Building Communities Online

I recently presented at Canopy Live on building communities online. This is a session I trimmed down from a full day's training that Dr Lou Mycroft and myself offer colleges and schools ( happily discuss more about this with anyone interested, anytime).

“Students said they were more likely to engage when they felt that staff valued them, were reliable and consistent in their engagement with online work, and had set up effective support measures.” 

(Palmer et al., 2017)

I purposefully include this from 2017 as I think anything pre pandemic is interesting. Not that what we learnt in the pandemic isn't interesting, but I like to highlight that online teaching happened pre pandemic and we learnt a LOT from that time too.

I don't think this quote is telling us anything unusual. Students want to feel valued. We all do. That is the practice of care (if you ever spend time with Dr Mycroft you will hear her speak to this often) that is education. How do we show students we care? What conditions for them to excel do we create? When teaching online how do we check in?

Also at Canopy Live was the wonderful Cat Lamin. She shared about how important it is to check in on others and your own mental health. She used this duck scale to ask us how we were.

What I like about the duck scale is that it is open to all, everyone can relate to the stages. This is one type of check in, there are others. What is important though is that we check in. I tweet regularly that the algorithms on social media show you what it thinks you want to see. To build community you have to go beyond the algorithm. Seek out people to connect with, topics that interest you. Scrolling isn't the way to build community on social media. Active dialogue is. Engaging with others, seeking voices different to yours to learn from. We rely a lot on platforms to deliver what we need. Think about a VLE. It shows you what you want to see, who has done the work and when. What it doesn't show you (instantly, agree that this is possible with back channels and extra interventions) is how the work went for students? How did they feel? Was it appropriately challenging? That's the human conversational part that we need to add in as an extra to our work. Likewise on Twitter, it delivers the information it is required to deliver. Scrolling until your hearts content, but the human interaction and connection is the work that you have to do.

If you are serious about building communities online, you might want to consider checking in, with a duck or without. The feeling of value you will show another in doing so cannot be underestimated.

Once you have checked in, how do you let students know that you value them throughout the lesson? I am reminded of a colleague who was once upset that a student failed to acknowledge her lovingly crafted feedback on each page of a students work. The student wanted to know the grade and what to do to improve in summary and disregarded hours of teacher feedback. Had the teacher asked what feedback the student had wanted there would have been a different outcome. Think yellow box marking where one section of yellow boxed work is marked intently. I have seen this include students self selecting the section to be marked also. The student has owned their work and indicated that they only require this section to be marked. The teacher marks that section with the level of feedback the student has asked for. Recognising whole college and school policies often dictate how we mark, but I think there are elements in this that can work and I have seen work well.

Teaching online, we can replicate this by indicating the yellow box. But that verbal feedback as we would traditionally circulate the room are slightly trickier. Sure we can verbally offer feedback, perhaps not whole class and maybe in breakout rooms? My go to technique is to use comments in student work live. I take a helicopter view of one slide deck. Each slide has the task, space for student work and each student's name on top. I then share one doc with the class with edit rights. Version history helps reinforce my expectations of etiquette and respect for others work in the doc. Each student navigates to their slide in the deck and works. I can see the colour code for each student as they work. I can then add comments live.

I can toggle my view to grid view (slide sorter view in PowerPoint) and see everyone working at once. I can see work appear live and dive in to slides where I think students might need help. Students feel safe to contribute, we have established expectations and I have reminded them of version history. Students feel valued that I can give them feedback quietly and as I would if I were circulating the room. Students could see each others work in the room normally, online they can too. If this were an issue for my students I would maybe move this quick, instant verbal feedback I am replicating online to Google Chat or private comments to students. I am showing students that I value their work and I am supporting them in their learning. We are all connected and building a learning community online.

Referring back to the initial quote, the value students perceive is also in expectations and support. Backchannel chats are a supportive measure my students enjoy. Our backchannel is via Google Chat. Students can privately message me live with how they are feeling, issues, ideas and I can support. Something like Backchannel Chat is also appropriate. That immediate support of knowing that your teacher is there and will be able to help is an effective support in itself, just the knowing. My students mainly share emojis at the level of challenge they are experiencing and my job is to support them to overcome that fear or work through it to achieve their potential in that class. This is time consuming and mentally taxing for me as a teacher, but since when was teaching not either of those things? We do what we need to do to help our students. I find setting a self marking activity for the class useful whilst I manage the back channel at key points in the lesson invaluable. Otherwise students would be left looking at my thinking face whilst I manage all the communication modes.

The pedagogy

When we began teaching online in lockdown, it was an emergency. We were crisis response teaching. We were forced to deliver lessons, quickly online. There was a raft of pdfs printed and sent home as well as links to good websites shared and teachers began synchronously delivering content. There was a focus on getting content out there, quickly, and rightly so. Students needed some normality to continue. Those safe adults that had taught them in their physical school were still showing up for them and were still there for them teaching online. 

We have moved on now. Now we have collapsed bubbles. Socially distance classrooms. Hybrid classrooms with half in half out. We have blended learning, flipped learning all going on. This time though it is intentional. This is the new education. This isn't a crisis response this is our approach to planning in these new long term circumstances. We can all see that classrooms of 30 may not return for some time unless massive physical redevelopment of institutions happen because space is tight. The challenge now is to reflect on our pedagogical approaches and seek ways to develop and include those in our classroom be it physical, online or hybrid. 

Taking this article from TES 

What is pedagogy?

By Tes Editorial on 10 December 2018 accessed 24th October 2020 I wanted to explore how this may look now in our new way of teaching. I have purposefully chosen an article that isn't recent. This is two years old since writing and the concepts discussed are much older. I chose this because I think a lot of the same rules apply when teaching online. 

Behaviourism

Lecturing is easily replicated online. We can screenshare our presentation. We can orate our lectures. Learners can listen. Modelling is also easily replicated. We can use a blank slide in our slide presentation to model answers, we can insert images and annotate too. For those craving a whiteboard and pen we can easily do this too with IPEVO software or Flipgrid and mirror the screen when writing on a mini whiteboard at home. (one of the best tutorials on this is here by Daren White) By using a mirror you can film using you laptop or chromebook camera the keyboard of your device. Then pop a mini whiteboard, or laminated card or paper to cover over the keyboard and model away. The IPEVO or Flipgrid software will flip your mirrored writing to appear the correct way round for the learners watching online. 

Constructivism 

When teaching online we can slow the pace down for our learners. We can scaffold with a separate resource. We can share in the chat box of our online video call, additional text or ask learners how they are managing. If we wanted to anonymise student responses we may want to use a poll system like Slido, Peardeck, Mentimeter, Wooclap or the inbuilt tools in the video conferencing software we are using. We can take pulse checks of our teaching and reflect and adapt where we go next based on student feedback. 

Social Constructivism 

Group work can be replicated via tasks set and assigned to groups of students in our LMS. We can assign to different students different work via Google Classroom or Microsoft Teams or whatever LMS we have. We can create slide decks of presentations with tasks outlined asking for group or pair collaboration on the same deck. We can use version history or track changes to see who contributed to the discussion. We therefore have a record of that group discussion that previously in a physical classroom we wouldn't have had. We now know if there are passengers in the group or pair work task and can support. We know now if there are dominant team players and we can support them too. This group or pair work doesn't have to happen synchronously. We can set a slide deck and ask learners to contribute when they are doing their task, this works for asynchronous and synchronous learning. In Google slides a simple FILE>Version History we can see the changes in the slide deck over time and assess learners group or pair work and participation with more of an insight than we may have had in a physical classroom. 

Using our video conferencing software we can either use breakout rooms for group or pair work or we can create meetings just for the groups or pairs to attend. We could schedule 3 meetings at the same time, and assign the code to the meeting to each of the groups or pairs if we wanted then to work synchronously. We as the meeting owner can visit each of these rooms to check progress. We can schedule small groups across the week where we as teachers deliver small group instruction via video call. 

Liberatonianism

Student choice can be created via hyperdocs. We can create an choice of topics or activities for learners, links to exciting resources all curated into one hyperdoc. We can use visual stimulus to inspire learners in our hyperdocs and insert images. It's then INSERT>Link to link to the online resource we have chosen. 

Students can show what they know by presenting on a video call with you or their peers. This can easily be recorded either via the software of the video call or a screen recorder like Hippo Video, IPEVO, Screencastify, Loom, Screencastomatic or many others. Students could record a video themselves using these tools and post it back to teachers. Students could create infographics to show what they know in Canva, Venngage or even Google Drawings. Students could curate their own resources to answer or support their answer to a question and display these in a Wakelet, Lino, Padlet or their own hyperdoc slide deck. 

Students can show what they have learnt or answer questions via Flipgrid. They can orate their thought process. They may have more time to do this. They may feel less pressure than in a physical classroom when doing this. You may gain more of an insight into your learners via their content in using this media. They could show their answers via dance, via song, their creativity can really shine through.

I've included this part as a reminder of when I was taught to be a teacher. I was taught via lecture face to face. I was taught the pedagogy. I was then told to go into the classroom and develop my own approach. Over the years my approach has evolved from those early days in the classroom. Group work has increased in my focus, teacher talk has reduced. This is through my reflections on my teaching. My growth and development as a teacher. That doesn't change now that I teach online. I am reflecting on my pedagogical approach in the physical classroom. As I reflect, I see that many strategies I physically did in the classroom can be replicated online. Yet I am excited and enthused at the new opportunities of teaching online and the new pedagocial approaches I can develop. I hope this blog has helped you feel the same. SJ