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For teachers looking to do their best this academic year in difficult circumstances, know that online teaching is hard work, but not for the reasons you might think. The hardest bit is changing your teaching mindset, and the mindsets of your students. Here’s some thoughts.
1. Worry less about content & more about relationships. The more time you spend creating & polishing content, the less you have for more important things like planning, nurturing and curating an environment and culture that will help students really engage with your course.
2. Online learning is about people, and this needs to be foregrounded even more than in on-campus. Be an advocate for your students, be on their side. Trust, by default, that they want to learn and be engaged. Your job is to help them do that, not to enforce / punish / judge.
3. Worry less about reading facial expressions & non-verbal cues, and more about listening to students. Give them opportunities to talk about the aspects of your course they want to talk about. Scaffold and encourage conversations between peers, where you’re not present.
4. Create space for them to express themselves, and then pay attention to what they say. But also, give them space for expression that you don’t have access to.
5. Worry less about scheduled sessions & more about planning meaningful tasks that help students connect what they’ve already learned to what they need to learn in the future.
6. Your responsibility for your students goes beyond scheduled sessions and “contact hours”. Students probably learn more when you’re not watching than they do when you are watching.
7. Conversations don’t need to be synchronous. Give opportunities for slower thoughts & questions (e.g. via discussion board, blog, Whatsapp group etc.). You don’t always need to monitor these processes, but students need to feel like you’re available to discuss things.
8. If doing a one-off session, talk to people teaching other sessions with the same students. Talk to the core programme team. Figure out how their different sessions should connect together and work on strengthening those connections
9. Collaborate with other teachers to plan across sessions. Make your presence known beyond your session, even if that is just by each teacher signposting how the other sessions relate to this one. Even just acknowledging that you’ve thought about this is a big deal.
10. Make your rationales explicit, take time to talk through your approach with students, help them see what you’re trying to achieve and what their role is. Students reinterpret your designs; explaining your aims will help them do so in appropriate ways.
11. Be clear about aims and aspirations, and how they relate to assessment. This helps students take responsibility for orientating their exploration towards the core requirements without you needing to be prescriptive and frees you up from producing loads of content.
12. Consider your role not as a producer of content or a presenter of information but as a source of structural and motivational support, as an aid to making connections between ideas, between people, and between one task and another.
13. Meaningful learning outcomes aren’t achieved within a single session. Students need to do things afterwards to consolidate what they learn, apply it, and make connections with other ideas. Discuss ideas for these activities with them.
14. The most important thing IMO is that you look beyond single-session lesson plans and beyond content to how you can help students’ keep learning and joining their different lessons together.
That'll do for now, I'd be interested in your thoughts.
