relationship between structured project-based learning and student outcomes-in either direction.

But two major new gold-standard studies-both funded by Lucas Education Research, a sister division of Edutopia-conducted by researchers from the University of Southern California and Michigan State University, provide compelling evidence that project-based learning is an effective strategy for all students, outperforming traditional curricula not only for high achieving students, but across grade levels and racial and socioeconomic groups.

Reimagining Advanced Placement Courses

The two studies involved over 6,000 students in 114 schools across the nation, with more than 50 percent of students coming from low-income households.

In the AP study, which included Gil Leal's class along with over 3,600 students in both AP Environmental Science and AP U.S. Government and Politics courses from five districts serving a diverse student body, researchers looked at a broad range of project-based activities in the sciences and humanities.

In one example, students in Amber Graeber's AP Government class took part in a simulation of an electoral caucus. Meanwhile, instead of simply reading about Supreme Court cases, students in Erin Fisher's class studied historic cases and then took on real-world roles, arguing the cases in mock court, acting as reporters, and designing campaign ads and stump speeches to make their case.

Researchers found that nearly half of students in project-based classrooms passed their AP tests, outperforming students in traditional classrooms by 8 percentage points. Students from low-income households saw similar gains compared to their wealthier peers, making a strong case that well-structured PBL can be a more equitable approach than teacher-centered ones. Importantly, the improvements in teaching efficacy were both significant and durable: When teachers in the study taught the same curriculum for a second year, PBL students outperformed students in traditional classrooms by 10 percentage points.

The study results nudged at entrenched ideas about how to best teach students from different backgrounds. "There's a belief among some educators and some policymakers that students from underserved backgrounds... aren't ready to have student-centered instruction where they're driving their own learning," said USC researcher Anna Saavedra, the lead researcher on the AP study. "And so there's this idea, and the results of this study really challenged that notion."

Nationally, the researchers concluded, 30 percent of students from low-income households take AP tests, but that number jumped to 38 percent for students in PBL classrooms-there are more low-income students taking AP tests using project-based learning, and more are passing as well.

It may seem counterintuitive that a student-centered approach is effective in an environment that's so focused on high-stakes testing, but the results suggest otherwise.

"Students felt like the work was more authentic," said Saavedra, suggesting a possible explanation for the improvements. "There were more connections to their real lives. For example, in the AP Environmental Science course, they were learning about their ecological footprint and thinking: How do my behaviors affect the health of my community and of the larger world?"

Authentic Learning

But project-based learning isn't just for high school kids. In Billie Freeland's third-grade class, PBL not only builds students' interest in science but also helps them make more connections with the world around them, generating a deep understanding of-and appreciation for-science, she says.

"Third-grade students work on the 'Toy Unit,'" said Freeland. "But don't let the name fool you.... Third graders learn the concepts of gravity, friction, force, and direction by designing toys from simple objects such as water bottles, straws, and recycled milk cartons. The unit ends with them designing their own toys that use magnetic or electrical force," she told researchers, while emphasizing that the projects are aligned with Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS).

Freeland's class was one of dozens involved in the large-scale study examining the effectiveness of PBL in elementary science classes. In the study, researchers from Michigan State University and the University of Michigan studied 2,371 third-grade students in 46 schools who were randomly assigned to a business-as-usual control group or a treatment group. The schools selected for the study were diverse: 62 percent of the schools' student bodies qualified for free or reduced-price lunch, and 58 percent were students of color.

Like the high school students in the AP study, elementary students in PBL classrooms outperformed their peers, this time by 8 percentage points on a test of science learning. The pattern held across socioeconomic class and across all reading ability levels: In the project-based learning group, all boats rose on the tide-and both struggling readers and highly proficient readers outperformed their counterparts in traditional classrooms.

"The beauty of all of this, which is really quite lovely, is that we have PBL in science, a progression of it, from elementary through high school," said Barbara Schneider, a professor of education at Michigan State University who worked on the study. "Our findings are consistent all across elementary and secondary school, which is really quite remarkable. And in both cases, we're looking at substantial increases in science achievement."

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New Research Makes a Powerful Case for PBL

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Two new gold-standard studies provide compelling evidence that project-based learning is an effective strategy for all students-including historically marginalized ones.

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Using PBL to Encourage Interdisciplinary Work

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Using PBL to Encourage Interdisciplinary Work

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Using PBL to Encourage Interdisciplinary Work

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Project-based learning units that include different disciplines allow students to apply what they learn to new situations, leading to deeper learning.

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Your Checklist for Virtual Project-Based Learning

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Your Checklist for Virtual Project-Based Learning

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It might feel counterintuitive, but in many ways the spring of 2020 was an opportune time to launch into a rigorous project. While the nation's school system was confronting an unprecedented disruption at mid-year, students were well-prepared to apply the knowledge they had already gained to a hard problem of their choice. Well-designed projects allowed them to work independently at home in a way that was engaging and provided continuity of learning.

What about this year? Projects are still a good way to motivate students during challenging circumstances, but we need to take care so that learning actually takes place. How can we use what we know about the science of learning to design projects that truly work?

A starting point: While some see PBL as part of a vision to remake the American school, it's not always an efficient way to impart core knowledge and skills. Direct instruction, which involves a lot of radar pings and low-stakes testing to determine how students are doing-followed by more instruction and practice based on any knowledge gaps you find-is more effective in that regard. I know this is tipping over a sacred cow, so take a look at this academic paper, this article, and this blog.

Psychology professor David Daniel's insights can help us navigate the terrain between learning core skills, and beginning challenging new projects. Daniel says that the goal of learning should be to create knowledge that is durable, usable, and flexible: durable far beyond the length of your course; known well enough to be actually usable by students; and flexible enough that they can use it in new contexts. Once core concepts are engrained, that's when projects can really shine-it can be where durability, usability, and flexibility are built, where true learning takes place.

PREPARE STUDENTS FOR YOUR (REMOTE) PROJECT

Project-based learning exposes gaps in student learning, so use this checklist before starting a PBL unit, especially at home:

1. Get them thinking about their prior thinking: Find out what prior knowledge, skills, stories and interests students have before starting a project. Do not assume they know the required materials-find out. Use surveys and formative assessments. Show images, video clips, or quotes that prompt discussions.

2. Build core knowledge and skills: For any gaps in knowledge, use direct instruction-concrete examples, stories, and analogies. Set typical questions and walk students through model answers. Deliver material in a small chunk size with frequent, in-lesson formative assessments to check understanding as you go.

3. Keep consolidating: Use retrieval practice, spaced practice, and self-explanation in the days and weeks after material is first learned to help store key knowledge and skills in long term memory-which reduces cognitive load when students start the project. All practice should be low- or no-stakes.

4. Practice academic independence: Move students from guided practice (in-person Zoom call or videoed lesson), to independent practice monitored by you (students working independently while still on Zoom with you, or working asynchronously but able to email you with questions), to truly independent practice (submitting a short low- or no-stakes assignment to you before the next class).

5. Do a final check for knowledge: Determine if students are ready for the project with a final, short formative assessment. For example, you can create a five-question, short-answer quiz of key facts and skills that students need to know for the project (not multiple choice). The results might reveal that some students need a quick practice assignment before they start the project; others might need 10-15 minutes of targeted reteaching to fill in gaps.

CONNECT PROJECTS TO PURPOSE

Increasingly, research shows that a clear sense of purpose and relevance increases student motivation, pushing them to dig deep to complete a challenging project.

1. Find the right time: Read the room-online, you can ask students to fill out a quick form or participate in a poll-and ask your class whether they are ready to start exploring the kinds of big questions that projects involve. Students might be exhausted from thinking deeply about these issues and need a break from them, and school can provide that too.

2. Make connections: If you're ready to start, there are plenty of big issues facing the world right now: a global pandemic, enduring issues of race and equity, and climate change, to name just a few. Have your students find connections between the things they've learned in your class and these real-world issues.

3. Practice empathy: It's rule number one in the world of new product development: Solving problems means understanding intimately the people who might benefit from the solution. Keep in mind that not all problems worth solving are global in scope. Look for issues that need to be addressed in your local community, and explore ways that your students can talk to community members, over Zoom or phone during the pandemic, about how the problem affects them.

4. Include elements of choice: Let students choose the problem they address, within constraints. Setting Goldilocks constraints is crucial-not too tight, not too loose. Refrain from too much choice, or choice too often, as this can freeze learning.

MAKE PROJECTS HIGHLY COLLABORATIVE (AND SOCIALLY ENGAGING)

One way to boost student engagement is to take advantage of the inherently collaborative, social problem solving at the heart of project-based learning.

1. Prepare your collaborative tech tools: First, to make sure students are productive, take the time to teach your students how to use the tech tools you've settled on. Then, use breakout rooms on video chats, group texting, discussion forums on your LMS, and online whiteboards such as MURAL and Padlet to provide the means for students to collaborate on their projects.

2. Support executive functioning: Projects require lots of independent work and place a heavy demand on executive functioning skills. Be sure to set up very clear objectives and scaffold skills like planning, choosing strategies, self-monitoring progress, making adjustments, and determining when you are done.

3. Let them be kids: Allow your kids to simply be kids at times, and enjoy each others' company. Don't underestimate the importance of building in social interaction into your class to make this year sustainable.

4. Have a way to bring them back: Make sure you have an agreed-upon way to bring everyone back to attention if students are starting to stray. Establishing rituals and routines helps you let students have the freedom to explore.

5. Establish roles and goals: Cracking the "one person does all the work" problem is hard. Setting clear roles for group members can help, and assessing students based on their discrete, defined contributions can create clearer accountability. Rotate roles throughout the year, though, to prevent students from limiting themselves.

KEEP EQUITY CONCERNS FRONT-OF-MIND

Projects should not be a measure of whether your parents have a 3D printer in the basement, a Masters in Fine Arts, or a team of highly skilled tutors at their disposal. This is especially important during distance learning, where students have vastly different home experiences.

1. Audit your thinking: Before you start your project, make sure that there's equity in prior knowledge-does everyone know what they need to in order to succeed? If not, teach it. Also evaluate your project plan to determine if it makes unfair assumptions about access to resources. You might ask students directly if they have access to all the materials they need, and adjust your project if they don't.

2. Make time in class: If all of the project work is after school hours, some students will inevitably have more time and resources. Put class time aside for projects so it's the students doing the work, not the parents-and so that working students, or those with other family responsibilities, are not unfairly disadvantaged.

3. Provide real-time feedback: The research shows that clear, encouraging, specific feedback during learning is highly beneficial-and students must get a chance to act on the feedback they receive or it is wasted.

4. Incentivize revisions: If you are giving a final grade, make acting on your feedback-iterating on and improving their work-part of the student's grade.

MAKE PROJECTS TRANSFORMATIVE

In every school, there are some transformative projects that endure long after students graduate. Ask an alumni of St. Andrew's, where we teach, who they interviewed for their junior year Oral History Project, which often ends with a 60+ page bound product, and they can almost all recall their interviewee and details of their story. Ask the same student who was the "Great Compromiser" in American history and they are less likely to recall that answer (even though our history teachers examine Henry Clay in great detail).

Great projects can define a year and transform a life. They develop attitude and character as well as knowledge. They are the crucial step in building durable, usable, and flexible learning. They can be effective summative assessments or demonstrations of mastery. They are the things we remember ten years after we graduate. We should not be thinking about "if" we should elevate our PBL into an equitable school experience that helps all students' learn, but "how" and "when." And to make PBL equitable and to make PBL great, the "how" must be informed by the science of learning.

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Your Checklist for Virtual Project-Based Learning

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It might feel counterintuitive, but in many ways the spring of 2020 was an opportune time to launch into a rigorous project. While the nation's school system was confronting an unprecedented disruption at mid-year, students were well-prepared to apply the knowledge they had already gained to a hard problem of their choice.

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An Adaptable Framework for Project-Based Learning

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An Adaptable Framework for Project-Based Learning

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The National Geographic Society has a five-step PBL model and resource library to foster deep learning whether students are in school or at home.

When school buildings closed at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, educators and students around the world unexpectedly entered new territory. For many, it was their first experience teaching remotely, and for some, it came with challenges. As one educator put it, "It feels lonely. It feels different. It feels like nothing I've ever experienced."

Educators and students had to find innovative ways to connect with families, collaborate with peers, and engage students in meaningful learning. They were like explorers on an expedition, navigating and problem-solving in an unfamiliar, challenging landscape and often without the tools they needed.

As state, district, and school leaders determine the safest and best approach for the 2020-21 school year, whether it's students learning remotely, in person with social-distancing requirements, or through a hybrid model, one thing is certain: School will look different. While educators and young people forge ahead into this new normal, skills like adaptability, creativity, and collaboration are critical as they navigate challenges that lie ahead. These skills are reflective of the core beliefs and values of the National Geographic Society and are integral to developing an explorer's mindset.

One way to foster an explorer's mindset-regardless of where and how students learn-is through project-based learning (PBL). Project-based learning engages students in independent work such as research that can happen anywhere and anytime, as well as working with peers, which can happen in person or virtually. This is one reason why PBL is particularly well-suited for a hybrid-learning environment in which some learners are working independently at home, while others are working collaboratively in the classroom. Another is that PBL provides learners an opportunity to develop critical, lifelong skills in an efficient way, which is increasingly important as many schools implement abbreviated schedules. We heard from several teachers in the National Geographic Educator Community that a project-based approach has helped their students and them make a smoother transition to virtual learning.

The National Geographic Society's Geo-Inquiry Process offers a lens that educators can use to guide all students, in any circumstances, in learning that helps them develop an explorer's mindset in the next school year and beyond. There are five steps to this process.

Step-by-Step Guide to the Geo-Inquiry Process

1. Ask: Generate a question. Educators encourage students to explore issues of interest by asking driving questions. These questions are essential for both explorers and young people to consider as they seek to understand the world. A student might ask, for example: What effect does racial injustice have in my community? Why is it happening there? What can we do?

2. Collect: Gather information. Next, students research and gather data to formulate hypotheses to their questions. This can be done through investigating online sources, conducting interviews with community members and experts, filling out online surveys, taking photographs, and doing field measurements and observations (from a safe distance).

3. Visualize: Organize and analyze the information. Once students have acquired data and information, educators can help them visualize the data in compelling ways, such as maps or graphs, that convey their understanding of the issue and support it with evidence. For example, a student completing a project on the Covid-19 pandemic in their community might create a color-coded map to display case counts in different neighborhoods as well as a bar chart showing the average age or income in those areas.

4. Create: Develop stories. With an analysis of the information they gathered, students demonstrate the answers to their inquiry questions through various ways of storytelling. An important part of the story-creation process is identifying what outcomes they would like to happen based on their findings, and which audiences they might need to reach for that outcome to occur.

5. Act: Share stories. In the final step, students take action by sharing their stories. Again, remote learning can accommodate a variety of storytelling options. They might choose to host a webinar, create a website, or produce a video to present their findings and analysis.

The Geo-Inquiry Process is a model that can be applied to any subject, and even multiple subjects at once. For example, students might explore systems and microbes in the human body from a scientific perspective, as well as through a cultural lens of how communities spread and contain outbreaks of infectious diseases. Such an interdisciplinary approach allows for collaboration among educators and a multidimensional learning opportunity for young people.

This school year, like any other, teachers want to spark curiosity in learners and help them deepen their understanding of the world. Through project-based learning, educators can help young people cultivate an explorer's mindset and equip them with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to seek solutions to the world's most pressing problems. As one of our young explorers said, "Young people are the world's most untapped resource for hope." Let's encourage them to ask, collect, visualize, create, and act.

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An Adaptable Framework for Project-Based Learning

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The National Geographic Society has a five-step PBL model and resource library to foster deep learning whether students are in school or at home. When school buildings closed at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, educators and students around the world unexpectedly entered new territory.

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Lawrence Kohlberg (1927-1987) was an American psychologist best known for his theory of the stages of moral development. His theory asserts that there are six distinct stages of human moral development, and that a person may go through these stages throughout his or her lifespan.

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This past weekend I was contacted by two educators who were worried about their ability to have their students engage in courageous conversations about contentious topics. Especially in this age of widespread distance an...

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The Big List of Class Discussion Strategies

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The Big List of Class Discussion Strategies

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Listen to this post as a podcast:
When I worked with student teachers on developing effective lesson plans, one thing I always asked them to revise was the phrase "We will discuss."
We will discuss the video. We will discuss the story. We will discuss our results.
Every time I saw it in a lesson plan, I would add a note: "What format will you use? What questions will you ask? How will you ensure that all students participate?" I was pretty sure that We will discuss actually meant the teacher would do most of the talking; He would throw out a couple of questions like "So what did you think about the video?" or "What was the theme of the story?" and a few students would respond, resulting in something that looked like a discussion, but was ultimately just a conversation between the teacher and a handful of extroverted students; a classic case of Fisheye Teaching.

The problem wasn't them; in most of the classrooms where they'd sat as students, that's exactly what a class discussion looked like. They didn't know any other "formats." I have only ever been familiar with a few myself. But when teachers began contacting me recently asking for a more comprehensive list, I knew it was time to do some serious research.

So here they are: 15 formats for structuring a class discussion to make it more engaging, more organized, more equitable, and more academically challenging. If you've struggled to find effective ways to develop students' speaking and listening skills, this is your lucky day.

I've separated the strategies into three groups. The first batch contains the higher-prep strategies, formats that require teachers to do some planning or gathering of materials ahead of time. Next come the low-prep strategies, which can be used on the fly when you have a few extra minutes or just want your students to get more active. Note that these are not strict categories; it's certainly possible to simplify or add more meat to any of these structures and still make them work. The last group is the ongoing strategies. These are smaller techniques that can be integrated with other instructional strategies and don't really stand alone. For each strategy, you'll find a list of other names it sometimes goes by, a description of its basic structure, and an explanation of variations that exist, if any. To watch each strategy in action, click on its name and a new window will open with a video that demonstrates it.

Enjoy!
a.k.a. Chat Stations
Basic Structure: Stations or posters are set up around the classroom, on the walls or on tables. Small groups of students travel from station to station together, performing some kind of task or responding to a prompt, either of which will result in a conversation.

Variations: Some Gallery Walks stay true to the term gallery, where groups of students create informative posters, then act as tour guides or docents, giving other students a short presentation about their poster and conducting a Q&A about it. In Starr Sackstein's high school classroom, her stations consisted of video tutorials created by the students themselves. Before I knew the term Gallery Walk, I shared a strategy similar to it called Chat Stations, where the teacher prepares discussion prompts or content-related tasks and sets them up around the room for students to visit in small groups.
a.k.a. Values Continuum, Forced Debate, Physical Barometer, This or That
Basic Structure: A statement that has two possible responses-agree or disagree-is read out loud. Depending on whether they agree or disagree with this statement, students move to one side of the room or the other. From that spot, students take turns defending their positions.

Variations: Often a Philosophical Chairs debate will be based around a text or group of texts students have read ahead of time; students are required to cite textual evidence to support their claims and usually hold the texts in their hands during the discussion. Some teachers set up one hot seat to represent each side, and students must take turns in the seat. In less formal variations (which require less prep), a teacher may simply read provocative statements students are likely to disagree on, and a debate can occur spontaneously without a text to refer to (I call this variation This or That in my classroom icebreakers post). Teachers may also opt to offer a continuum of choices, ranging from "Strongly Agree" on one side of the room, all the way to "Strongly Disagree" on the other, and have students place themselves along that continuum based on the strength of their convictions.

Basic Structure: Students are divided into 4 groups. Three of these groups are assigned to represent specific points of view. Members of the fourth group are designated as "provocateurs," tasked with making sure the discussion keeps going and stays challenging. One person from each group (the "speaker") sits in a desk facing speakers from the other groups, so they form a square in the center of the room. Behind each speaker, the remaining group members are seated: two right behind the speaker, then three behind them, and so on, forming a kind of triangle. From above, this would look like a pinwheel. The four speakers introduce and discuss questions they prepared ahead of time (this preparation is done with their groups). After some time passes, new students rotate from the seats behind the speaker into the center seats and continue the conversation.

Variations: When high school English teacher Sarah Brown Wessling introduced this strategy in the featured video (click Pinwheel Discussion above), she used it as a device for talking about literature, where each group represented a different author, plus one provocateur group. But in the comments that follow the video, Wessling adds that she also uses the strategy with non-fiction, where students represent authors of different non-fiction texts or are assigned to take on different perspectives about an issue.
a.k.a. Socratic Circles
Basic Structure: Students prepare by reading a text or group of texts and writing some higher-order discussion questions about the text. On seminar day, students sit in a circle and an introductory, open-ended question is posed by the teacher or student discussion leader. From there, students continue the conversation, prompting one another to support their claims with textual evidence. There is no particular order to how students speak, but they are encouraged to respectfully share the floor with others. Discussion is meant to happen naturally and students do not need to raise their hands to speak. This overview of Socratic Seminar from the website Facing History and Ourselves provides a list of appropriate questions, plus more information about how to prepare for a seminar.

Variations: If students are beginners, the teacher may write the discussion questions, or the question creation can be a joint effort. For larger classes, teachers may need to set up seminars in more of a fishbowl-like arrangement, dividing students into one inner circle that will participate in the discussion, and one outer circle that silently observes, takes notes, and may eventually trade places with those in the inner circle, sometimes all at once, and sometimes by "tapping in" as the urge strikes them.
a.k.a. Affinity Diagramming
Basic Structure: Give students a broad question or problem that is likely to result in lots of different ideas, such as "What were the impacts of the Great Depression?" or "What literary works should every person read?" Have students generate responses by writing ideas on post-it notes (one idea per note) and placing them in no particular arrangement on a wall, whiteboard, or chart paper. Once lots of ideas have been generated, have students begin grouping them into similar categories, then label the categories and discuss why the ideas fit within them, how the categories relate to one another, and so on.

Variations: Some teachers have students do much of this exercise-recording their ideas and arranging them into categories- without talking at first. In other variations, participants are asked to re-combine the ideas into new, different categories after the first round of organization occurs. Often, this activity serves as a good pre-writing exercise, after which students will write some kind of analysis or position paper.
a.k.a. Speed Dating
Basic Structure: Students form two circles, one inside circle and one outside circle. Each student on the inside is paired with a student on the outside; they face each other. The teacher poses a question to the whole group and pairs discuss their responses with each other. Then the teacher signals students to rotate: Students on the outside circle move one space to the right so they are standing in front of a new person (or sitting, as they are in the video). Now the teacher poses a new question, and the process is repeated.

Variations: Instead of two circles, students could also form two straight lines facing one another. Instead of "rotating" to switch partners, one line just slides over one spot, and the leftover person on the end comes around to the beginning of the line. Some teachers use this strategy to have students teach one piece of content to their fellow students, making it less of a discussion strategy and more of a peer teaching format. In fact, many of these protocols could be used for peer teaching as well.

Basic Structure: Another great idea from Sarah Brown Wessling, this is a small-group discussion strategy that gives students exposure to more of their peers' ideas and prevents the stagnation that can happen when a group doesn't happen to have the right chemistry. Students are placed into a few groups of 4-6 students each and are given a discussion question to talk about. After sufficient time has passed for the discussion to develop, one or two students from each group rotate to a different group, while the other group members remain where they are. Once in their new group, they will discuss a different, but related question, and they may also share some of the key points from their last group's conversation. For the next rotation, students who have not rotated before may be chosen to move, resulting in groups that are continually evolving.

Basic Structure: Two students sit facing each other in the center of the room; the remaining students sit in a circle around them. The two central students have a conversation based on a pre-determined topic and often using specific skills the class is practicing (such as asking follow-up questions, paraphrasing, or elaborating on another person's point). Students on the outside observe, take notes, or perform some other discussion-related task assigned by the teacher.

Variations: One variation of this strategy allows students in the outer circle to trade places with those in the fishbowl, doing kind of a relay-style discussion, or they may periodically "coach" the fishbowl talkers from the sidelines. Teachers may also opt to have students in the outside circle grade the participants' conversation with a rubric, then give feedback on what they saw in a debriefing afterward, as mentioned in the featured video.

Basic Structure: One student assumes the role of a book character, significant figure in history, or concept (such as a tornado, an animal, or the Titanic). Sitting in front of the rest of the class, the student responds to classmates' questions while staying in character in that role.

Variations: Give more students the opportunity to be in the hot seat while increasing everyone's participation by having students do hot seat discussions in small groups, where one person per group acts as the "character" and three or four others ask them questions. In another variation, several students could form a panel of different characters, taking questions from the class all together and interacting with one another like guests on a TV talk show.
a.k.a. Pyramid Discussion
Basic Structure: Students begin in pairs, responding to a discussion question only with a single partner. After each person has had a chance to share their ideas, the pair joins another pair, creating a group of four. Pairs share their ideas with the pair they just joined. Next, groups of four join together to form groups of eight, and so on, until the whole class is joined up in one large discussion.

Variations: This structure could simply be used to share ideas on a topic, or students could be required to reach consensus every time they join up with a new group.

Whereas the other formats in this list have a distinct shape-specific activities you do with students-the strategies in this section are more like plug-ins, working discussion into other instructional activities and improving the quality and reach of existing conversations.

One of the limitations of discussion is that rich, face-to-face conversations can only happen when all parties are available, so we're limited to the time we have in class. With a tool like Voxer, those limitations disappear. Like a private voice mailbox that you set up with just one person or a group (but SOOOO much easier), Voxer allows users to have conversations at whatever time is most convenient for each participant. So a group of four students can "discuss" a topic from 3pm until bedtime-asynchronously-each member contributing whenever they have a moment, and if the teacher makes herself part of the group, she can listen in, offer feedback, or contribute her own discussion points. Voxer is also invaluable for collaborating on projects and for having one-on-one discussions with students, parents, and your own colleagues. Like many other educators, Peter DeWitt took a while to really understand the potential of Voxer, but in this EdWeek piece, he explains what turned him around.

A backchannel is a conversation that happens right alongside another activity. The first time I saw a backchannel in action was at my first unconference: While those of us in the audience listened to presenters and watched a few short video clips, a separate screen was up beside the main screen, projecting something called TodaysMeet (update: TodaysMeet has shut down. Use YoTeach! instead.) It looked a lot like those chat rooms from back in the day, basically a blank screen where people would contribute a few lines of text, the lines stacking up one after the other, no other bells or whistles. Anyone in the room could participate in this conversation on their phone, laptop, or tablet, asking questions, offering commentary, and sharing links to related resources without ever interrupting the flow of the presentations. This kind of tool allows for a completely silent discussion, one that doesn't have to move at a super-fast pace, and it gives students who may be reluctant to speak up or who process their thoughts more slowly a chance to fully contribute. For a deeper discussion of how this kind of tool can be used, read this thoughtful overview of using backchannel discussions in the classroom by Edutopia's Beth Holland.
a.k.a. Accountable Talk
Talk moves are sentence frames we supply to our students that help them express ideas and interact with one another in respectful, academically appropriate ways. From kindergarten all the way through college, students can benefit from explicit instruction in the skills of summarizing another person's argument before presenting an alternate view, asking clarifying questions, and expressing agreement or partial agreement with the stance of another participant. Talk moves can be incorporated into any of the other discussion formats listed here.

Whole Brain Teaching is a set of teaching and classroom management methods that has grown in popularity over the past 10 years. One of WBT's foundational techniques is Teach-OK, a peer teaching strategy that begins with the teacher spending a few minutes introducing a concept to the class. Next, the teacher says Teach!, the class responds with Okay!, and pairs of students take turns re-teaching the concept to each other. It's a bit like think-pair-share, but it's faster-paced, it focuses more on re-teaching than general sharing, and students are encouraged to use gestures to animate their discussion. Although WBT is most popular in elementary schools, this featured video shows the creator of WBT, Chris Biffle, using it quite successfully with college students. I have also used Teach-OK with college students, and most of my students said they were happy for a change from the sit-and-listen they were used to in college classrooms.

An oldie but a goodie, think-pair-share can be used any time you want to plug interactivity into a lesson: Simply have students think about their response to a question, form a pair with another person, discuss their response, then share it with the larger group. Because I feel this strategy has so many uses and can be way more powerful than we give it credit for, I devoted a whole post to think-pair-share; everything you need to know about it is right there.

TWO MORE YOU'LL LOVE

Since writing this post, I have learned about two more discussion strategies that teachers are finding to be incredibly effective and powerful for getting students to talk, especially about books and other texts:

This protocol has students come up with their own Thoughts, lingering Questions, and Epiphanies from an assigned reading. Teachers who have used this method say it has generated some of the richest conversations they have ever heard from students!

This strategy places students into one-on-one conversations, getting them to learn each others' names better and create a track record of what they talked about. Excellent for classes where you want to assess for discussion and help students get more comfortable with each other.

So what else do you have? I would like to think this is a pretty complete list, but I'm sure more strategies are out there. If you use a discussion strategy that's not mentioned here, please share it below.

Come back for more.
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The Big List of Class Discussion Strategies

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Here they are: 15 formats for structuring a class discussion to make it more engaging, more organized, more equitable, and more academically challenging.

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Discussion-Based Teaching and Handling Controversial Topics in the Classroom

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Discussion-Based Teaching and Handling Controversial Topics in the Classroom

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Discussions help students apply abstract ideas and think critically about what they learn. In fact, studies show that discussions build students' problem-solving skills more effectively than do lectures. However, fostering productive discussions can be difficult for even the most experienced instructors. The articles in this section offer tips on preparing for discussions, asking questions that promote discussion, getting students to talk, and handling common problems that arise during discussions.

Using Discussion Questions Effectively (CRLT)
Strategies for encouraging student engagement and critical thinking through effective questioning.

IDEA Paper #49: Effective Classroom Discussions (IDEA Center, Cashin, 2011)
Explores the strengths and weaknesses of discussion approaches, and suggests 18 recommendations for improving discussion in college courses.

IDEA Paper #31: Answering and Asking Questions (IDEA Center, Cashin, 1995)
This paper is concerned with the answering and asking of questions in college-level courses. It makes suggestions regarding questioning techniques that are appropriate for lecture classes as well as for discussion groups.

FAQs: Leading Discussions (Middendorf et al., 2010)
This document provides solutions to several common questions about leading discussions, including how to keep conversations flowing, and how to handle "discussion monopolizers."

The Dreaded Discussion: Ten Ways to Start (Frederick, 1981)
Listing of ten ways to start a discussion, adapted from Frederick's article in Improving College and University Teaching.

Guidelines for Classroom Interactions: This CRLT page provides examples of class discussion or interaction guidelines and guidance on how to develop them.

Handling Controversial Topics in Discussion

Many instructors consciously avoid controversial issues in the classroom because of the difficulty involved in managing heated discussions. However, controversy can be a useful, powerful, and memorable tool to promote learning. Research has demonstrated that conflict or controversy during classroom discussion can promote cognitive gains in complex reasoning, integrated thinking, and decision-making. The links in this section offer guidance for how instructors can successfully manage discussions on controversial topics.

Managing Hot Moments in the Classroom (Warren, 2000)
Handling controversial topics and heated discussions can be stressful and difficult. However, controversy can be a powerful tool to promote learning. This article offers instructors practical strategies for turning difficult encounters into learning opportunities.

CRLT Guidance on High-Stakes Discussions
CRLT has often provided guidance to help instructors facilitate classroom discussion when controversial or tragic incidents loom large in students' minds. This page includes both general guidance on facilitating high-stakes topics and an archive of guidance in response to particular historic moments and controversies (e.g., Hurricane Katrina, the War in Iraq, 9/11).

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Discussion-Based Teaching and Handling Controversial Topics in the Classroom

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Discussions help students apply abstract ideas and think critically about what they learn. In fact, studies show that discussions build students' problem-solving skills more effectively than do lectures. However, fostering productive discussions can be difficult for even the most experienced instructors.

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Arguing for Agency: One Student-led Classroom Debate at a Time

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Arguing for Agency: One Student-led Classroom Debate at a Time

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Understanding the ins and outs of the COVID-19 pandemic can be difficult-information changes almost daily, and public health guidelines shift, too. For schools grappling with these changes, it can be confusing. But it's also a powerful learning opportunity for students: a chance to foster critical thinking skills and engage students in informed decision-making.

Brooklyn Laboratory Charter Schools (LAB) has partnered with renowned Chicago-based firm Argument Centered Education (ACE) to develop a suite of free, to encourage teachers, students, and families to have discussions and debate about different aspects of the pandemic and appropriate responses and protocols that can minimize risk and keep communities safe and healthy. Our goal is to help school communities work through available evidence and take ownership of public health informed, equitable choices along the way.

Our strategy is simple: Responding to the pandemic ultimately is about changing norms, behaviors, and priorities, and that means our community of students and families must shift how they operate. We are challenging our community to argue for its agency-to take ownership of good decisions based on factual information. According to ACE, "debatifying" the curriculum, as we are doing in this project, gives students an opportunity for deeper learning because it builds their agency by exercising their criticality. They are exploring different points of view, challenging each other's assumptions, and debating the options regarding what constitutes the best solution.

Guided by ACE, Brooklyn LAB has identified two different projects that revolve around COVID-related "debatable questions."

The first question deals with COVID-19 protocol enforcement and discipline: Should schools implement and enforce common coronavirus mitigation policies at the staff member or administrator level, or should students and teachers be called upon to act responsibly and self-enforce? The second question focuses on in-person school: Should schools restore full or hybrid in-person learning before a COVID-19 vaccine is available?

By doing research, developing positions, and then debating all sides of these questions, students not only learn about the scientific, public health, and public policy questions that swirl around COVID-19, they learn to apply critical literacy skills and to develop their own views. This kind of evidence-based argumentative discourse strengthens student voice.

The project also illustrates how there's not always one right solution. The first question is a good example of that: students can make strong arguments on both sides. At its core, this challenge has to do with the best way to build a culture in a particular community, top down or bottom up? Our teachers and students have noted that the underlying question is similar to ideas that propelled restorative justice practices in schools: the possibility that administratively enforced suspension and code-of-behavior policies, while more direct and certainly more traditional, may not be as effective as student-enforced credos.

"Sure, mandates might get people into compliance, but schools also might be able to build a community culture around the response to COVID-19 if they are intentional about putting students in the actual forefront," said LAB Academic Director Bennison Ntsakey. "Making arguments on all sides of this issue is a way for students to test and possibly apply progressive education theories in the context of the current pandemic that is so directly affecting their lives."

We have seen how this issue queues up various practical questions of school governance that students are invited to think through. Should schools create student panels for enforcement of COVID-19 mitigation? What should punishments be if students or other constituents are caught violating protocols? Should violators receive a warning? How will the solution to this problem affect the way a school solves other complicated issues down the road?

The second project is a bit more straightforward, but it allows students to explore different points of view based on their research and their lived experience, which creates a nuanced debate. Students can pull information from the headlines, whether it's a recent Nicholas Kristof column in The New York Times or perspective from the American Academy of Pediatrics about how in-person learning is best for the mental health of most American students.

For this question, students have a chance to make equity-based arguments, noting that when kids are in school for eight hours a day, every student in the school essentially is on a level playing field. On the one hand, having all kids in school serves this crucial and fundamental goal of public education. On the other hand, it may further spread the virus.

As students dig through and weigh the evidence to develop their arguments, they have a chance to consider the conditions under which either approach should be applied.

ACE supports students and teachers with a slate of resources for each question. For instance, Media Lists organize primary and secondary source material into three categories: background information, sources favoring one position, and sources favoring another position. LAB has supplemented ACE tools with materials compiled by teachers.

Because argument-centered instruction is so active and student-centered, it gives students more agency over their education, which can be more effective in promoting learning, particularly among students with higher needs. MAPS Corps Executive Director Dr. Nia Abdullah put the point this way, in a recent Education Post article:

As the former principal of a small urban, high-needs, extremely trauma-impacted high school, and later a comprehensive, majority Black and Brown suburban high school, I have witnessed firsthand the power of classroom-level debates on controversial current events to heal wounds, while simultaneously engaging African-American males in rigorous academic instruction that prepares them for college, career, and civic life.

Sure, it's unlikely that members of our community will be called upon by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to offer their insights on pandemic response. But they are examining and sifting and weighing for themselves the critical information on COVID-19, and then making their own decisions. By facilitating an environment in which students and families use credible data to inform their own perspectives, we believe we can create a more informed community that is willing to do what it must to protect its members.

At LAB, we are applying an argument-centered approach to a crucial current issue in our students' lives in order to educate and empower them. Together, we are arguing for agency, one debate at a time.

For more, see:

Preparing for a Healthy and Safe Return to School: Public School Facilities Planning in the Era of COVID-19

The Better Arguments Project

Educating All Learners Alliance Launches Flagship Site, Shares Personas Educators Can Use to Understand Students' Lived Experience During COVID-19

Schools Need a Success Coach for Every Learner

Resolved: Debate Can Revolutionize Education and Help Save Our Democracy , Robert Litan (Brookings Institution, 2020)

Preparing to Reopen: Six Principles That Put Equity at the Core

They Say, I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Writing , Cathy Birkenstein & Gerald Graff (W.W. Norton, 2019)

To Reopen, America Needs Laboratory Schools

How to Reopen Schools: A 10-Point Plan Putting Equity at the Center

Reopening Schools: A Scheduling Map for Educators to Plan the Who, What, When, Where, and How of Learning this Fall

The Front Porch: A New Approach to Support the Health, Safety, and Well-Being of Our School Communities

Safeguarding Back to School: Preparation for a Healthy Return to School in Downtown Brooklyn

Les Lynn is the founder and director of Argument-Centered Education. Since 2013, Argument-Centered Education has been helping districts, networks, administrators, and teachers become effective in organizing and implementing instruction around engaging, balanced, and arguable questions at the center of the high school and middle school curriculum

Eric Tucker is the co-founder and Executive Director of Brooklyn Laboratory Charter Schools. He has served as a teacher and instructional leader in Providence and Chicago. He is former Director at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the co-founder and Executive Director of the National Association for Urban Debate Leagues. Eric is also a member of the Getting Smart advisory board.

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Arguing for Agency: One Student-led Classroom Debate at a Time

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Understanding the ins and outs of the COVID-19 pandemic can be difficult-information changes almost daily, and public health guidelines shift, too. For schools grappling with these changes, it can be confusing. But it's also a powerful learning opportunity for students: a chance to foster critical thinking skills and engage students in informed decision-making.

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Master new skills, explore new ideas, and build your teaching toolbox with our growing library of on-demand professional development resources. Professional development is available on demand and through live online webinars.

or learn more about...

We're here to help

Not sure how to best implement Professional Development into your classroom? iCivics offers downloadable comprehensive guides, tips, and tricks for each of our resource guides to help facilitate a seamless experience.

Download Support Files Explore PD FAQ

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Master new skills, explore new ideas, and build your teaching toolbox with our growing library of on-demand professional development resources. Professional development is available on demand and through live online webinars. or learn more about... Not sure how to best implement Professional Development into your classroom?

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Street Law has developed a robust library of Deliberation resources including materials for several Deliberation topics, social-emotional learning resources to support students as they participate in Deliberations, and an instructional video and handouts to help teachers and students understand the Deliberation process.

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Fostering Civil Discourse: How Do We Talk About Issues That Matter?

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The ideas and tools in this guide will help you prepare students to engage in reflective conversations on topics that matter, whether you are in a remote, hybrid, or in-person setting.

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Following the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, suggestions for educators and parents on how to support productive conversations around traumatic events.

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The Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Balancing Act

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The Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Balancing Act

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As educators prepare for teaching courses online this fall, some of us will face adjusted schedules that provide less live class time than we used to have when teaching students in person. Furthermore, many instructors have found they can engage with less material in a live online session than they can in an equally long live in-person session.

All of this implies that we will have to make some hard decisions about what material to keep in our live sessions (synchronously), what material to ask students to engage with on their own time (asynchronously), and what material to simply cut out.

To help steer your thinking, here are two key questions to ask yourself.

1. How should I split my content into synchronous and asynchronous material?

2. How can I leverage asynchronous learning to help me conduct better synchronous sessions?

Here's how I've been thinking through these questions after spending time in the past few years working with colleagues to design and implement blended learning experiences in degree programs and in executive education.

Find the Right Split Between Synchronous and Asynchronous Materials

The answer to the first question depends on what you think is the comparative advantage of a live class session over activities your students can do asynchronously. In other words, for what learning activities does being together make a difference? This will vary based on your learning goals, the material you teach, and your style of teaching.

Here's what I think are reasonably general principles.

Synchronous learning is better when you think it is important to have the following:

Exchanges of perspectives among your students.

Students learning from each other.

Interactions in which you're playing the role of facilitator or mediator.

Opportunities to build community.

Asynchronous learning is better when you think it is important to have the following:

Students developing a common foundation before class (especially of basic ideas or concepts).

An assessment of your students' perspectives or background on the subject, as this will affect how live classes would be conducted.

Students being able to engage with the material at their own pace. This is especially useful if prior knowledge of the material varies a lot across students.

Students spending a substantial amount of time pondering and reflecting.

If you've applied the principles above but are still doubting whether you should assign a particular material to a synchronous or an asynchronous session, consider applying the following test to decide.

The Laundry Test

Where I teach, online classes generally get recorded; students can watch the recorded videos if they cannot attend the live session. I recently asked a student how she decided whether to engage in the live class or watch the recording later. Her answer was revealing. She said, "When I am trying to decide, I ask myself, 'Is this a class I could attend while folding my laundry?' If the answer is yes, I watch the recording. If the answer is no, I attend the live session."

While I think that, in general, we should design both synchronous and asynchronous experiences that students find so engaging that they cannot fold the laundry at the same time, I think the spirit of this question might help inform your decision of what to reserve for asynchronous learning. If the students can conceivably fold their laundry while engaging in the experience, my advice is to either eliminate it or reserve it for asynchronous learning.

"Design asynchronous material in a way that allows you to collect information about your students that you can then use to conduct better synchronous sessions."

Use Asynchronous Learning to Conduct Better Synchronous Sessions

To answer the second question, it's helpful to design asynchronous material in a way that allows you to collect information about your students that you can then use to conduct better synchronous sessions. This mixing of asynchronous and synchronous components is sometimes referred to as a blended learning approach, the three key steps of which I have summarized below.

Some instructors either skip or don't leverage step two to its fullest benefit. Here are some ideas of information you can gather through a survey or quiz (in step one) and then review (in step two) before class, so that you can use it to make your live classes more engaging (in step three).

"If students can conceivably fold their laundry while engaging in an experience, my advice is to either eliminate it or reserve it for asynchronous learning."

An Example: Blended Learning in Action

Imagine this: You ask your students to read an article or a case study, which concludes by asking them to express a preference or take a position-something along the lines of, "Given the evidence presented in this article, which of these three positions do you think is the most reasonable?" You then provide three choices in a multiple-choice poll question.

Or with a case study, the question might be, "If you were in the shoes of the case's protagonist, what would you decide?" Again, give students three choices in a multiple-choice question. On either occasion, you would follow the multiple-choice question with another question that asks the students to justify the choice they made in a short paragraph.
Leveraging student responses to survey questions before class
You look at the data corresponding to the first question and see that over half of the students favor option B, and also notice that very few students favored option A. You start planning for your live session and think about strategies you might employ to make sure that option A gets a fair representation in the class discussion.

You start pouring over the answers to the second question and notice that Ruth, who favored option A, made a very compelling argument for this choice. You decide you will want to call on Ruth when the live session happens. Furthermore, you see that Varun, who voted for option C, has an argument that contrasts with Ruth's argument in an interesting way and decide that after calling on Ruth you might want to call on Varun to have a debate.

Armed with this information, you now go into your live class with a much better sense of where your students are and a good plan to leverage their work in the asynchronous session to conduct a more engaging and vibrant live class session.

When you start the live class session, you call on Ruth and Varun as you planned, and a vigorous debate ensues. Then you want to bring someone who favored option B-you look for a student who voted for option B and notice that three students have their virtual hand up but only Beatriz voted for option B. You call on Beatriz. And so on. Magic happens. The students don't even know how, but you have just orchestrated an engaging discussion in a way that they have rarely seen. And all of this happened because you took some time to think about what information you wanted to know about your student engagement with the asynchronous material, collected this information, and used this information to inform your class plan.

Frequently Asked Questions

When you employ the blended learning approach just illustrated, the following questions may emerge:
How do I make sure students complete what I ask them to do in the asynchronous part-the poll question, for example?
This will depend on your institutional context, but consider making the completion of these "pre-class exercises" part of the course grade. I recommend that you consider grading for completion (or perhaps effort), but not whether they got the right answers.
This sounds great, but I don't have time to do this for every class. What do I do?
You don't have to do this for every class. Like with everything else in teaching, my advice is to start small. Experiment doing this for a couple of classes in your next course. Or to save time, only pose multiple-choice (or numeric) questions without seeking explanatory text. See how it goes. You will learn a lot. You can then tweak and do more the following time. Or you might decide that it doesn't work for you and not do it again.
When should students do the asynchronous work?
The exact coordination of timing between the synchronous and asynchronous work will depend on many factors, but in general you want the asynchronous work that will inform your live class plan to be due sometime before class. If your live class is at 9 a.m., you can make the assignment due the day before to give yourself some time to go over the information and adjust your class plan. Even if it's due shortly before your class session, you might have enough data by the previous day to at least start making some decisions, and you can then make some final tweaks just prior to class.

In summary, reserve for your live sessions the learning experiences that truly benefit from being together with your students at the same time. Whenever you ask students to engage with asynchronous material before class, collect some information from them that will allow you to teach a more productive and engaging live session.
This article is based on Dan Levy's new book, Teaching Effectively with Zoom.

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The Synchronous vs. Asynchronous Balancing Act

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As educators prepare for teaching courses online this fall, some of us will face adjusted schedules that provide less live class time than we used to have when teaching students in person. Furthermore, many instructors have found they can engage with less material in a live online session than they can in an equally long live in-person session.

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Teacher, Are You There? Being "Present" in Online Learning

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Teacher, Are You There? Being "Present" in Online Learning

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Connecting with others in powerful, human ways is possible to do online. It just takes awareness and a few simple steps.

Credit: Biscotto Design / Shutterstock.com © 2021

This article is part of a series about incorporating asynchronous video into educational activities:
What learning experiences have been most substantial in your life? How many of those were special because of the people there with you, assisting you in your journey?

One student, Steven, enrolled in an online program because it fit his work and family situation best. He enjoyed the content of the classes, but mostly he had forgettable experiences and even some frustrating ones. At the end, he could not name any of his teachers or fellow students, and consequently he felt no connection to the university at all-except for one professor. This professor had reached out to him, had conversations with him, and served as a mentor. When Steven graduated, he attended graduation ceremonies mostly to see this one professor, the one who had made a connection.

A common misunderstanding about education is that it is primarily focused on brains, information, and memory. While learning certainly involves attempting to get things to "stick" in our heads, it is much more-it is about change and growth. Education is the learning of new information, yes, but also developing new skills, values, behaviors, feelings (you can "learn to love" for example), culture, and ways of living and interacting with the world. These things are often best learned through relationships, as the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky believed, and he argued we first learn things with others before we can internalize them ourselves.

As online education continues to expand, we have learned that effective learning involves human relationships-even if we are not physically together in a classroom. While it is possible to participate in a course in which the student reads a textbook, completes assignments, and takes exams without ever communicating with an instructor, that type of experience is often hollow. Richard Culatta, former director of the Office of Educational Technology for the US Department of Education and current Chief Executive Officer for the International Society for Technology in Education, said, "Learning is inherently social," before adding, "We need to see a shift in using tech less for presenting content and more as a tool to design, create, explore, and connect."

Video technologies are part of that shift in helping online learners feel connected to teachers and peers. This connection comes from people developing the sense that they are "present" in the class, even if they are not physically in the same room. How is it possible to be present when you are physically separated?

1. Show the Real You

In all human relationships, we feel closer to someone who seems authentic and similar to ourselves. For example, Jimmy Fallon, John Krasinski, and other celebrities were able to expand their popularity during the COVID-19 home quarantines of 2020 by recording their shows at home. Family interruptions, dressing "down," and sneak peaks at their homes (Jimmy Fallon has a slide!) helped them feel more real and human to their viewers.

As another example, Joe Wicks, the "Body Coach," grew astronomically in popularity as he led the world in daily physical education exercises during the home quarantine period. One regular feature of his workout videos was that he would change out the items on the shelves behind him (see figure 1) and invite viewers to guess what was new. He would then describe each item and explain why it was special to him.

Figure 1. Joe Wicks workout at home

For teachers, although it may be inappropriate to share some aspects of our personal lives with students, we can still shorten the distance between us and the students by showing some parts of our authentic selves. One time I was recording a video to my students and my toddler climbed up on my lap, interrupting me. At first I was frustrated by this interruption. However, later my students said, "It's really fun to see you at home. You're like a regular person!" For another example, consider this video of Chris Haskell, a clinical associate professor at Boise State University. How do the items in his background help you understand Haskell as a professional? What about as a person?

Chris Haskell video showing part of his home [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bCZkhdrn0k&t=4s]

Tip! Record videos from different locations in your home, office, or community. While you should be careful not to overdo it, a few seconds showing your personality can make learning fun. As an example, Lloyd Rieber of the University of Georgia recorded introductions to his videos from his farm, sitting next to his favorite cow, before moving on to the formal instruction parts of the lesson. Years later, students may not remember everything Rieber taught, but they will remember who he was as a person.

Lloyd Rieber teaching about needs assessment after feeding Anabelle

2. Express (the Right) Emotions

Our eyes, ears, and other senses have evolved to take in a tremendous amount of information each second. Not only do we hear or see what someone has said or shown us; we also notice, unconsciously, details about how the message was communicated. For example, a simple statement such as, "I am so happy to see you today!" can carry the opposite meaning if you say it with a furrowed brow, terse tone, rolled eyes, or crossed arms. As another example, animators have become so skillful at using nonverbal communication that an entire story can be told without any dialogue. See, for example, Pixar's popular shorts "For the Birds" or "Geri's Game."

Some teachers are skilled at showing emotion in online videos. They smile, get excited, show surprise, lean closer to the camera, and otherwise talk to the students instead of to the camera. Students notice this and feel more connected to these teachers. Consequently they are more likely to reach out to those instructors if they have questions or need assistance and to feel more engaged in the courses. As an example, these two student quotes illustrate the connections that are possible in a class where the instructor used asynchronous video:

"It was like he was having a conversation with me even though I wasn't responding. He was talking to me as if I was right there in front of him."

"It seems like we are actually having that conversation even though we're not."

Meanwhile, other instructors are less skilled at showing emotions in their videos, and they come across as disinterested. Students in these classes do not feel the same sense of connection with their instructors and may even prefer text communication instead.

Tip! Your students will be more connected to you if they feel that you are talking to them directly. When recording your video, look at your camera instead of at your screen and imagine the student(s) you are talking to. They are really there...on the other end of the internet! Also, remember to smile, and greet your students when you begin, before launching into your instructional material.

Tip! Just as we can show positive emotions in a video, we can also easily show negative ones. For this reason, be careful not to record a video while you are frustrated-the students will probably notice and might misunderstand what you are trying to communicate.

Practice! Rewatch a video you record for your class, or ask a friend to watch it and provide you with feedback. Try watching it with and without sound. What emotions do you see, or is your video emotionless? (Remember "Bueller? Bueller?") Are those the emotions you want to express? Now try recording the video again with a different emotional angle. Can your friend pick up the difference? Which would they prefer to see from their instructor?

3. Personalize Your Videos

When we communicate in person, we personalize the way we talk by referring to someone's name, or referencing something we have in common ("Isn't the weather great today? Are you enjoying your walk?"). Using the exact same phrases to talk to everyone, without any variety, would feel awkward. Similarly, in online communications, we can increase the feeling that we are "present" with our students if we customize our communications with them. Undoubtedly, there are times when it is better to be efficient. If most students make the same mistake on an assignment, we might copy and paste a reply to them. If we didn't do this, we might not have time to give them feedback at all, and students appreciate receiving the feedback!

However, when we are trying to establish a connection with students, these canned responses can seem cold and clinical rather than personal. Instead, if we reference shared experiences or specific things about the student we are talking to, that student feels important and understood. For example, an instructor might provide feedback on an assignment by using the student's name and referencing their work or a snippet of a past conversation: "Sara, I remember you said you were from the Midwest, and I loved seeing you reference your hometown in your paper. It made me want to visit! I do have some feedback for you...."

Tip! In large classes, keep a notepad or computer document handy where you can write notes about students so that you can refer to them later. Doing this can help you remember what conversations you have had with which students-it is unlikely that they will forget! Referencing these previous interactions will give the students, and you, a sense of a continuing conversation-one in which they are active participants.

Tip! Sometimes creating video discussions that are not directly related to the content of the class can be really helpful in establishing a positive learning community atmosphere. With in-person learning, teachers will often chit-chat with students before, during, and after class. This casual conversation can be helpful in making students feel noticed and important to the teacher. Online, these conversations need to be created intentionally. Try creating a "chit chat" thread for students to talk to each other and you about off-topic things, or have a weekly thread where you suggest a current-events topic and ask students to record video responses. Be sure to reply to them and continue the conversation! As one example, when the 2020 COVID-19 quarantine began in the United States, I created a thread for students to share short, asynchronous video clips about how they were handling the directive to stay at home, which helped us find the good in the situation. They shared that they enjoyed spending time with family, watching movies, and catching up on sleep, and we developed a greater sense of a shared experience as we talked with each other about the current state of society.

Conclusion

Charles Graham, well known author on blended learning, said, "Many learners want the convenience offered by a distributed environment, and, at the same time, do not want to sacrifice the social interactions and human touch they are used to in a F2F classroom." We can increase this sense of the "human touch" in all of our interactions, including through text. However, video has a particular power to convey our humanity. In particular, asynchronous video can provide some of the convenience of online learning without sacrificing the human connection. If we personalize our videos to the students, express emotions, and strive to show them a little of who we really are as people, this can increase the feeling that we are "present" together in the class, even if we are physically separated. This feeling of presence can increase student engagement and satisfaction with the course, as well as students' feeling of connection and appreciation for the instructor.

Acknowledgment

This series of articles was written with the support of EdConnect.

Notes

1. Richard Culatta, personal communication, December 21, 2020.

2. Charles R. Graham, "Blended Learning Systems: Definition, Current Trends, and Future Directions," in The Handbook of Blended Learning: Global Perspectives, Local Designs, eds. Curtis J. Bonk and Charles R. Graham (San Francisco: Pfeiffer Publishing, 2006), 9.

Richard E. West is Associate Professor in the Instructional Psychology & Technology department at Brigham Young University.

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Teacher, Are You There? Being "Present" in Online Learning

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Connecting with others in powerful, human ways is possible to do online. It just takes awareness and a few simple steps.

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Co-Facilitated Discussions to Truly Engage Your Online Students with Course Content 

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Co-Facilitated Discussions to Truly Engage Your Online Students with Course Content 

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Faculty Focus | Higher Ed Teaching & Learning

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Asynchronous online discussions (AOD) are commonly used by online course instructors who want their students to reflect on the course content and express their personal understanding, while also responding to and interacting with their peers and/or instructors about the content (Milman et al., 2012). The idea behind asynchronous online discussions is that online learning takes place in a social-collaborative learning environment where online students can benefit and learn from each other's ideas and perspectives (Xie & Ke, 2011). There are many ways in which instructors might use AODs in their online courses, but traditionally, online students are asked in discussions to post once and respond a specific number of times. A challenge with this strategy is that once each student completes their postings and responses, they often quit reading, responding to, and engaging with what others say or think about the issue or topic under study, thus missing out on useful insights and experiences. One effective solution is to incorporate peer moderation or facilitation of online discussions, which I have been using in my own online courses since summer 2020 when I read Milman's (2014) article about co-facilitation of online discussions.

In my own online courses, I use student co-facilitation strategy in which two to four students work together to facilitate a particular online discussion each week (Milman, 2014). In each online discussion, my online students first individually post a reflective summary of the content (e.g., pdf readings, my lecture videos) with a specific question they pose at the end of their summary. All of these end-of-summary questions account for the questions to be discussed in each online discussion. Then, the co-facilitation is started by the assigned co-facilitators of that discussion thread and the co-facilitators start addressing their peers' questions and comments. The other students are not only required to respond to at least three peer comments or questions but also expected to respond to at least one co-facilitator comment or question to get full discussion participation credit. The co-facilitators close their discussion threads by first making a summary of what has been discussed and then posting their personal reflections on their co-facilitation experience (Milman, 2014).

How did my online students find this strategy? Well, for three semesters including spring 2021, my students reported going beyond what was required, gaining greater insights, and learning the content in depth when they were asked to co-facilitate an online discussion. Here is a snapshot of what they thought about co-facilitation in online discussions:

" With prior classes, I knew discussions posts could get monotonous, so I thought doing this would prevent that as well as improve the learning experience."

" Overall, I am really glad that we got assigned co-facilitators, not only for the ease of the assignment but also for the support system that we get setup with. Overall, a wonderful experience."

" Overall, this was a pleasant experience, I enjoyed digging a little deeper to answer my peer's questions. Some questions were a little tougher than others, but it just added to this experience."

" After co-facilitating, I can really see the value of the maxim 'the best way to learn a subject is to teach it to someone else.' It was certainly a unique challenge since I had the same foundation as my peers in this subject, yet I was tasked with engaging with my peers on a deeper level and diving further into the material. In the end, not only do I feel I had a positive impact on my peers' learning, but I better understood the material myself."

" I actually enjoyed being a co-facilitator because in most online class discussions, I will just try to make my comments and get the grade but this time I had to take a moment and think about not only my response but what other classmates had to say."

If I have you convinced (hopefully to some extent) to use co-facilitated discussions in your own online courses, here's how you can begin implementing co-facilitated discussions. Below I offer some design guidelines of co-facilitation that you can adapt to your own unique online context:

Provide an autonomy-supportive structure

At the beginning of the semester, I provide my online students (via course syllabus and intro emails) with a clear and autonomy-supportive structure guiding them step-by-step for their co-facilitation assignment. They have the full freedom and control over deciding how to co-facilitate their assigned discussions. During this planning process, I always encourage them to reach out to me if they have any questions/concerns about co-facilitating.

Basically, I expect co-facilitators to:

1. Communicate with their assigned team members, and plan and prepare for their co-facilitation by reviewing the specific content of their discussion topic

2. Equally distribute the responsibilities among themselves based on their own decisions

3. Co-facilitate their assigned discussion thread by having their peers discuss comments and questions using positive and supportive language (e.g., kindly inviting peers to discuss, posing interesting questions, making substantive comments to their peers' postings, offering practical solutions, encouraging peer participation, arousing curiosity etc.)

4. Model politeness and respect using netiquette

5. Support their peers' understanding with their substantive comments and non-judgmental responses

Provide authentic examples of co-facilitation

Students ask for concrete examples of how they should be co-facilitating a discussion, what language they should use, how they should approach a peer comment or question, etc. Give them a few examples such as the following:
That's a great point! I hadn't thought of it that way. I definitely would agree that engagement is a critical issue. What about the effect of motivation on engagement? So, to answer your question more directly, I agree that they do not create lasting effects. However, I think it gives students something to look forward to or something materialized. If you feel like it, I invite you to look at Bob's reflection where he discussed the impact of COVID on student motivation to study. I like how you talked about the example you learned in your history class and how that can be applied to what we have discussed so far in class. You definitely have a great understanding of this topic!
Keep your online presence alive

While the students are discussing and the co-facilitators are doing their jobs, I lean back and monitor each conversation just to make sure that everything is going right. I post once or twice in each discussion thread to indicate that I am there and reading their responses. I use postings such as:

" Wow, this seems to be a lively discussion going on with really interesting questions to be answered. Looking forward to the answers!"

I also send regular encouragement and appreciation emails to the co-facilitators (while their co-facilitation is going on) to show that their work and effort are greatly appreciated. This makes them feel recognized by the course instructor and gives them further motivation to do more throughout the course.

Since I started using this in summer 2020, co-facilitation has been an integral component of my online courses simply because almost of all my online students have reported positive reviews from it. Online discussions do not have to be one-way, fragmented, and boring monologues. You can easily turn them into meaningful, purposeful, and vibrant student conversations by using this co-facilitation strategy in your online courses so that your students engage more meaningfully and deeply with the content. They may also find themselves interacting more purposefully with their peers and working hard to support one another during their online learning journeys. And remember, when you assign your online students as facilitating leaders of specific discussion threads, they take greater ownership of those discussions, making them much more likely to truly engage with the learning content (Picciano, 2019).
Murat Turk is a graduate research and teaching assistant, and a digital learning designer teaching online courses at the University of Oklahoma. He designs and implements online courses based on social-collaborative and social-constructivist learning principles. He is also doing research on online presence, student motivation, and engagement in online learning environments. References (APA 7th)
Milman, N. B. (2014). Scaffolding student facilitation of online discussions. Distance Learning for Educators, Trainers, and Leaders, 11(4), 25-27. https://www.usdla.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Vol.-11-No.-4-2014.pdf

Milman, N. B., Hillarious, M., & Walker, B. (2012). An exploratory qualitative analysis of graduate student learning and division of labor resulting from student cofacilitation of an asynchronous online discussion. Quarterly Review of Distance Education, 13(2), 51-64. https://jgregorymcverry.com/readings/milmanhillariouswalker2012onlinediscussions.pdf

Picciano, A. G. (2019). Online education: Foundations, planning, and pedagogy. Routledge.

Xie, K., & Ke, F. (2011). The role of students' motivation in peer-moderated asynchronous online discussions. British Journal of Educational Technology, 42(6), 916-930. Professional Development Collection. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8535.2010.01140.x

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Co-Facilitated Discussions to Truly Engage Your Online Students with Course Content | Faculty Focus

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Asynchronous online discussions (AOD) are commonly used by online course instructors who want their students to reflect on the course content and express their personal understanding, while also responding to and interacting with their peers and/or instructors about the content (Milman et al., 2012).

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Ludic Pedagogy: Schooling Our Students in Fun

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Ludic Pedagogy: Schooling Our Students in Fun

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Faculty Focus | Higher Ed Teaching & Learning

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As much of the higher education experience has moved online in the throes of a global pandemic, there is much discourse about how to survive and thrive in this new-and possibly permanently changed-educational environment. Many instructors have endorsed (and even demanded) an increase in student surveillance to curtail cheating. Others have called for new, improved online learning management systems to streamline delivery and assessment. Meanwhile, faculty have argued that unrealistic production expectations have led to increasing rates of burnout for both students and instructors.

Where's the fun in this hypervigilant, restrictive, and punitive culture? Does it have to be this way?

While issues such as organized delivery and meaningful assessment are important elements in teaching and learning, we suggest that what will carry us through the pandemic days, and indeed long thereafter, are positive classroom experiences. Such experiences should not be considered those that are simply free from tyranny, but those that are demonstrably enjoyable and, dare we say, fun. While suggesting a positive or fun environment is hardly notable in and of itself, what is notable is the remarkable dearth of academic literature about creating and fostering fun in the higher education classroom.

To remedy this unforgivable oversight, we propose Ludic Pedagogy as a teaching philosophy that embraces the importance of fun, play, playfulness, and humor-without sacrificing academic or intellectual rigor. This philosophy integrates positive aspects and helps faculty create a learning environment that is less stressful-and (gasp!) enjoyable-for student and instructor alike, while increasing engagement, motivation, and learning outcomes.

Fun is an intrinsic motivator: the feeling that drives us to play chess, go rock climbing, or dance. Traditionally, education has employed grades as an extrinsic motivator, such as when a student seeks praise, validation, or avoids punishment or shame. However, extrinsic rewards erode intrinsic motivation; a sense of self-satisfaction is lost when extrinsic motivation takes over.

It therefore makes more sense to rely on students' sense of enjoyment to engage in classroom activities and course material. Similarly, faculty members are likely to be more motivated in their teaching tasks by fun than they are by their paychecks or occasional free donuts in the faculty lounge. Creating-and maintaining-a fun environment can only be seen as a win-win proposition.

The difficulty with fun is that it is inherently subjective. One cannot make others have fun, and one student's idea of fun may be different from another's. Instructors can simply create the conditions in which students are likely to have fun. And we argue that doing so is worth the effort.

What kinds of conditions contribute to fun in the higher education classroom-whether online or face-to-face?

First, play is an activity that is possibly the least dependent upon external motivations. That is, play is driven by fun. Therefore, if we create an environment in which play is not only allowed but encouraged, we have created a situation in which students engage in an activity driven-perhaps solely-by intrinsic motivation. As educators, we can employ this activity in the service of learning. For example, Mooney and Harkison (2018) have implemented games into teaching human resources management, Purinton and Burke (2019) incorporated fun into an accounting class, and Francis (2012) used fun to teach information literacy.

Next, both students and faculty can approach our new and changing learning environment with a playful disposition. Playfulness is the willingness of classroom participants to engage in the activities of play in a manner that is wilfully nonserious. Though "serious" academics may clutch their pearls at such a mindset, a wealth of research exists showing impacts of playfulness on individual learning (Proyer, 2011), creativity (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975) interpersonal interaction (Jarrett & Burnley, 2010), attention to quality (Glynn, 1991), and overall performance (Proyer & Ruch, 2011; Glynn & Webster, 1992, 1993).

Finally, humor plays a key role in the Ludic Pedagogy model. This element is attitudinal and utilizes Benjelloun's (2009) definition of "any event that makes the classroom experience pleasant" (p. 313). The other aspects of Ludic Pedagogy-fun, play, and playfulness-hold no value if they are not experienced in a pleasant environment. Good humor, considered both as the mood or state of mind and the quality of being amusing, underpins the efficacy of all the other elements.

The "humorous" piece of humor is also closely connected with fun, and has a range of pedagogically desirable benefits, including moderation of the effects of stress (Sliter, Kale, & Yuan, 2014), reduction of anxiety (Benjelloun, 2009), and increase in self-esteem (Lei, Cohen, & Russler, 2010). Who doesn't mind a few laughs, especially in an otherwise stressful environment plagued with hard work and assessment?

Implementing Ludic Pedagogy is, of course, relative to the content and context of each individual course, its materials, and learning objectives. However, there are four general suggestions that can be used in most higher education contexts:

A positive demeanor is more inviting to students, leading to a more pleasant environment, which in turn is more conducive to learning. The other aspect of humour-laughter based on appropriate humor-aids in students' recall of material (Wanzer, Frymier, & Irwin, 2010). Including humourous illustrations, examples, problems, or stories, can be incorporated into most, if not all, instructional environments.

2. Play is not only gamification

We play because it is fun. Many educators have gamified their courses via technological tools, but low-tech puzzles, games, and even online surveys can also be categorized as play. Play begins with anticipation-as students begin to see the shapes of new ideas, they experience the tension and excitement of learning. The play itself is any tool that allows the student to engage with and experiment with new concepts.

3. Create and cultivate community

The whole of Ludic Pedagogy is predicated on the idea of social relations. Fun, play, and playfulness are social by nature. It is this social nature that positively impacts well-being. Providing opportunities for students to interact in a playful manner-for example, in small breakout discussion groups in person or online-enhances interpersonal connections and all the benefits associated with them. Even introverts can participate in online surveys or games, which require little or no verbal participation or visual appearance.

4. Model a ludic mindset

Faculty would be well-served to model a ludic mindset characterized by playfulness and good humour. A willingness to model positivity and enthusiasm toward course content encourages students to be more willing to immerse themselves in learning.

Students who learn within a ludic framework enjoy improved learning motivation, increased creativity, lower stress attributed to the classroom, and an overall more positive learning environment. Similarly, faculty members who adopt Ludic Pedagogy are not only showing their interest in improving students' learning, but are also opening the door to the opportunity to enjoy their work in a way that all the free donuts in the world could not provide.
Dr. T. Keith Edmunds is a full-time faculty member at Assiniboine Community College in Brandon, MB, Canada. He may also often be found lecturing in the department of business administration at Brandon University. Dr. Sharon Lauricella is Associate Professor of Communication and Digital Media Studies at Ontario Tech University, Oshawa, ON, Canada. She has been the recipient of the Ontario Tech Teaching Award (2009 and 2013), the Social Science and Humanities Teaching Award (2014 and 2019), and the Tim McTiernan Student Mentorship Award (2020). References
Benjelloun, H. (2009). An empirical investigation of the use of humor in university classrooms. Education, Business and Society: Contemporary Middle Eastern Issues, 2(4), 312-322.

Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1975). Play and intrinsic rewards. Journal of Humanistic Psychology, 15(3), 41-63.

Ehlers, U., & Kellermann, S. (2019). Future Skills: The Future of Learning and Higher Education - Results of the International Future Skills Delphi Survey. Baden Wurttemberg-Cooperative State University, Karlsruhe. Retrieved from https://www.learntechlib.org/p/208249/report_208249.pdf

Francis, M. (2012). Using fun to teach rigorous content. Communications in Information Literacy, 6(2), 151-159.

Glynn, M. A. (1991). Framing tasks: the effects of the work and play frames on task attitudes, behaviors and information recessing. Paper presented at the annual meeting of The Association for the Study of Play, Charleston, SC.

Glynn, M.A. & Webster, J. (1992). The adult playfulness scale: an initial assessment. Psychological Reports, 71, 83-103.

Glynn, M. A. & Webster, J. (1993). Refining the nomological net of the Adult Playfulness Scale: Personality, motivational, and attitudinal correlates for highly intelligent adults. Psychological Reports, 72(3), 1023-1026.

Jarrett, O. & Burnley, P. (2010). Lessons of the role of fun/playfulness from a geology undergraduate summer research program. Journal of Geoscience Education, 58(2), 110-120.

Lei, S., Cohen, J., & Russler, K. (2010). Humor on learning in the college classroom: evaluating benefits and drawbacks from instructors' perspectives. Journal of Instructional Psychology, 37(4), 326-332.

Mooney, S. & Harkison, T. (2018). Assessment for learning in university settings: fun and games. Anatolia, 29(4), 507-517.

Proyer, R. (2011). Being playful and smart? The relations of adult playfulness with psychometric and self-estimated intelligence and academic performance. Learning and Individual Differences, 21, 463-467.

Proyer, R. & Ruch, W. (2011). The virtuousness of adult playfulness: the relation of playfulness with strengths of character. Psychology of Well-Being: Theory, Research and Practice, 1(4). http://www.psywb.com/content/1/1/4

Purinton, E. & Burke, M. (2019). Student engagement and fun: evidence from the field. Business Education Innovation Journal, 11(2), 133-140.

Sliter, M., Kale, A., & Yuan, Z. (2014). Is humor the best medicine? The buffering effect of coping humor on traumatic stressors in firefighters. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 35(2), 257-272.

Wanzer, M., Frymier, A., & Irwin, J. (2010). An explanation of the relationship between instructor humor and student learning: instruction humor processing theory. Communication Education, 59(1), 1-18.

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T. Keith Edmunds, PhD, and Sharon Lauricella, PhD

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Ludic Pedagogy: Schooling Our Students in Fun | Faculty Focus

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As much of the higher education experience has moved online in the throes of a global pandemic, there is much discourse about how to survive and thrive in this new-and possibly permanently changed-educational environment. Many instructors have endorsed (and even demanded) an increase in student surveillance to curtail cheating.

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In preschool, social interaction through play-based learning invites children to explore the world around them in new ways, using skills like collaboration, critical thinking, communication, and creative innovation to solve problems and learn. But with the pandemic, educators and parents alike are concerned about the lack of social interaction this year and the impact of that on children's social and emotional development.

So how can we support social and emotional development and play, especially for our youngest learners, whether we're in in-person, remote, or hybrid environments?

In-Person Learning and SEL

Social skills are sometimes misinterpreted as "soft skills" or "noncognitive skills" in education; however, learning sciences continue to prove that all learning is founded on relationships and social grounding. Our ability to read and do math, for example, stems from our social skill development and ability to form connections and communicate.

For schools that have resumed in-person learning, providing daily social and emotional learning (SEL) instruction and practice will help foster a sense of belonging and safety as students return to close proximity with others. Routines ground us, and just as we wouldn't go a day without brushing our teeth, SEL skills should be practiced every day so that they grow stronger.

To do this through play, invite students to draw how they're feeling, make frozen statues with their bodies to reflect a superhero strength they wish they possessed, or describe their feelings as if they were an ice cream cone. You can also play games that can be socially distant but still fun, like Simon Says, which has been studied and found to improve executive functioning skills, or clapping games that develop pattern awareness. Being back at school is an opportunity for students to celebrate and support one another through this challenging time.

You can emphasize school culture and rethink school-wide traditions-for example, using video-based morning announcements with song or movement can create a common language and shared vision for a community, and you can initiate community-wide celebrations or fun competitions either in the neighborhood or virtually, like a scavenger hunt or a costume parade.

Hybrid Learning and SEL

If you are working in a hybrid instruction environment, use the valuable in-person time you have with students for things that would be more difficult to accomplish via remote learning-building meaningful relationships, strengthening social connections, and promoting small group play. Have them explore how to express feelings through their faces and bodies and to recognize those feelings in others.

You can then reinforce what you have prioritized in person when students are learning remotely, and students can reinforce this practice with their families and independently watch videos to guide their practice of emotional expression in the classroom.

Families are playing a more critical role in the learning process than ever before. By providing support for families to continue to facilitate SEL at home, you can help them feel more connected to the school community. Show them how simple it can be to guide play and reinforce SEL skills at home through playful activities like designing forts out of boxes or furniture, setting up a hopscotch game to practice number skills, or learning how to cook together, which can be a chance to explore units of measurement.

Build in regular opportunities to check in with students and families by asking them to share a highlight of their day or one wish they have for tomorrow. On a video call, they can express this through a movement and you can mirror that movement back to them, showing that you hear and validate their experience.

Fully Remote Learning and SEL

Fully remote learning presents a big challenge for preschool kids. Connect with them as a whole class, in small groups, and one-on-one. Offer conversation starters such as "What was your favorite moment yesterday?" or "What is something you're excited about?" You can ask students to tell you how they're feeling as if they are reporting on the weather, or to share how they're feeling via a color.

Continuing to reinforce a common language is critical. To do this, create weekly challenges or activities to share with families and foster a sense of community school-wide while students are learning from home. Use surveys to find out what your students and their families are naturally interested in and find ways to explore those interests with them. This could mean setting up a virtual talent show or creating a shared music playlist or a group collage of moments, people, or places that bring families joy.

Social and emotional learning and play are inextricably linked and critical daily components of how we move through our days, support our students, and support one another.

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In preschool, social interaction through play-based learning invites children to explore the world around them in new ways, using skills like collaboration, critical thinking, communication, and creative innovation to solve problems and learn. But with the pandemic, educators and parents alike are concerned about the lack of social interaction this year and the impact of that on children's social and emotional development.

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How to Design a Culturally Responsive Bitmoji Classroom

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How to Design a Culturally Responsive Bitmoji Classroom

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Your virtual classroom can foster a sense of community by including items that represent both your and your students' backgrounds.

Courtesy of Nadia Echevarria

Nadia Echevarria's virtual classroom includes images of objects that are meaningful to her and her students.

You finally finished your Bitmoji classroom, taking part in what might be one of the biggest K-12 teaching trends in 2020. You color-coordinated your digital bulletin board, office chair, and pencil cup, and your ABC garland is perfectly hung. The process may or may not have taken five hours longer than you expected, but your final product might help students navigate your online class a little better, it may actually look like your brick-and-mortar classroom (impressive!), or it might simply have given you joy to create.

I am a professor of educational technology who has discussed Bitmoji at length with my own students who are current or future K-12 teachers. I've come to believe that in spite of the critiques of Bitmoji classrooms, there is value in them. Yes, they risk being trite, visually overwhelming, or a waste of time, and the Bitmoji program profits from users' personal data.

These are concerns that deserve serious consideration. At the same time, well-done virtual classrooms can be an effective way to build community, engage students online, and enact culturally responsive pedagogies. But doing it right requires some serious thought. Your virtual classroom may be cute, but does it convey meaningful, functional, inclusive, and culturally responsive pedagogy?

Before diving in, head to Edutopia's recent Bitmoji article for basics on how to create a virtual classroom. Then return here for guidance on thinking critically about what your classroom should include to be good for all students, particularly your most vulnerable ones.

5 Questions to Ask When Creating a Virtual Classroom

1. What is the learning purpose of my virtual classroom? A clear objective or question is at the center of effective learning, whether online or in person. What do you want your virtual classroom to support your students in doing or knowing? Virtual classrooms can be used to set expectations and norms, support relationship building, and offer students clickable virtual libraries. (Be careful with copyrighted material. Some publishers, such as Scholastic's Learn At Home Library, have begun to offer free, open-access books during the pandemic.) For example, my student Lindsay Hoel created different virtual classroom pages, like the one below, for targeted purposes.
Courtesy of Lindsay Hoel
2. What meaningful objects can I include? Next, seek meaningful objects to include in your classroom. Bitmoji classrooms can easily get littered with stuff, making it difficult for students to focus on what matters. How can you cut the clutter and include meaningful imagery? When deciding what objects to include, ask yourself: Do objects in my classroom represent my values, background, and culture as an educator and as a person?

Ask yourself if you need that clock in the corner or if it's just distracting. And that Starbucks mug in your avatar's hand-what is it for? I love coffee with the best of 'em, but what does a branded coffee cup really say about me? Instead, why not showcase your family, friends, pets; activities that matter to you; your favorite places; or a favorite book, movie, album, or piece of art that is important to you? You could share a favorite quote that expresses your teaching philosophy. Think about your students' identities and cultures so that you can share things about yourself that resonate with their lived experiences. Nadia Echevarria's classroom, seen at the top of the page, illustrates a virtual classroom with meaningful objects that represent her background as a person and educator.

3. How can I make my virtual classroom accessible for cognitively and linguistically diverse learners? Begin by cutting the clutter. If you have too much content, why not make a second virtual classroom for related but distinct purposes? Next, check your fonts-are they clearly legible for all of your students? Then ask yourself if your language is clear, simple, and accessible for your bilingual and multilingual emergent students. Remember, screen readers may not function with your virtual classroom-keep this limitation in mind if you have students who rely on this technology. For more specific considerations, see the Universal Design for Learning guidelines, which may provide helpful guidance.

4. How can I make my virtual classroom inviting and nurturing for racially and culturally diverse learners? Your classroom, whether in person or online, must be a space that welcomes and celebrates your particular students, especially those who come from historically marginalized communities. Do you include objects, imagery, and content that resonate with and demonstrate respect for your African American, Latinx, and Indigenous students? Do you find ways to celebrate bilingualism and culture that matter to your students' communities? There are so many ways to honor your kiddos with two simple places to start: your classroom walls and your bookshelf.

What's on your "walls"? Think about including some of Teaching Tolerance's One World classroom poster series. These free digital posters include quotes by racially and culturally diverse changemakers and would make a culturally responsive addition to any virtual classroom. Next, what's on your "shelf"? Are the people and stories represented on your virtual bookshelf diverse in terms of race, language, ability, sexuality, and gender? Jillian Heise's Classroom Book a Day suggests books with diverse characters and authors to showcase your virtual classroom. Michelle John's Bitmoji classroom, below, features a bookshelf and walls that are culturally responsive.
Courtesy of Michelle John
5. How will I express creativity without an overwhelming time investment? Finally, remember that five hours making a Bitmoji classroom are five hours you could have used to plan a meaningful, hands-on social studies or science lesson. However, if the time you invest brings you joy and can support student learning, particularly for your most vulnerable students, it may be time well spent.

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How to Design a Culturally Responsive Bitmoji Classroom

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Your virtual classroom can foster a sense of community by including items that represent both your and your students' backgrounds. Courtesy of Nadia Echevarria Nadia Echevarria's virtual classroom includes images of objects that are meaningful to her and her students.

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Preparing for service disruptions or your own absence will help your classes go smoothly even during this year of many challenges.

At the beginning of the school year, just as huge numbers of students and teachers were logging on to their new virtual classrooms for the first time, the popular videoconferencing platform Zoom had an outage. In an article about that crash, one administrator was quoted as saying, "2020 is a year of whatever can go wrong, has."

This outage was one of many issues that educators had to overcome as a multitude of teachers have been asked to teach virtually or synchronously online for the first time in their careers. Many of these teachers have had little time to prepare and few resources. One item in particular that teachers may not have had time to prepare for would be a backup plan.

What will you as a teacher do when your synchronous class goes down or your learning management system (LMS) is unreachable? Often these outages do not last long, but they can be very disruptive to students without a backup plan.

What happens when you're unable to be present for a day, or two, or three in your virtual class? Illness can happen to a teacher or family member that would require them to be away from the computer for several days.

Many teachers are required to have a folder with a set of substitute plans detailing students' names and information, policies, procedures, and classwork. These are often called substitute binders. But what about your new virtual classroom-do you have a set of substitute plans for it?

As with the regular classroom, teachers can construct a virtual substitute binder. Saving these items in a Google doc or another easily accessed file can help make your virtual classroom a success even when you or your virtual classroom are unavailable.

What to Place in Your Virtual Classroom Substitute Binder

1. A communication plan: In these types of situations, it is vitally important that you be able to reach your students and sometimes their parents to let them know what to do. Services like Remind and Google Voice can help you to quickly send text or phone messages to students and parents without giving out your personal contact number. Consider having a couple of preset template emails ready to send.

Email to students and/or parents: This email lets the students know that you or the class are unavailable and contains links to activities for students.

Email to another teacher: If you have a backup teacher filling in for you, this email would contain a link to your binder and names of other teachers or administrators he or she could reach out to with questions. Also, including a quick checklist of procedures and a class meeting schedule would be helpful.

2. Previously selected activities: Having previously selected content available that you can provide to students so that they can continue learning is vital when your virtual classroom is unavailable. Here are some examples that you can use or modify based on your classroom.

Select a HyperDoc that you can use to review a topic or provide extra credit. These easy-to-find HyperDoc activities can be sent to you for quick grading later.

Select several videos from Khan Academy that students can watch and for which they can provide a summary or take a screenshot of their progress.

Use sites like Mathematics Question of the Day or Critical Reader Question of the Day to assign students a question that they can answer and send to you.

Find an interactive lesson or collection from PBS LearningMedia. Assign questions or a post about what they learned with examples.

Use a WebQuest or Symbaloo Learning Path. Pick your topic and then have students use the web to answer questions and solve problems about it.

Pick a set of vocabulary or other topics from Quizlet. No need to type your vocabulary words. With the app's billions of terms and definitions, the set of definitions you need is most likely there.

Create review sheets and games with Flippity. You can then paste links to these games and review sheets in your LMS or webpage.

For younger students, pick a book from Storyline Online and have students answer questions.

Create questions about another time period or another culture by visiting the museums and historical archives found on Google Arts & Culture.

A Google a Day encourages students to become better online searchers by playing a game to find answers to questions on Google.

While these current times are unequaled in our educational history, it will be the caring teachers who find ways to make any situation and any format a place for learning. Taking time to make a virtual substitute binder can provide consistency and instruction to prevent students and parents from becoming confused and frustrated.

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Preparing for service disruptions or your own absence will help your classes go smoothly even during this year of many challenges. At the beginning of the school year, just as huge numbers of students and teachers were logging on to their new virtual classrooms for the first time, the popular videoconferencing platform Zoom had an outage.

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Strategies for Implementing Online Culturally Responsive Teaching 

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Strategies for Implementing Online Culturally Responsive Teaching 

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The new "question-of-the-week" is:
What are specific online strategies you have used to apply culturally responsive teaching in an online or hybrid environment?
In the midst of pandemic craziness, it's safe to say that at least some educators might be losing sight of prioritizing issues of equity and cultural responsive teaching. This reaction is, unfortunately, typical of what has happened in the past-there are always "more pressing" challenges to deal with, and "we'll get to it after this [latest] crisis has passed."

I would argue that now, more than ever, is the time for teachers to prioritize culturally responsive pedagogy and responding to racism. Many of the family members of our students, and some of our students themselves, are dying as a direct result of the legacy and existence of racism as they are hit hard by COVID-19.

This two-part series will explore strategies that we can use in an online and hybrid environment to no longer delay many of us changing our practices to further support students of color and their families.

You might also be interested in collections of these columns focusing on:

Today's contributors are Shelly M. Jones, Ph.D., Gina Laura Gullo, Isabel Becerra, and Candace Hines.
Math and culturally responsive teaching
Shelly M. Jones, Ph.D., is a 27-year veteran educator. She is a mathematics education professor at Central Connecticut State University and the author of Women Who Count: Honoring African American Women Mathematicians and will co-author a forthcoming set of books on culturally responsive teaching in mathematics from Corwin Press:

Over the last decade, I've advocated culturally relevant teaching in mathematics. Gloria Ladson-Billings (2009) defines culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) as an approach to teaching that empowers students intellectually, socially, emotionally and politically. As we think about what we consider as culturally responsive/relevant teaching in an online environment, we must first ask, "How can we empower our students?" In a mathematics classroom, students are empowered when they have a positive mathematics identity. Educators must get to know their students in order to make instructional decisions that build students' math identities.

Many educators are tuning into social media to share their experiences of virtual activities at the heart of relationship building and identity development. Who are our students? Marian Dingle, a 22-year veteran teacher in Georgia, says she is good at eliciting the trust of her students, and if she is not aware of their culture, she asks questions until she becomes more comfortable. Another educator, Xi Yu (DismantelingMathematics.com) shares an activity that she used to have students introduce themselves. The students answered the following three questions on virtual Post-it Notes: 1) What is your name? 2) How are you feeling? and 3) How do you like your rice prepared? Before we jump into the math, we (teachers) need to humanize the space. Students need to feel seen and safe so they can learn. I love that Ms. Dingle has students unmute their devices on the first day of school so they can pronounce their names because pronouncing a student's name correctly is part of becoming culturally competent, which is one of the propositions of CRP. Another proposition of CRP that is commonly overlooked (Jones, 2018; Ladson-Billings, Spring 2014) is helping students develop a critical consciousness. We can do this by facilitating opportunities for students to use math to explore issues of inequity.

When teachers choose mathematics activities that are open-ended and mathematically rich, they will empower students intellectually, especially if the activities are connected to students' lived experiences. Teachers can empower their students socially by building community through virtual engagement strategies. They can empower students emotionally by creating a safe virtual environment with nonverbal communication tools. Finally, teachers must find ways to empower their students politically by using resources that reflect the voices of all students especially Black, Indigenous, and students of color. As my colleague Lou Matthews says, "Free your math, and justice will follow."

Four culturally responsive teaching strategies Gina Laura Gullo is an educational equity consultant with GLG Consulting and a researcher of unintentional bias and interventions that serve to lessen the impact of such biases. She also adjuncts and mentors in educational leadership at several Mid-Atlantic universities:
While I teach most of my online hybrid courses to college-level students and K-12 teachers and leaders, many strategies I use to apply culturally responsive teaching remain relevant to current K-12 teachers. These four strategies can be applied to students at any level and will help to ensure equity and inclusion in your classes.

A core tenet of culturally responsive pedagogy is getting to know your students, which becomes difficult with limited face-to-face interactions. Teachers can use online forums to allow students to introduce themselves on their own terms. Start by introducing yourself including culturally meaningful aspects of your self-identification. Then, assign all students to similarly introduce themselves to you and the whole class. Younger students might do this with a picture or recorded video while older students can simply write an introduction. This allows students to tell you what they find most relevant about their identities while also self-defining who they are in the context of the classroom environment.

Critical self-reflection offers students the opportunity to consider how and whether material relates to their own experiences and perspectives of the world and then making meaning of the learning in that context. While not limited to online hybrid learning, critical self-reflection lends itself well to this format. Students can learn material during online sessions, reflect before class, and then discuss the material when meeting face to face to help others reflect on the culturally contextualized material. This can be as simple as journaling after a history lesson or as intricate as working in synchronous online groups to break down inequities from the same lesson. Teachers can use writing prompts and breakout groups to encourage students to reflect on related experiences and build background knowledge and respect for others' individual experiences. Critical self-reflection offers a segue into experiential learning and internalization to create long-term learning.

Typical of classrooms, especially for younger students, learning stations offer engagement with learning materials in a variety of formats to meet the learning styles of various students. Online hybrid learning offers a unique opportunity for this kind of learning where students can engage with material in a variety of manners. For example, a science lesson on dinosaurs might include a reading, a video lecture, an educational game, an online museum visit, an at-home craft, and a face-to-face discussion. Each of these modalities would teach about dinosaurs but in a way that allows students from different learning backgrounds to excel. Learning styles often reflect cultural norm, hence relating to culturally relevant pedagogy, but they also reflect an inclusive learning environment that attends to equity beyond ethno-racial demographics.

Counter-stereotypic exemplars are images that represent individuals in ways that are not consistent with stereotypes such as a Black male teacher, a female construction worker, or a Latina surgeon. Research suggests that such images can help to reduce implicit biases based on stereotypic norms. By including pictures that represent counter-stereotypes, students can see themselves and others represented in different manners. Not only will this contribute to a reduction in their own biases, but it can also encourage students to excel in a wider variety of occupational fields.

I used these strategies both face to face and online but find that each translates well to online hybrid learning. I encourage teachers to avoid discovering brand-new strategies during this time where quick transitions to online learning are commonplace and instead explore how they can adapt currently evidenced strategies for inclusive learning to hybrid learning environments.

"Sheltered Instruction" to support diverse learners Isabel Becerra is a sheltered-instruction specialist for the ELL Department in Garland ISD, in Texas. She was born in Bolivia and has been an educator since 1992. She is a passionate advocate for English-language learners:
As a sheltered-instruction specialist, I advocate the learning of our diverse learners. I make sure that teachers have access to strategies that will allow ALL learners to participate in activities and assignments that will engage them in the learning process. Among these strategies, we promote those that are culturally responsive to the population that we serve.

The sheltered-instruction framework we use is based on the 7 Steps to a Language-Rich Interactive Classroom. Each step promotes strategies that will allow ALL students to access content and develop their linguistic skills. We have modeled and developed PD for teachers to use these strategies in the classroom and remotely. Among these strategies, we have those that nurture accessibility to academic vocabulary, structured conversations, purpose for reading and writing, and those that include sentence stems, visuals, and checking for understanding in real time. All these strategies help those strategies that are culturally responsive in giving students the ability to access and participate with content in a nonthreatening way.

Among the most effective culturally responsive teaching strategies that we model for teachers to incorporate into their online lessons are interactive games. These are the power strategy for culturally grounded learning because they get the brain's attention and require active processing, and most games employ a lot of cultural tools. Culturally diverse stories will allow students to learn content more effectively by creating a more coherent narrative about a topic. Boosting Vocabulary is an important equity strategy, engaging students in building word consciousness in their community, home, and home language. Showing videos, documentaries, and movies depicts a range of cultures that are relevant to students, and presenting real-world problems for students to solve is a strategy where two cultural connections will typically occur, and students may use unique cultural perspectives to solve the problem.

One of the most important elements that we encourage our teachers to develop while planning for culturally responsive online teaching is to establish inclusion. It involves developing a foundation of respect and connectedness through established routines, mutually agreed norms, and equitable treatment of all learners. We want all of our students and their families to feel included in the online learning community, as well as to engage them to voice their feelings and share their experiences, so creating those opportunities through discussion and chat sessions can be useful. We want teachers to ask students questions about their cultural identities and backgrounds. This can help students feel comfortable in sharing their stories.

During online teaching, it is very common for students to become easily frustrated and tune out from online courses that lack structure and relevance. This is why we highly recommend teachers to allow students to take charge of their own learning by providing choice. It gives students options of selecting from a variety of learning activities and styles. This will establish a learning environment that is relevant to the students' lives, as well as one in which they feel autonomy over their learning. It will also help the teacher to develop a collection of culturally relevant materials related to his or her course and will engage students to become independent learners.

Delivering culturally responsive strategies in an online environment can help teachers to motivate and engage students, facilitate brain processing, cultivate critical thinking and problem-solving skills, strengthen cultural identities, and promote a sense of safety and belonging. Culturally responsive educators are those who continually examine their own cultural perspectives and biases to ensure that they are creating environments that are supportive to all learners. This is the number one responsibility we have as educators in a world where diversity is growing every day.

Five questions Candace Hines is a multiclassroom leader at Memphis Scholars. She is also a regional presenter and has trained teachers across various districts in Tennessee. She has served as a facilitator for Teach Plus, leading their Teacher-Led Professional Learning Network. She has also served as a fellow for Collaborative for Student Success, Hope Street Group Tennessee Teacher Fellow, Common Core math coach, and the Tennessee Teacher Ambassador Network:
During the COVID pandemic, virtual learning has become one of our primary forms of education. That being said, as educators, we must continue to include culturally responsive teaching strategies in our online classrooms. Culturally responsive teaching aids in students growth and overall academic success. I have found the following strategies to be critical when providing culturally responsive cyber learning environments:

It has been said that online learning layers on complications to the development of culturally responsive teachers and classrooms, as described by Heitner and Jennings:

Before the coronavirus pandemic, equitable technology amongst our students was always a challenge. Supplying students with Wi-Fi and devices does not guarantee that we are teaching with culturally responsive strategies. We are in a radically different school structure from the one to which we are most accustomed. Part of this newness has meant more frequent adaptations as we learn what works and what does not. We must take into account that students have been greatly impacted by this pandemic.

We began the school year 100 percent virtual, with teachers participating in live instruction from 7:45 a.m. until 4:00 p.m. Data was collected from a staff survey, from the teacher committee meeting, and from our parents. All three spoke to concerns about student stamina. In response to these data points, a hybrid class schedule was implemented. Scholars now have a blend of live, synchronous, half-day instruction, and the other portion of the day is used to engage in asynchronous subject-specific, academic content. As a result, students' biweekly assessment data, exit ticket submissions, polls, parental participation, and attendance reports have shown consistent growth!

Next, we must examine what intentional moments are embedded during sessions that allow students to share their voice, engaging socially and culturally. Educators must lay the foundation for culturally responsive environments before class starts. This strategy should include a series of questions that establish inclusion amongst scholars. As you consider what implementation will look like in your learning environment, please be advised that these components are not to be completed once and marked off; continuously use them as a reference. Another helpful strategy is to examine your teaching practice using these questions:

1.What are scholars interested in?

2.What do students see as valuable?

3.How can I encourage students to engage on a meaningful level?

4.How can I incorporate diverse material and resources?

5.Have students taken ownership of their learning?

Our last strategy requires us to monitor and adjust. Teachers have been known to struggle with amending due dates. During these unprecedented times, we must consider the effects that COVID may have had on parents and students' schedules and overall lives. Adjusting assignment-submission dates is a strategy that has been successful. Scholars have the autonomy to complete certain tasks at their own pace. For example, classwork given on a Monday can be submitted weekly or biweekly for full credit. Along with this system, asynchronous instructional materials should be kept to a minimum to not overwhelm participants; limit the amount of tools, apps, and platforms. Resources should also be in direct correlation with the curriculum and current learning target for that content. Effective planning, hybrid schedules, and reliable content are key strategies to cultivate culturally responsive classrooms.

[1] Heitner, K. L. and Jennings, M. Culturally responsive teaching knowledge and practices of online faculty. Online Learning 20, 4 (2016).

Thanks to Dr. Jones, Gina, Isabel, and Candace for their contributions!

Please feel free to leave a comment with your reactions to the topic or directly to anything that has been said in this post.
Just a reminder; you can subscribe and receive updates from this blog via email or RSS Reader. And if you missed any of the highlights from the first eight years of this blog, you can see a categorized list below. The list doesn't include ones from this current year, but you can find those by clicking on the "answers" category found in the sidebar. I am also creating a Twitter list including all contributors to this column

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Strategies for Implementing Online Culturally Responsive Teaching (Opinion)

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The new "question-of-the-week" is: What are specific online strategies you have used to apply culturally responsive teaching in an online or hybrid environment? In the midst of pandemic craziness, it's safe to say that at least some educators might be losing sight of prioritizing issues of equity and cultural responsive teaching.

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Engaging Students in Virtual Instruction With the Camera Off

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Engaging Students in Virtual Instruction With the Camera Off

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Giving students the option to turn their cameras off may make them more comfortable and open up new possibilities for teaching.

As remote learning became the norm, some of my students began to not-so-subtly indicate that something was wrong. During a guest lecture on Zoom, several typically engaged students had their cameras turned off. One student stopped attending synchronous class meetings, and another stopped submitting assignments.

In conversation, it became apparent that these students wanted to remain engaged with learning-but didn't want cameras on. I realized that I needed to reassess how I determined students' engagement: by looking at their faces.

Here are some ways I've found to maintain community during virtual learning-while allowing students to make a choice about whether or not to turn on their cameras.

How to Make Video Optional

Running video-optional Socratic seminars: For small group discussions, I allowed students to meet on their own time-but asked that they submit a video recording to check for understanding. One group submitted a video even though students' cameras were off; nothing was lost in my ability to assess their ability to hold a discussion.

Initially, I had abandoned replicating a Socratic seminar virtually. Following the lead of this group, however, I was inspired to embrace an experiment. I conducted a virtual Socratic seminar in which the outer circle turned off their cameras and only the inner-circle students spoke with video and cameras on.

Students in the outer circle, who typically would be evaluating the participation of their peers in the inner circle, used the chat feature to echo powerful comments they heard and ask questions of the inner-circle group. In our brick-and-mortar classroom, they would have done this by writing notes on the whiteboard or passing notes to their partners in the inner circle. Having their video off did not inhibit student participation after all. In fact, embracing this approach actually opened up a discussion technique that I thought would not work in the remote-learning world.

Providing choice: For this coming year, I am proactively planning opportunities for video-off and video-optional moments. To build student agency, I offer students a choice about how they want to demonstrate their learning. For asynchronous reading assignments, for instance, I plan to offer the options of submitting a typed reading journal, writing an oral response on Flipgrid (with the settings changed so that only the teacher views the videos), or posting a photo of a creative response completed with pen and paper.

When using Flipgrid, I will give students the option of blocking the camera or turning the screen away so that just their voice is audible. For synchronous video meetings, my students will be able to choose whether to participate with chat, video, or just audio. As I found helpful last spring, I will continue to find ways to build in breaks with the camera off, asking students to work independently off-camera and then return to small group or whole-class work with active participation.

Fostering deep engagement in multiple formats: I plan to incorporate various tools to build rapport, engage 100 percent of students 100 percent of the time, and assess their progress-even while students' cameras are off. Polling tools, whether separate or within Zoom, can serve as effective formative assessments. They can be used to ask students how they're feeling, use a silly icebreaker question, or give a multiple choice quiz.

Teachers might have students draw or use a personal whiteboard in the classroom to check for understanding: Students can hold up a paper or whiteboard to the screen without needing to show their home or face.

Setting up video-optional small group work: As I examine lessons I've used in in-person teaching, I'm struck that protocols I have used for deep textual analysis and reflection might work even better in the virtual realm. In the past, I've taught activities that had a required reflection time; some students found this awkward and rushed to the next step. With the break from the constant gaze of the camera, I plan to experiment with this same lesson in breakout rooms this fall.

As an education leader has reiterated to me, a student who previously had video on and subsequently disappeared should always be greeted with, "I noticed your video has been off; how can I help you be present in this online community?" Just as we would check in on a student with a chat after class in the hall, these demonstrations of care may even open up student-generated modes of participation.

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Engaging Students in Virtual Instruction With the Camera Off

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Giving students the option to turn their cameras off may make them more comfortable and open up new possibilities for teaching. As remote learning became the norm, some of my students began to not-so-subtly indicate that something was wrong. During a guest lecture on Zoom, several typically engaged students had their cameras turned off.

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Self-motivation. Ownership. Engagement. We have always wanted students to feel passion for learning and to be intrinsically motivated-to be driven from within. With much learning moving to an at-home environment, these student characteristics are more important than ever, and the way that we, as educators, frame at-home learning experiences can have a profound impact on how students feel about them.

This will be especially important for some students. Consider the barriers that may impact student learning at home: lack of internet, devices, and support. Add to the mix competing priorities like supporting siblings, having essential jobs, and coping with stress and trauma, and it's clear that motivation, resourcefulness, and self-regulation are critical.

This isn't to say that student engagement is everything. Districts and schools have to consider barriers through an equity lens and ensure that all students have the essential supplies to access learning, but access alone will not equate to equal opportunities to learn if we don't also help students become engaged, innovative, and empowered.

Yet if we learned anything last spring when schools shut down and kids stayed home, it was that many students struggled to stay engaged. What if part of the problem has been how we have framed the work? What if, without meaning to, we have taken engaging, inspiring, and awesome work and made doing it acts of compliance instead of engagement, simply by the way we framed it?

For example, let's say a teacher has incorporated elements of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) as students build an understanding about how geography affects human settlement and resource use. Students are offered multiple means of representation to learn (attend a live Zoom or watch the recording, read or listen to an online article, view a documentary, read the textbook, etc.) and several choices of assessments to express their understanding (journaling or writing a paper, producing a video reflection, recording a podcast, etc.). Sounds awesome, right? Kids should be excited, shouldn't they?

What This Looks Like in Practice

Let's consider how teacher messaging might impact students' enthusiasm.

Teacher 1: "OK, everyone. I've got several choices for you to learn about how geography affects where people decide to live and the way they live. I expect you to choose at least two different resources to explore for me, and I want you to also pick one activity to try. To get full credit on the assessment, you will need to cite the resources you used."

Teacher 2: "OK, everyone. You have several choices for how you get to learn about how geography affects where people decide to live and the way they live. Don't forget to use at least two different resources, and then pick an activity to try. You can do more than one if you want! Remember to cite resources to give credit to other authors and organizations and boost the credibility of your work."

Notice that the first teacher emphasizes compliance through the use of teacher-centric language ("I want," "I expect," "I've got") and extrinsic motivation by emphasizing getting "full credit." The belief behind this message is, "Kids probably won't want to do the work, so I need to tell them what to do and motivate them to do it." The second teacher uses more student-centric language, offering invitations and suggestions, while speaking primarily in the second person instead of the first. Their assumption and expectation is that students are motivated to learn, and their role is to guide and support students' learning.

The suggestions below may help you to reflect on the power of language as you design and deliver learning that embraces variability; eliminates barriers; and helps students to build intrinsic motivation, sustain effort and persistence, and self-regulate during Covid-19 and beyond.
Moving From Compliance to Engagement

Instead of "I expect you all to...," try "Your next challenge is..."

Instead of "I want you to...," try "What's a goal you have..."

Move From Teacher Ownership to Student Ownership

Instead of "Here are three things you need to do...," try "Here are three things to try as you..."

Instead of "I've created some choices for you...," try "You have several choices to consider..."

Shifting From Extrinsic to Intrinsic Motivation

Rather than tell students what they need to do to get a good grade, consider explaining what they should keep in mind as they aim for high-quality work. When it comes to things like the importance of citing sources, don't frame it as something that's necessary for a good grade. Instead, show how this improves the work. Suggest to students that it boosts the credibility of their work and gives credit to other authors. Offering rewards for completed assignments also can backfire. Instead, you can ask students about their goals for the work.

Changing language habits is really hard. So here's something to try. As you're teaching and talking with students, record yourself using the voice-memo app on your phone; or, if you're teaching remotely, record the session. You may also want to review directions within your learning management system, rubrics, and letters home. Which phrases do you use that emphasize student ownership, engagement, and intrinsic motivation, and which ones may unintentionally indicate the reverse? Pick one phrase or habit to work on so that you don't feel overwhelmed.

There is so much to adapt to support students' at-home learning that it can feel overwhelming, and there's so much that feels out of our control. Language is a simple and powerful thing we can control.

This work isn't about us. We don't have power over our students, but we provide them with the support so they can find the power within themselves. And when we talk about learning as though it is the reward, and provide students with the scaffolds and support to pave their journey, we will be closer to our intent: students finding the resources they need and using their voices to share what they know in ways that are relevant, authentic, and meaningful to them.

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How to Choose Words That Motivate Students During Online Learning

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Self-motivation. Ownership. Engagement. We have always wanted students to feel passion for learning and to be intrinsically motivated-to be driven from within. With much learning moving to an at-home environment, these student characteristics are more important than ever, and the way that we, as educators, frame at-home learning experiences can have a profound impact on how students feel about them.

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5 research-Backed tips to improve tour online teaching presence

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5 research-Backed tips to improve tour online teaching presence

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5 Research-Backed Tips to Improve Your Online Teaching Presence

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As the physical distance increases between you and your students, so can the psychological and emotional space. Here are some tips that can help.

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Leadership Expectations In Year Two Of A Pandemic

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Leadership Expectations In Year Two Of A Pandemic

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APAC Vice President at Center for Creative Leadership, offering cutting-edge leadership solutions.
Counting down and stepping into a new year, most of us felt a big sense of relief to leave behind the many hardships faced in 2020. Now, well into 2021, the realization that some of the new challenges we are facing are even bigger than those we left behind has set in.

Here in Singapore, as one of the first countries exposed to Covid-19, the first cases started to appear around one year ago. The frenzy of those early weeks of the pandemic is still fresh in my mind. The early office protocols all seem surreal now - from isolation rooms and building evacuation for any suspected case to the close monitoring of the whereabouts of all our team members in the region to prevent anyone from get stuck between countries and end up at risk as borders started to close. Adrenaline levels were certainly at their peak in those initial weeks and months, especially for leaders making many swift decisions to respond to the crisis. One year on, we continue to face the significant negative impact from Covid-19 across the world, yet the adrenaline rush that fuelled leaders in the initial period wore off many months ago and Covid-19 realities have now just become part of everyday life. How leaders will face the higher expectations and next set of challenges coming up matters now more than ever for businesses, nations and the world in order to turn the corner and create a better future.
Endurance
So what kind of leadership do we need as we move into year two?

Drawing from some of the highlights from our most recent research with 73 C-suite leaders across the Asia Pacific area, as well as my observations working with leaders over the last few months, here are three priorities to help leaders successfully take on year two.

The phrases "You're on mute," "Covid fatigue" and "burnout" are here to stay. The first priority for leaders is to keep themselves sane by recharging their energy levels with the essential practices that work for them. These can include exercise, meditation, practicing gratitude, social pursuits and emotional savoring, to name a few. Entering year two, and relying less on any adrenaline rush, requires even more regularity and discipline in essential practices to maintain personal endurance. Trying out some new practices, enlisting an accountability partner and journaling on what is and is not working are additional techniques leaders will need to beef up whatever they have in place already.
Authenticity
Leaders must also have both systemic support structures and quick and easy ways to re-energize their people, including dynamic, bite-size interventions to help people "burn bright" and not burn out. One example of a dynamic, bite-size intervention is "time confetti," a term used to describe those tiny pockets of free time between 5 and 15 minutes that often get filled with mindlessly checking email, texting and scrolling through feeds. Especially in the work-from-home environment, time confetti can go a long way to maintain and refill energy reserves. A short walk, a few breathing exercises, a five-minute meditation and listening to a great song are just a few ways to practice redeeming time confetti.

Moving into year two, leaders will need to make an even bigger investment in both systematic support structures and quick and dynamic approaches to maintain well-being for themselves and their people.
Realistic Optimism
While the concept of authentic leadership isn't new, it has grown in importance in the last year. The ongoing insecurity caused by the pandemic, as people worry about their health and their livelihoods, has led to decreased confidence and trust among the wider population. Leaders must be their most authentic selves and make honesty and transparency the foundation of their workplaces.

Authenticity leads to trust, and looking-ahead leaders must boost both. I've seen a number of organizations where trust has gone up over the course of the pandemic, making a big, positive difference for the success of the organization. Leaders who already had a lot of trust within their teams were best positioned to increase that trust during the first year of the crisis. As we move into year two, continuing to openly demonstrate trust in employees amid work-from-home and flexible work arrangements will go a long way. Leaders will now also need to have a meaningful end in mind that connects to collective purpose in order to help everyone deal with much of the uncertainty that still lies ahead. One of the Asia-Pacific managing directors we interviewed said, "I see authenticity as a prequalification for leading people to an unknown destination."

Remaining optimistic while facing very difficult realities is perhaps the most important way that leaders must continue to step up. Making sure not to overlook the many collective achievements coming out of the crisis is important, which at a global level includes the fastest vaccine developed in human history. Amazing examples of collective resourcefulness and generosity within organizations and across communities to overcome major obstacles and take care of each other must continuously be celebrated by leaders at all levels.

At the same time, acknowledging and facing the significant setbacks and suffering for many businesses, communities and especially those most vulnerable is equally important. Facing that suffering can be painful and daunting. Choosing how much and when to focus on the harsh realities and "bad news" is an important balancing act that leaders need to get even better at this year. Viktor Frankl, the Austrian philosopher who maintained optimism in even the most difficult circumstances during the Holocaust, said, "It is not freedom from conditions, but it is freedom to take a stand toward the conditions."

As we move into year two, burning bright will require leaders who can consistently endure the darkness, find the light and use authenticity and realistic optimism to help others see it.

Forbes Coaches Council is an invitation-only community for leading business and career coaches. Do I qualify?

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Council Post: Leadership Expectations In Year Two Of A Pandemic

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APAC Vice President at Center for Creative Leadership , offering cutting-edge leadership solutions. Counting down and stepping into a new year, most of us felt a big sense of relief to leave behind the many hardships faced in 2020.

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On self-care: Durán's emphasis on setting priorities extends to physical and mental wellness. "Right now I take walks every day just to decompress and start each day anew and fresh. I meditate regularly to keep myself in balance. So those are personal things I've done to help say, what's a priority in my life right now?"

On dealing with dual pandemics: spoke with MindShift just a week after the police killing of George Floyd sparked nationwide protests , and a month and half after a police officer fatally shot another Black man, Steven Taylor, in her own community. "Personally, I feel mad and hurt and overwhelmed by my own thoughts and emotions. It can be tough to be a leader while you're processing that in real time," Patel said. "Even though I've been developing my stance as an anti-racist educator for years, watching the world and our communities have to hold this kind of rage right now is very difficult," she said. In addition to the logistics of reopening schools, "we're also battling this other corrosive virus plaguing our schools - white supremacy," she said. "I think at times like this, schools become a really great place for people to find solidarity and comfort and to work through their emotions and thoughts and need for dialogue. To not be able to have that open for our students and families, (and for) our staff and our leaders in these coming weeks is tricky. So I'm just kind of thinking about how we go about doing that."

On supporting teachers: said his role is all about connecting without controlling. "My number one job is making sure [teachers are] OK and seeing how they're doing and giving them what they need. And then priority two is giving them the space to figure it out as opposed to giving some mandates. With something that's so crazy, like a sudden rush to remote learning and a pandemic going on in the background, you're going to need an innovative answer. And folks need time and space to innovate and create." His approach models how he wants teachers to treat students. "Because primarily with the kids, they should be connecting and checking in and also innovating their curriculum," he said. "[Students] should be getting through this time, not worried about if they're going to fall behind or if they're going to pass or not pass. That shouldn't be anything that a kid is worried about when a hundred thousand people die."

On technology and equity: According to , 20 percent of her district's families do not have enough devices in the home for each child, and approximately 15 percent of students do not have access to cable modems or high speed internet. To fill in the gaps during emergency distance learning, Guilford County Schools distributed more than 17,000 devices to students and sent 40 smart buses into neighborhoods to provide Wi-Fi. Still, about 2,300 students never logged on, and thousands of others logged on only sporadically . "A lot is falling on school districts to try to resolve. And I think that school districts have done so much that parents believe it's our responsibility to provide broadband connectivity," Contreras said, but she believes educators need to help shift that expectation. "It's the responsibility of federal government and the state government to make sure that the citizens of this country have high speed internet because there are very few things you can do any more without internet," she said. "It is something that is an essential service - a public good that is necessary, required, like electricity and water. It should not be treated as a luxury."

On self-care: Contreras said that the high-stress demands of the superintendent role makes self-care important but hard to achieve. "I would say that I'm a work in progress. But I wake up each morning, and I read the Bible, and I'm particularly inspired by The Message version of the Bible, which is plain, modern English. And then I walk three to five miles a day, exploring our county's beautiful parks and nature trails. And during the pandemic, I started gardening and I enjoy the peace and joy that gardening brings to my life now."

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How to Lead During a Pandemic? Be Nimble, Bring In Many Voices and Hold On To Radical Hope - MindShift

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On self-care: Durán's emphasis on setting priorities extends to physical and mental wellness. "Right now I take walks every day just to decompress and start each day anew and fresh. I meditate regularly to keep myself in balance. So those are personal things I've done to help say, what's a priority in my life right now?"

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The keys are prioritizing community and designing student-centered lessons.

Teachers who have taught exclusively offline in a traditional school setting may find the transition to teaching online daunting and foreign. As educators navigate this new reality of school closures, social isolation, and remote learning, it's important to remember that education and learning encompass more than disseminating and collecting assignments. Learning, at its core, is a social endeavor. People learn through their interactions with each other and the world around them. Given the social nature of learning, educators who are moving their classes online must prioritize community building to ensure their students thrive online.

Creating a Community of Learners

The Community of Inquiry theoretical framework underpins much of the research on online and blended learning and is grounded in collaborative constructivism (Swan, Garrison, &amp; Richardson, 2009). Given the concerns many teachers have about the isolating nature of online courses, I appreciate the focus that the Community of Inquiry places on creating a community of learners who can make meaning while interacting online. This framework provides a structure for teachers to design and facilitate an online course to effectively engage students in active learning.

The Community of Inquiry framework is composed of three interconnected presences-social presence, teaching presence, and cognitive presence. The social presence refers to the learners' ability to assert their social and emotional selves, view their classmates as real people, and communicate openly online. The teaching presence encompasses the design, instruction, and facilitation of learning in the course. Finally, the cognitive presence is learners' ability to construct meaning through a process of inquiry, dialogue, and reflection ( Garrison, Anderson, &amp; Archer, 2000). Understanding the interplay between these presences can help teachers transitioning their courses online create learning experiences that are engaging, student-centered, and leverage the class' collective intelligence.

The Social Presence: Cultivating an Online Community

As teachers move online, a critical first step is to create a safe virtual space that will help students develop their social presence. Traditional teachers shifting classes online mid-year due to school closures may assume that their students know each other and will feel comfortable participating in academic conversations and collaborative tasks online. But I would caution teachers not to assume that the community they have established in-person will automatically translate to the online environment. There are likely students in our classes who have shared the physical classroom all year but who may have never spoken or collaborated on a shared task. The transition to learning online presents an opportunity for teachers to make sure that everyone in the class community knows each other and forms relationships with their peers online that will make their interactions more respectful and rewarding.

The first step in establishing open, honest, and respectful communication in an online community is to clearly define the expectations for behavior in the online environment. Teachers concerned about what students might say or do online should ask their classes to think about and articulate the behaviors they believe will help them to feel comfortable engaging with peers and sharing ideas. Teachers can ask the class to articulate these expectations on a shared digital document.

Asking students to craft the norms and expectations for their online interactions gives them ownership of the space and creates an incentive for them to abide by these guidelines. Teachers can add additional items to the list or ask students to consider specific behaviors to ensure the guidelines address the teacher's concerns about online interactions. Once a clear guide has been established, teachers can pose questions about what consequences are appropriate when the expectations for online communication have been violated. This places the responsibility on the community to think through the appropriate response to missteps, and students are more likely to internalize these expectations and think about what they say and do online.

A staple of any online course is discussion, and a good online discussion can be a great way to build community and communication skills. Icebreaker discussion questions, like the ones in Figure 1, can help students learn about their peers and help them to view their HEAD classmates as real people with feelings, values, and beliefs.

Figure 1. Online Icebreaker Discussion Questions

Icebreaker: If you could have any superpower, which would you choose and why?

If you could have one of the superpowers below, which would you choose and why?

ability to become invisible

ability to read other people's minds

Begin your post by clearly stating the superpower you would like and thoroughly explain your choice.

Once you have posted your response, please read and reply thoughtfully to at least 2 other members of the class. In your reply, ask questions, comment on specific points made, compliment the ideas shared, and build on ideas shared.

Research has established that higher levels of perceived social presence in an online course yield higher levels of interaction, engagement, and satisfaction with that course ( Tu &amp; McIsaac, 2002). This suggests that the investment teachers make in building a cohesive online community with a strong social presence will pay dividends.

The Teaching Presence: Designing and Facilitating Online Learning Experiences

Teaching online is obviously different from teaching in a physical classroom, yet there are areas of overlap that may help traditional teachers feel more comfortable making the move online. When I work with teachers who are teaching a blended or entirely online course for the first time, I encourage them to treat their Google Classroom or learning-management system (like Schoology or Canvas) as their online classroom-to think of it as a place where students engage and learn, not just a place to just post things. This is the place where students will access information and resources, engage with their teacher and their peers, and submit their work for feedback and evaluation.

Once teachers begin to treat their learning-management system as their virtual classroom, they can begin to think about their roles and responsibilities in this online environment. The Community of Inquiry framework specifically identifies course design, direct instruction, and facilitation of learning as central to the teaching presence in an online course ( Swan et al., 2009).

Traditional teachers must think differently about the organization and design of their online courses. It is a mistake to think that K-12 students who spend seven hours a day in a traditional classroom can spend that same amount of time in front of a computer at home. That is an unrealistic, and frankly unhealthy, expectation. Students who are isolated at home because of school closures and social distancing mandates are juggling a lot mentally and emotionally. They are negotiating a shared space with their family. They may be sharing devices and limited bandwidth with parents and siblings. They may also be dealing with fear and anxiety about the current health crisis.

It's important to adopt a modular approach to designing distance-learning experiences. Teachers must break up the learning activities into smaller parts and give students time to self-pace through those activities. The beauty of online learning lies in the flexibility it affords learners. I would encourage teachers to plan a week at a time and post all of the videos, articles, podcasts, online discussion questions, and assignments that students will need at the start of the week. When teachers post the week's work, they should clearly identify the learning objectives for the week, due dates for specific tasks, and times when the teacher will be available for "office hours" via video conferencing tools like Google Meet or Zoom. This approach allows learners the luxury of completing tasks at a time and pace that works for them.

The Cognitive Presence: Engaging the Class in Meaning Making

If teachers think about the building blocks of a traditional lesson, they will begin to see how those modular activities (direct instruction, discussion, collaborative group work, and others) can be shifted online using a variety of tools, many of which are probably already embedded into their learning-management system. Figure 2 breaks down some of the basic building blocks that educators use to design offline lessons and describes how teachers can use technology tools to engage students in these activities online.

Figure 2. The Building Blocks of an Online Lesson

Successfully Taking Offline Classes Online - table

Building Block

Objective

Online Tools

As teachers think about how these individual building blocks fit together to form a learning experience that extends over a week or several weeks, it is helpful to consider using the 5Es instructional model -engage, explore, explain, elaborate, and evaluate-as a guide when arranging these building blocks (Bybee, 2015). This model provides teachers with a clear path to designing a learning experience that will develop the cognitive presence in a distance-learning community. It prioritizes inquiry, exploration, collaboration, and communication.

Teachers begin by engaging students in a conversation about what they think or wonder, what they already know, or what they would like to find out about a particular topic. Then students explore the topic. Teachers can provide links to articles, videos, and podcasts about a topic, or students can conduct their own research. The "explain" phase of this cycle encourages students to share what they have learned, and the elaborate phase encourages students to make connections between what they are learning and other concepts covered in the course as well as their lives beyond the classroom. It also gives them opportunities to practice, review, and apply what they learned. The learning cycle ends with an evaluation activity to assess what students learned or to ask them to engage in a reflective activity thinking about what they learned to develop their metacognitive muscles.

The beauty of the 5Es instructional model is that it emphasizes the role of the learner in the process of making meaning in a course.

Student-Centered Online Learning

Just because learning is moving online does not mean that students should be relegated to the role of passive receivers of information. Instead, I would like to see teachers prioritize student-centered learning by developing online communities and designing lessons that leverage technology tools and instructional models that actively engage students in each part of the learning process.

References

Bybee, R. (2015). The BSCS 5E instructional model: Creating teachable moments. Arlington, VA: National Science Teachers Association.

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Successfully Taking Offline Classes Online - ASCD

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Teachers who have taught exclusively offline in a traditional school setting may find the transition to teaching online daunting and foreign. As educators navigate this new reality of school closures, social isolation, and remote learning, it's important to remember that education and learning encom

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The Community of Inquiry has emerged as the most widely referenced (the seminal 1999 article approaches 3,000 citations) and arguably the most widely used model for constructivist based e-learning design and research. I've always thought that it's greatest strength is its simplicity (only 3 major, but interacting components) and the way the model can readily be used by teachers to devise and evaluate online learning courses and by researchers to guide the development of research questions and data collection strategies.

In the late 90's we were interested in showing empirically that emerging 'new' forms of interactive distance education could support the type of high quality learning that is possible (though certainly not always available) in classrooms. We wanted to provide evidence for Randy Garrison's claim that this was a new mode of teaching and learning that was education at a distance - not high tech, traditional cognitive behavioural style distance education. Thus, we focused on a key component of constructivist learning - social presence. We also picked up on Randy's earlier work (based on Ennes, Paul and Lipman's work) on critical thinking to devise the phases of cognitive presence. Finally, though Walter Archer, Randy and myself were all active in informal adult learning, we realized that the activity we were focusing on took place in institutional contexts with students studying in degree programs. Thus, we wanted a focus on the critical design, facilitation and subject matter expertise components of teaching presence.

Perhaps we quit too early, as this post argues next, but we had created a parsimonious model that was easily illustrated in the now famous COI Venn diagram. I also recall the fluidity with which new indicators were added to each of the presences as we poured over the transcripts from asynchronous computer conference based courses. In early days, it was easy to add, delete or reword indicators, but the three presences seemed to us then to account for all the major themes of successful online courses. A special call out here to Liam Rourke who worked as a graduate student on this project, and was responsible for much of this early identification and classification work. The COI work was especially enhanced with the development by Ben Arbaugh and colleagues of the COI survey, which made it much easier to gather perception data to measure each of the three presences.

We have never argued that the model identifies all possible components of successful formal education - either online or in the classroom. And perhaps not surprisingly, it wasn't long before additions (and a few deletions) were suggested. For example, David Annand, (2011) suggested that social presence wasn't really needed for effective teaching and learning.

A number of researchers picked up on the need for the contextual or interface "presence" and in the case of distance education for the participants to master the mediating technology. Gilly Salmon (2000) in her famous 7 step e-learning moderation model sees such technical support as a key component of each of her moderation steps. I was never that impressed with these arguments as every context - including classrooms, uses some combination of asynchronous and synchronous media to support teaching and learning. Thus, the "presence" of the media and the need for and skill with which teachers and learners adapt to it is a minor factor that is unique to each teaching and context and I thought would needlessly complicate the COI model.

First came the close to convincing arguments from Peter Shea and his colleagues that the COI model lacked awareness of the critical role that the learner plays in formal education. We all realize that the same learning context and interventions can affect different students with vastly different effect. Thus, Shea and Bidjerano (2010) postulated the need for Learner Presence to account for these important learner set of variables in either online or classroom education.

Marti Cleveland-Innes, Prisca Campbell (2012) and other of Marti's colleagues next argued that " emotional presence" was notably absent from the original COI model. My rather lame excuse that 3 males from Alberta, were very unlikely to posit the existence of emotional presence, since "real men" in Alberta, don't do 'emotion'. Rienties and Rivers (2014) picked up on these ideas of emotional presence in a review study - Measuring and Understanding Learner Emotions: Evidence and Prospects. They who directly added a fourth element to create what technically is now no longer a Venn diagram since it does not show all possible interactions of all 4 components. It is now a Euler model - see http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/1475/why-can-a-venn-diagram-for-4-sets-not-be-constructed-using-circles).

The most recent suggestion for a fourth presence comes from Lam (2015) who validated the existence of the original three presences, and then coined a new term for the type of learner agency that resonates with Shea's " learning presence. Unfortunately she described this new addition to the COI as "Autonomy Presence". Wikipedia explains that Autonomy comes from Ancient Greek: αὐτονομία autonomia from αὐτόνομος autonomos from αὐτο- auto- "self" and νόμος nomos, "law", hence when combined, is understood to mean "one who gives oneself one's own law" (Wikipedia). The word is used largely in the context of independence and freedom to make one's own decisions. In educational context, this "autonomy" is valued to some degree, but as all students know, is severely curtailed by the edicts and wishes of the teacher. The indicators that Lam uses to identify and classify autonomy presence are however becoming increasingly important as the Internet provides additional or supplemental resources and communities that students can use to enhance, augment and validate their learning. (see below)

Terumi Miyazoe and I (2015) discussed this empowerment and the ability for students to increase student-student and student-content interaction in the context of my interaction equivalency theory in our 2015 paper Interaction Equivalency in the OER and Informal Learning Era.

It strikes me that the critical elements of learner, interface and autonomous presence flow directly from Alberta Bandura's (1989) work on agency in which he described three types of agency in social cognitive theory. These are autonomous, mechanical and emergent interactive agency (p. 1175). The word agency evolved from Medieval Latin agentia "active operation," Certainly the capacity for "active operation" can include most of the elements of i nterface presence since being productively active implies control over the environment. Shea's reminder of the importance of the learning presence in the control of "active operation" is also subsumed in agency.

So my own suggestion in the search for the 'missing' element(s) in the COI model is to add agency presence to the COI trinity. This term is simpler than autonomous, builds on the seminal work of Bandura and captures the components mentioned by both Shea and Lam.

But where does that leave emotional presence? I argue that emotion is included in social presence (for example the indicator use of affective language) elements and in agency presence in line with both Bandura's autonomous interaction - the capacity to recognize and use the power, insights and liability of emotional responses and his emergent agency in which emotions can be used to reach insights not accessible to those denying their existence or unable to deal with them effectively.

I haven't validated this model empirically but it would likely include and consolidate many of the elements identified by Lam in her autonomous presence and Shea in his learning presence. And hopefully this addition would bring the COI model more in line with the emergent and networked resource ideas of modern connectivist theories.
References
Annand, D. (2011). Social presence within the community of inquiry framework. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 12(5), 40-56.

Bandura, A. (1989). Human agency in social cognitive theory. American psychologist, 44(9), 1175.

Cleveland-Innes, M., & Campbell, P. (2012). Emotional presence, learning, and the online learning environment. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 13(4), 269-292.

Lam, J. (2015). Autonomy presence in the extended community of inquiry International Journal of Continuing Education and Lifelong Learning, 81(1), 39-61.

Miyazoe, T., & Anderson, T. (2015). Interaction equivalency in an OER, MOOC and informal learning era. Best of Eden 2013 Issue - EURODL. http://www.eurodl.org/?p=special&sp=articles&inum=7&article=695.

Rienties, B., & Rivers, B. A. (2014). Measuring and understanding learner emotions: Evidence and prospects. Learning Analytics Community Exchange.

Salmon, G. (2000). E-moderating: The key to teaching and learning online. London: Kogan Page.

Shea, P., & Bidjerano, T. (2010). Learning presence: Towards a theory of self-efficacy, self-regulation, and the development of a communities of inquiry in online and blended learning environments. Computers & Education, 55(4), 1721-1731.

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A Fourth Presence for the Community of Inquiry Model?

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The Community of Inquiry has emerged as the most widely referenced (the seminal 1999 article approaches 3,000 citations) and arguably the most widely used model for constructivist based e-learning ...

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An educational community of inquiry is a group of individuals who collaboratively engage in purposeful critical discourse and reflection to construct personal meaning and confirm mutual understanding.

The Community of Inquiry theoretical framework represents a process of creating a deep and meaningful (collaborative-constructivist) learning experience through the development of three interdependent elements - social, cognitive, and teaching presence.

Social presence is "the ability of participants to identify with the community (e.g., course of study), communicate purposefully in a trusting environment, and develop inter-personal relationships by way of projecting their individual personalities" (Garrison, 2009, p. 352).

Teaching Presence is the design, facilitation, and direction of cognitive and social processes for the purpose of realizing personally meaningful and educationally worthwhile learning outcomes (Anderson, Rourke, Garrison, & Archer, 2001).

Cognitive Presence is the extent to which learners are able to construct and confirm meaning through sustained reflection and discourse (Garrison, Anderson, & Archer, 2001).

History of the CoI Framework
In an interview for the Reflective Teaching in a Digital Age podcast, Dr. Randy Garrison describes the history of the CoI framework, including its role in the thoughtful design of online education, and practical ways of helping students learn through active participation and shared meaning-making.
Click here to listen to the interview

Garrison, D. R., Anderson, T., & Archer, W. (2000). Critical inquiry in a text-based environment: Computer conferencing in higher education model. The Internet and Higher Education, 2(2-3), 87-105.
Related Files

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An educational community of inquiry is a group of individuals who collaboratively engage in purposeful critical discourse and reflection to construct personal meaning and confirm mutual understanding. The Community of Inquiry theoretical framework represents a process of creating a deep and meaningful (collaborative-constructivist) learning experience through the development of three interdependent elements - social, cognitive, and teaching presence.

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Lesson Plan

Credit... Sam Kalda

The Well section runs a regular column called "But what about when the photocopier is broken, your sixth-period class is bouncing off the walls, or you're teaching five sections in a row? We don't normally run "lesson plans" for teachers and school leaders, but we thought mindfulness for educators was a perfect topic for the start of a new school year. Below, you'll find practical strategies compiled by Alison Cohen, a certified mindfulness teacher and secondary school leadership and instructional coach, for bringing mindfulness into your life both inside and outside the classroom to support your own well-being and, in turn, the well-being of the young people in your care. She ends the post with resources for introducing students to mindfulness too. Meditation for Real Life," which includes helpful tips on how to be mindful - for instance, when walking in the rain or while doing the dishes.

Do you practice mindfulness? Do you weave it into your classroom routine somehow? Let us know.
Though definitions of mindfulness range, mindfulness or mindful awareness generally refers to paying attention to your moment-to-moment internal and external experience - thoughts, emotions, sensations, sounds, the surrounding environment - with an attitude of openness and curiosity, regardless of whether what you are experiencing feels unwanted or unpleasant.

Maria Konnikova writes in her Sunday Opinion piece " The Power of Concentration ":

Though the concept originates in ancient Buddhist, Hindu and Chinese traditions, when it comes to experimental psychology, mindfulness is less about spirituality and more about concentration: the ability to quiet your mind, focus your attention on the present, and dismiss any distractions that come your way. The formulation dates from the work of the psychologist Ellen Langer, who demonstrated in the 1970s that mindful thought could lead to improvements on measures of cognitive function and even vital functions in older adults.

Now we're learning that the benefits may reach further still, and be more attainable, than Professor Langer could have then imagined. Even in small doses, mindfulness can effect impressive changes in how we feel and think - and it does so at a basic neural level.

Paying attention in this way can be a challenge because our attention tends to wander frequently to the past, future and elsewhere. We're also living in an era that is full of distractions. For these reasons, cultivating mindfulness takes practice.

Teaching can be a stressful job - and so can being a principal. Practicing mindfulness can serve as a valuable antidote to the stress many educators experience in juggling the competing demands common during the school day. Patricia A. Jennings's study on the CARE for Teachers program, published this year, suggests that mindfulness-based interventions can "increase teacher social and emotional competence and the quality of classroom interactions." Mindfulness practice has also been shown to alter the brain structure of practitioners in positive ways, improve concentration and emotional self-regulation, and decrease burnout symptoms, among many other benefits.

In addition, this study, published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, suggests that practicing mindfulness can result in a decrease in implicit biases and the negative behaviors they can lead to. This Times video shows how implicit biases are thought processes that happen without us even knowing it - little mental shortcuts that hold judgments we might not agree with. Sometimes those shortcuts are based on race, ethnicity or gender. These biases can cause educators to engage with students, colleagues and other school community members in destructive ways that are misaligned with their conscious values. Mindfulness can help us act more thoughtfully in the moment and rely less on those automatic shortcuts.

David Gelles has produced a complete mindfulness meditation guide for The Times, which includes meditation exercises, audio guided meditations (such as the one-minute meditation) and tips for making meditation a habit. The guide even includes four different meditation journeys using virtual reality.

Before you jump in, we'd like to point out that the guide includes mention of both "formal" and "informal" mindfulness practice. Formal mindfulness practice, also known as mindfulness meditation, involves carving out one or more minutes to pay attention to the present moment on purpose, to strengthen awareness and our ability to recognize we have choices available in each moment. Informal mindful practice are in-the-moment strategies that can be used throughout the day. Keep in mind that mindfulness practice is called a practice for a reason: It bears the most fruit when practiced deliberately and regularly.

Now, where to start? That's an individual decision, but perhaps get your feet wet by selecting one meditation exercise, such as the one-minute audio guide, or experimenting with one of the suggested meditation apps, like Insight Timer. Try meditating each morning for one minute. If you find the experience beneficial, consider lengthening your practice time or trying other exercises included in The Times's guide.

To go further, perhaps you want to take an introductory course tailored specifically for educators. Mindful Schools offers courses to develop personal mindfulness practice and mindful teaching, along with how to teach mindfulness to others. And, CARE for Teachers, run by the Garrison Institute, introduces educators to a variety of research-based self-awareness and self-care practices "designed to help teachers reduce stress and enliven their teaching by promoting awareness, presence, compassion, reflection and inspiration."

An important note: There's a common misconception that mindfulness meditation is meant to be relaxing. When this is not the case, people often believe they are doing it wrong or are "bad" meditators. Practicing mindfulness meditation regularly, no matter how it may feel in the moment, supports nervous system regulation and increases awareness. The question is not whether you experience bliss throughout the meditation session but instead, as the meditation teacher Norman Fischer explains, "The test of meditation isn't meditation. It's your life."

Below are a few different strategies for practicing mindfulness during the work day:

Practice two feet one breath: A hectic school day might seem like an unlikely place for meditation, but a few seconds of purposeful awareness before each class can help set the tone for the rest of the period - or the entire day. Before starting class, try "two feet one breath," an evidence-based awareness and burnout prevention practice described in this Well article about doctors. For five seconds, feel your feet on the ground and take one conscious breath, feeling the sensations of breathing. To stay focused on the exercise, you might even say to yourself, "two feet one breath."

Set intentions: Setting intentions - in a word or a sentence - can also be helpful in mindfulness practice. For example, how do you want to show up, from the minute students begin arriving at your door? Perhaps you decide your intention is to welcome each student as they enter with eye contact and a smile, and then to continue to recognize their individual strengths and needs throughout the class period. Or, it may be that you're dealing with a personal challenge outside of school. Your intention might be to acknowledge thoughts and feelings about it throughout the day, as a way of being self-compassionate and ensuring difficult emotions do not negatively affect your interactions. Setting an intention can increase the likelihood that you will engage with students in ways aligned with your values.

Use the "I am aware" sentence starter: During the school day, pause briefly and finish the sentence "I am aware ...," tuning in to what's happening in your experience. For example:

"I am aware I need to go to the bathroom and there are four minutes before class starts." Decision time: Make a run for it? Or, wait until after class and in the meantime do my best to focus on the task at hand?

"I am aware I'm feeling surprised by how well the guided practice part of the lesson went." Great! Later today I can reflect on why it worked so well.
"I am aware I'm anxious about seeing Jenna next period, since yesterday we had a tough moment in class. I've let go of it, but what if she hasn't?" In this case, before class has even begun I recognize how I feel and am therefore less likely to think Jenna's presence is the cause of my anxiety. I might opt to say something to her at the door to clear the air before class begins, or I may choose to wait and see if she even remembers yesterday's interaction and only check in with her later in the period if need be. My awareness of the anxiety and its cause creates space. Now I have a choice about next steps.
Make one activity a day a mindfulness priority: Choose one daily activity during work you commit to doing with mindful awareness. For example, when eating lunch or drinking coffee, focus on the experience of eating or drinking, actually tasting each bite or sip, and not grading or lesson planning while doing so.

Fourth graders at Public School 212 in Queens practice mindful exercises in the classroom. Related Article Credit... Lindsay Morris for The New York Times

Practicing mindfulness in your own life can organically lead to integrating it into your classes in a variety of ways, whether by inviting students to take two feet one breath or by beginning class with a moment of mindful breathing.

In this 2015 article The Times reported on how schools and districts across the country are experimenting with mindfulness programs:

In schools in New York City and in pockets around the country, the use of inward-looking practices like mindfulness and meditation is starting to grow. Though evidence is thin on how well they might work in the classroom, proponents say they can help students focus and cope with stress.

If you or your school are looking for support in bringing mindfulness practice to students, Mindful Schools offers curriculum and training for teachers interested in sharing mindfulness with students.

But remember, starting with mindfulness in your own daily life, before introducing anything new to students, can on its own make a positive impact on the culture of your classroom and your students' success.
Additional Resources
Courage to Teach: a retreat series offered by the Center for Courage and Renewal that "focuses neither on technique, nor directly on school reform, but rather on renewing the inner lives of professionals in education."

Contemplative Fellowships for Educators: scholarships provided by the Hemera Foundation to support "educators' growth through contemplative practice in a retreat setting, allowing individuals the opportunity to cultivate mindfulness, compassion, personal well-being and professional efficacy, and, in turn, embody and apply these qualities to promote positive school cultures."

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Cultivating Mindfulness for Educators Using Resources From The New York Times (Published 2017)

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Lesson Plan The Well section runs a regular column called " But what about when the photocopier is broken, your sixth-period class is bouncing off the walls, or you're teaching five sections in a row? We don't normally run "lesson plans" for teachers and school leaders, but we thought mindfulness for educators was a perfect topic for the start of a new school year.

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Liberatory Design is a process and practice to:

Generate self-awareness to liberate designers from habits that perpetuate inequities.

Shift the relationship between the people who hold power to design and those impacted by designs.

Foster learning and agency for those involved in and influenced by design work.

Create conditions for collective liberation.

The Liberatory Design Deck included here offers Mindsets and Modes to support your practice of Liberatory Design.

The Liberatory Design approach and card deck are (always!) works in progress. We'd love to hear your feedback! How do you use it? What works for you? What do you wish was different? Any new ideas? Find the team at www.liberatorydesign.com

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Liberatory Design is a process and practice to: Generate self-awareness to liberate designers from habits that perpetuate inequities. Shift the relationship between the people who hold power to design and those impacted by designs. Foster learning and agency for those involved in and influe

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Liberatory Design is a riff on Stanford d.school's design thinking process to promote equity in desin work. This framework was co-created by Tania Anaissie, Victor Cary, David Clifford, Tom Malarkey and Susie Wise during a collaboration in 2016/17 with the National Equity Project and d.school's K12 Lab.The goal is to provide a design process that develops one's self-awareness as an equity-centered designer.

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Human-Centered Design

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When schools shut down overnight in response to coronavirus safety measures, many educators had a circumstance they've been wishing for, a complete shutdown of the current system, and the opportunity to design something new. And now, many notice they should be careful what they wish for. Designing a new system of teaching and learning is incredibly hard work, especially in circumstances of pandemic and national unrest. So where do we start when thinking about the new system design for teaching and learning in America? We start with people. Specifically, our young people (students). Systems are people working in motion together. But many systems are not designed in honor of the people, they operate in honor of arbitrary outcomes. Now is the time to flip that system design approach and design with humans at the center.

The "Humans" in Human-Centered

Now, more than ever we must be explicit about who we center in human-centered design. We can't perpetuate a normed collective of people-as we know system norms are standard in whiteness and oppress/alienate all the other humans that do not subscribe to that white context. We must talk about each human, be explicit of the dynamic human experience in consideration to race, culture, gender, class, location, belief systems, physical ability, mental health wellbeing, etc. To center humans in design, we must consider:

How does this design component best meet the interests and needs of a Latinx, non-binary young person living in New Mexico?

If we create a process for restorative cultures at school, how are we learning from local Indigenous leaders and families to inform our work?

How does reimagining this system component improve the learning experience of a deaf, Black, male teenager living in the urban core of Los Angeles?

How are we ensuring that we are not perpetuating ableism in our facility and resource design priorities and ensuring all students, no matter physical or mental ability, can access and benefit?

By shifting from generalized considerations and centering each human participant in the system design, we will better understand the correlation between processes and structures and be better in our consideration of impact and consequences for short and long term decision making. When measurements of success center on each student, and must tell the story of their individualized learning experience in a meaningful way, what matters is each students' learning experience, and we learn more specifically what is working (or not) in the overall system design.

Seating the Table (Who is making decisions?)

Human-centered design requires collective decision making. In education work, funding and policy are in many cases decided by people with limited to no context of actual education work. Most people at policymaking tables are representative of a power structure, limited cultural context, and privileged access that is not a nuanced example of the learning community experience. It is imperative that decisions are made at a collective table that is representative of all stakeholders that are part of the educational story. It also means being more intentional about selecting students, and providing ample access for parents to participate, and considering location and timing for community and business partners, and the influence alumni and upcoming parents can have on design. We must ensure that the actual community is at the table, and not a group of chosen people deciding in the best interest of the community.

Design

Human-centered learning relies on the involvement of the (student) user. Creating paths to build agency for learners to actively engage in learning is a fundamental design principle. Systemic structures to build in feedback cycles and critical thinking provides opportunities for human-centered learning environments to be iterative and evolving. Inclusive education relies on the design structure to be inclusive.

Designing with humans at the center creates a new way of working together-time and place and process are not representative of outcomes-based norms. This can appear "unproductive" or "inefficient" by previous standards. Human-centered design can appear expensive or not as "cost-effective" by previous standards. Designing for human-empowered outcomes will function and spend differently-do not lose sight of this systemic change and move through the discomfort as part of the learning curve.

Human-centered design strategies layered with systems thinking is the opportunity we have within this working tension. Within our already resource-constrained district budgets, we need courageous strategies to tackle the important (and often messy) work ahead to redesign a system that better represents our communities and families we serve.

Execution

Personalized learning is critical but it has to be secondary to the conversation about personalized outcomes. We have to first know where we are going and why. After you are solid with your why, consider the best options moving forward to support this. We have shared some to consider.

Start with students at the center.

Build capacity and nurture continuous improvement through Networked Improvement Communities (NIC) dedicated to the purpose of human-centered design.

Ensure NICs are inclusive of all stakeholders at the table, inviting teacher- and student-led groups to prototype social innovations, while seeking feedback to test the feasibility of their ideas.

Establish a personalized learning environment to ensure mutual accountability of student-centered instruction and cultural competence. For teachers and the learning system, this could be as important as knowing a learner's IEP requirements.

Flatten the hierarchy, thrive in holonomy, and strive for more holocratic leadership models.

In learner-centered approaches, such as the following recommendations from Big Picture Learning, highlight cultural competence and interests throughout. 1. Pay attention to the whole student, 2. Focus on students' strengths, 3. Encourage leaving to learn, and 4. Assess in multiple ways.

Reflection

"Without reflection, we go blindly on our way, creating more unintended consequences, and failing to achieve anything useful." -Margaret Wheatley

It is imperative that human-centered systems design integrates reflection. One key place to reflect at the start of human-centered design is on the influence and impact of empathy in design thinking. Empathy can seem counterintuitive to the influences of power and resource scarcity in outcome-centered system design. It is important to pay attention to the effective ways to build empathy within human-centered design and operationalize empathy as a recurring human-centered systemic function.

Set a primary investigative reflection of the current system and for whom it is designed and for whom it is not currently designed. Invite diverse stakeholders to take a look into the design process, and then conduct interviews to gather insightful information from a "fresh eyes" view of the system.

Systematize shared reflections of all stakeholders to gain deeper understanding of humanity in human-centered design. Insight like the following excerpt from this KQED Mindshift Blog is incredibly important,

"I would say, academically, if you were inclined to think about students as human beings who deserved chances and grace, then this transition isn't as difficult ... We are in a situation where our system has not been equipped and has never been equipped to give kids equitable access to the things that we need to fully teach them. And so this period has only exacerbated that ... So I think a big takeaway for me is that I'm blessed that I already had an orientation around centering children because it made this transition, not easy in terms of the relationships-I miss kids daily-but I guess the technical parts, like what assignments I'm going to give, what am I going to do to facilitate learning, that stuff has been relatively simple." - José Vilson, Teacher, Harold O. Levy School, New York City

Sustenance

Healthy, diverse, abundant community eco-systems are the outcomes of human-centered design. Beginning to shift the system and establish the climate of human-centered design and culture is long, dedicated work that will shape a community. When that community is in harmony as a human-centered system, solidify outcomes of liberation by sustaining the systemic iterations with Liberatory Design strategies. To sustain, there must be diverse roles and interdependent connections. To sustain, there must be trust in access, opportunity, and connectivity. Human-centered systems nourish participants in ways that enable the work, even when difficult, to be life giving and community building, for generations to come.

For more, see:
Stay in-the-know with innovations in learning by signing up for the weekly Getting Smart has launched the Getting Through series to support educators, leaders, and families on the path forward during such an uncertain time. This series will provide resources and inspiration as we face long term school closures, new learning environments, and address equity and access from a new lens. Whether you are just getting started with distance or online learning, or you've had plans in place and have the opportunity to share your work and guidance with others, there is a place for your voice and an opportunity to learn. We're going to get through this together, and we invite you to join us. Please email Editor@GettingSmart.com with any questions or content you'd like considered for publication. We also invite you to join the conversation and on social media using #GettingThrough. .

Kelly has been an educator for fourteen years. She began her career teaching in Southern California and has helped schools and systems reimagine teaching and learning, as well as serving as a school administrator. She is a Deeper Learning Equity Fellow, driven by the relentless belief in the possibility of social justice within education systems. Kelly focuses her education leadership on re-imagining structures for teaching and learning in order to empower all students for the future. Kelly is also a member of the Getting Smart Advisory Board.

Rebecca Midles is an innovator in competency education and personalized learning with over twenty years of experience as teacher, administrator, board member, consultant and parent. Follow her on Twitter at @akrebecca.

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Getting Clearer: Human-Centered Design | Getting Smart

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When schools shut down overnight in response to coronavirus safety measures, many educators had a circumstance they've been wishing for, a complete shutdown of the current system, and the opportunity to design something new. And now, many notice they should be careful what they wish for.

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for educators

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IDEO's Five Stages of Design Thinking for Educators