My Strengths and Needs with Remote Learning: A Reflection

As the new school year is about to begin (or is it? who knows...) I've thought a lot about my experience with remote teaching last spring. Specifically, there are some things that went really well and there were other things that definitely need to change.

Let's start with strengths (got to start with the glows, ya know!!?).

So the school that I work at encouraged us teachers to use technology in the classroom before we went remote. For this reason I already had a google classroom set up with all the students. This made the transition very easy for me.

Along with this, the structure of an explicit model class was very easy to transition into remote. For my explicit modeling, I used this website called EdPuzzle. I love EdPuzzle...I want to be sponsored by EdPuzzle. It's basically this website where you can upload (or use other people's) videos and you can add check for understandings throughout the video. You can also add comments (written or voice) throughout as well. It's great for math. I would record myself giving the mini lesson and then in EdPuzzle I would add check for understandings as well as additional commentary. There are so many amazing benefits to having your mini lesson recorded. The biggest is that students can go at their own pace. It's inherent differentiation. Also, the videos are there forever. If a student is reviewing for a test they can go back and watch the video to relearn the concept. Honestly, recording myself was great. 10/10 would recommend. And 10/10 would recommend using EdPuzzle.

Another glow that I would say for myself (wow I'm really staying humble here) is my consistency and organization. At our school we use Google Classroom and I wanted to make sure mine was visually organized. Each unit had it's own topic and then each lesson was an assignments labeled as 1.1 or 2.7 etc. Each assignment had everything in it...the Do Now, Mini, Practice, and Exit. Everyday the assignment was organized the same way and I really believe students appreciated the consistency. They knew what to expect everyday...especially when the world felt so unexpected all the time. Anyways, I'm basically really proud of how I organized my Google Classroom. It brings me joy...I don't know..is that weird?

The last glow I'm going to give myself are my interpersonal relationships with my students. I think my relationships got stronger during remote learning? Is that weird to say? I really think they did. At the beginning, my co-teacher and I were struggling to get students to come online and into the Google Meets. We started calling these kids and their parents during class saying, hey we are online right now come on and I'll help you!! Once students came online, they realized that wow this teacher is actually going to help me and this work isn't that bad...I may be able to actually do this!! Along with this I had made mandatory small groups. Students had a specific day they must log on and they would do the lesson with me and a few other students. I think it was less daunting for students to be in a meet with 10 people versus the whole class. I was able to get students to unmute, I was able to cold call, it really just felt like a normal classroom. Also with a group of 10 students I was able to be WAY more personal and ask about life and ask how they were doing. The small groups were really successful, kids liked coming into the meets. I consistently had a group of kids that would just come on everyday because they liked doing the work together rather than by themselves. All these things helped build the strong interpersonal relationships. Due to these relationships, I would say I probably saw 85% of my students consistently, and the ones that I didn't see consistently I was able to get in contact with them and help them catch up. I've told many people this, but if students don't like you, they will not log on to your remote class. Your relationships with your students is SO important during this time (I mean honestly at all times but we are talking specifically about remote learning).

Yikes I'm rambling a lot.

I actually spoke at a symposium about how to make an effective and engaging remote math lesson so if you would like to look at what I talked about feel free to click through this slide show: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1y3t6lbz3BoS5hxUc0QF2QkslPRGhX7qXtnJxupq0pBw/edit#slide=id.g75220abf82_0_49

Okay onto Needs/Grows.

The biggest grow that I need to work on is explore lessons. Ugh. Ugh. Ugh. As a math teacher, it's just so much easier to model the type of problem and then have students practice it. But does that teach critical thinking? No. Does that teach resilience? No. Are students understanding the why behind the problem? Probably not. Due to the abrupt nature of going remote and not having that much time to plan in advance, I found it really difficult to come up with remote explore lessons. I tried using desmos and it was just okay. I think now that I have more time to plan in advance I'll use it more meaningfully. I also need to take the time to look at other tools that could be used for explore lessons.

I also need to think about how to structure a remote live session. This year I will have all the kids logging on at the same time (due to hybrid learning). Small groups won't be possible. I need to think about how to create a remote classroom culture in which students feel comfortable unmuting and hopefully turning on their camera (which is a whole other thing).

Lastly, I've been thinking a lot about how I can show my students how math is relevant in their lives. Whether it's showing them mathematicians that look like them, or doing more projects that relate to their communities, interests, and passions... like that's what I want to implement. I need to think about how I can do that in this hybrid model that is occurring this year. It's going to be a lot, but I think it's worth it.

In (very abrupt) conclusion, I got the basics down. I now need to focus on how to level up.