The first thing is to keep focusing only on what is important and getting rid of all the fluff.
You know, all the extra stuff that you put in there that's not really all that important,
kind of like how I cut out the intro in this video. Remote teaching really forced us to
think about what was essential in our curriculum and what wasn't. There literally just wasn't
any time anymore for random worksheets or activities that kind of mattered, but not
really. And that's because when you're teaching online, you only have a limited amount of time,
so it's not hard to cut all that stuff out. But how do we continue this focus on what's important
when we return to a full in-person school day? By far the most effective way to do this is to use
essential questions in your teaching. What are essential questions? They're basically compelling
questions that don't have a single correct answer, that provoke deeper thinking, and get people to
engage with thematic content that really gets to the core of what it means to be a human,
and be alive, and you know, big questions like that. If you're a Math teacher, an essential
question might be, "How can we use patterns to predict the future?" If you're a Science teacher,
it might be something like, "How do we know what's real and what isn't?" And if you're an English
teacher, you might ask an essential question like, "How does literature communicate a greater truth
than non-fiction?" There are lots of excellent resources that I'll link in the video description
below for helping you identify essential questions that would work for your classroom,
like this list on futurefocusedlearning.net, which has over 100 essential questions in all subject
areas that you can use for inspiration, or just use. They also have this useful six step guide
that walks you through how you would start with your standards, and then you would think about
what would actually challenge students, and then you would also start considering what
students would actually be doing to engage with this question. By the way, this is where the
technology integration piece comes back into play, because when you ask students to explore
essential questions by creating with technology, that is when true transformation takes place.
You want to come up with about three to five essential questions to guide your entire year,
and then you can use those questions to evaluate all the activities, lessons, units that you teach,
and if they don't contribute toward this bigger picture narrative, toward answering the questions,
get rid of it. It's fluff. Now once you've cut all the fluff, you'll also need to maximize class
time to be able to get to all that higher order thinking. And here we can also take from some of
the strategies used in remote teaching too. I'm willing to bet that you'd be okay never hearing
the words "synchronous" and "asynchronous" again. Or maybe it's "roomers" and "zoomers." I don't
know, it's a close call. But if there's one thing we should definitely keep from remote teaching,
it is asynchronous instruction. Specifically, when you, the teacher, are making video tutorials that
your students can watch on their own time, at their own pace. People often think that
flipping instruction means that you have to be asking students to watch your video tutorials
outside of class, but it doesn't have to be that way. You can definitely flip instruction within
your classroom, and in fact, it can be just as effective, if not more effective, to do that.
Flipping your classroom in class helps address one of the most significant problems educators
face today. When you're trying to provide direct instruction to an entire class of students,
it almost never works. Why? Because not all students learn at the same pace. You're either
moving too quickly for some students who need you to slow down, and then they end up entirely lost,
or you're moving too slowly for other students who already get it, and they're sitting in your
classroom, bored. The result is that we kind of end up accepting this reality that we're just
going to shoot right down the middle and try to get as many people right in that middle as
possible, but everybody who's kind of an outlier on each side kind of just gets lost in the mix.
Instead, if you set up your class where you're doing a lot of your direct instruction via video
tutorials that you create, then students get to move at their own pace, and when they're ready
they can just move on to an independent activity or you can set them up to do a collaborative
activity afterwards. Not only does this help promote autonomy and self-awareness in students,
it also frees up your time to be able to pull individual students or small groups who need some
additional remediation, or who need enrichment. The second problem that flipping your classroom,
or asynchronous instruction, helps address is the fact that live instruction is done
once it's over. When instruction only happens in real time, students have no way of going back
and re-watching it over again to get what they missed, and if they're out for the day because
they're sick, then they just totally missed out on that lesson. Or they might just even step out to
use the bathroom, and then miss a critical step for how to divide fractions, and then
just never learn that again, and then spend the rest of their entire lives never knowing how to
divide fractions, and how do you even live a life like that not knowing how to divide fractions?
Oh, that was just me? Seriously though, flipping instruction is just more equitable. It's
inherently differentiated. You can even take your video tutorials up a whole other level by adding
interactive questions to them. Thom actually just made a video about the new Screencastify update
that now allows you to do that in Screencastify, and Edpuzzle just added that feature to their
extension, so you can record a screencast and then you can add those questions directly in Edpuzzle.
So it's much easier to do that now, and it's a great way to be able to pull a report, see how
students are doing, and continue to facilitate that self-awareness in your students. So rather
than pigeonholing asynchronous instruction as a remote teaching strategy, we should call it what
it actually is, an effective teaching strategy. Something you'll never hear me say: "I wish
we could go back to the days of just teaching over Zoom?" If you're back teaching in person,
you can probably get rid of video conferencing as a strategy for teaching students. But,
you should keep video conferencing as a way to connect with families. We all know how important
building strong relationships with families is to a student's success, but we also know how
difficult it can be to maintain connections with families, to communicate issues that are happening
at school with families just over the phone, and the difficulty of working parents being able to
find time to be able to come into the school. And it really doesn't need to be all that hard.
That's so 2018. The whole ritual of sending home schedules for parents to sign up for a meeting,
and then calling the ones that don't, and then having those parents take time off work and then
drive around and try to find a parking spot, and then come into the school building, and sit in an
uncomfortable chair outside your room for like 30 minutes while your other meeting goes late,
ends up just being another barrier to effective parent engagement. Think about how much easier
it would be to just get Thom's grandfather on a Zoom call so I can share my screen,
and then I can explain to him how Thom has not been doing any of the assignments this
entire year, and I'm really sorry but we really got to get this kid's act together. And think
about how much easier it is for a parent who's working two jobs, just trying to make ends meet,
to just hop on a quick video chat to talk about their student. So this remote teaching strategy
we should keep is also a strategy that's about inclusion and equity. Something else that's so
2018: only connecting with and learning from other educators at your physical school. Teaching can
feel incredibly isolating, especially if you're working at a school where others around you don't
really share your vision, and they just kind of want to go back to the old way of doing things.
Remote teaching didn't just bust down brick and mortar school buildings for students, they also
broke those walls down for teachers, and opened up a whole new world of connectivity with other
educators around the world. It just made it so clear how easy it is to connect and collaborate,
and work together with people no matter where they live. Take us for example. Thom and I run
New EdTech Classroom together as a business, yet we almost never have conversations live. Because
we live in different time zones and have different schedules, the way that we primarily communicate
is using this app called Marco Polo that allows us to record asynchronous videos, watch them in our
own time, and then record a video response back. And not just that. Thom and I are close friends,
but we've never actually met in person, and when we do meet in person, he's going to be very
surprised by how much taller this camera makes me look. Now it's not that I don't want to see Thom,
I do, and I want to see other people as well. My point here, though, is that in the age of the
internet we're able to connect with people that we wouldn't normally be able to connect with,
if we didn't have access to that resource and that tool. And that means you aren't restricted
to learning just from people in your district. You can learn from educators all around the world.
You can attend virtual conferences that you might not be able to attend if you had to actually fly
and pay for a hotel and do all that in person. Being a connected educator means you can tap into
a collective network that's humming with ideas and resources to push you and help inspire you, even
if you don't find that inspiration at your actual school. Let us know in the comments, what are some
things you think we should be keeping from remote teaching, when we return to in-person classrooms?