(…ish)
I’ve been having a ridiculously difficult time coming up with a subject for this last post (of the first course of my first semester of the M.Ed. program). In fact, as I write this, I feel very much as though I’ve warped backwards in time to my university-student-self, who often wrote essays the day before (*cough* ok, in the wee hours of the night of the day) they were due. When lamenting to my sister-in-law, she suggested that I write about my day — and I realized that she was on to something.
You see, I ended my morning of work (in which I had a one-hour online Google Meet with one of my classes) with a trek from my upstairs desk in Central Office, to the main floor where our school has an outreach centre. Normally, I don’t have a chance to actually see many of my students; today, I’d been made aware that three of my students were in. It turns out that they had come in for an “engagement day” organized by the family wellness worker who works for our school, which would run in the afternoon.
I began with checking in with the two students I knew by face and name; neither needed my help nor planned to work on school right then. After sleuthing a little (read: asking the secretary for help), I found the third of my students, who was sitting on a sectional couch with her older sister in the corner of the room. I joined them and we proceeded to talk (so very briefly) about school. Since she was there for the afternoon fun, and had previously disclosed some social anxiety, I spent the next twenty minutes just … talking … without any particular outcome in mind outside of building a relationship. A lot of it revolved around food, which made them laugh when I pointed it out, since I’ve often commented that it is the default topic of our informal conversations which start off our weekly online sessions.
Pizza was brought in for lunch, and then our principal directed the students into playing games — one a word scramble (in which I collaborated with several groups who were struggling); another a hot-potato-esque game where students wore oven mitts to unwrap a multi-layered shrink-wrapped gift (and in which I ran the timer and yelled encouragement and counted down the final few seconds). I needed to continue to other appointments shortly thereafter, as the students were moving into a cookie decorating activity.
In all, this one afternoon allowed me to talk with (at minimum, smile and say hi to) seven of my students. And as I reflected with my sister-in-law (who works at the same school as a program assistant and was there for part of the engagement fun), the entire afternoon filled me. I felt buoyed. And we talked about just how important that aspect of relationship is, particularly to some of the students whose personal lives are filled with unknown challenge, strife, grief and stress. And how in an online setting like the one we’re working in, that personal connection — that relationship — is actually the most important piece we can address, and to which academics needs be acquiesce and take a back seat.
So, part of this challenges me — how is it that I will foster this oh-so-important aspect of teaching, exactly, when there are so many competing demands on my most precious and scarce resource: my time? Even in terms of connecting with students through different modalities; I would like to know if there is a “best” program to use to create a video to check in (and be shared in a way which doesn’t run into snags like Google Drive share access sometimes leads to). Maybe (surely!) a program is out there which allows for a pre-recorded message to be delivered via phone to a list of numbers…is it one which can be used in my setting? Can one be developed? Might our PowerSchool be amended or built upon in such a way as to allow for this modality to be a part of its communications systems? How can I use tech to reach the families and the students who so desperately need to feel that connection and relationship with me as the teacher?
In a previous online session with the Language Arts 9 class, (transferred to me on short notice at the end of October), I found students were surprisingly receptive to my asking them to work in groups of three in breakout rooms. They gathered information on historical figures mentioned in the novel being studied at that time, collaborated to put their findings into one digital space, and shared their findings with the entire class at the end of the session. All without having any advance notice! I was pumped.
This week we spent twenty minutes (of our 50-minute session) discussing idioms and long words. They used the chat feature of Google Meet, while I attempted to pronounce the words they found while maintaining a running commentary throughout the entire process. After this afternoon’s conversation with my sister-in-law, I realized that I could build on this experience by creating another collaborative breakout room group activity. My plan is to ask the students to work in pairs (maybe in trios) to write a paragraph which makes sense, while incorporating some (five?) of the words they find from a “word of the day” site, and then to share it with their peers.
Many years ago, in my first online teaching job, I had my English 30 students read aloud as part of the online sessions. Most memorable were the Shakespearean plays, since those are meant to be spoken and lend themselves to this activity quite readily. Though my current students are some four years younger in comparison, I think that I have reasonable grounds to push them out of their comfort zone and ask for each one to read some small snippet of a text during one of our online sessions.
It does seem to me that my mathematics classes pose a bigger challenge, since the subject itself lends itself far more readily to a lecture-based style of online session. Other than asking students questions, and waiting patiently for their responses, I do not have a reliable “good” way of engaging math students. This is an area which I would like to explore within the parameters of the M.Ed. degree and courses: when in an online environment, how might I use synchronous online sessions to engage students? What, exactly, can educational technology bring to me in this realm, other than being the tool by which students access their course content? What methods or resources exist around mathematics which heighten student interest, ameliorate deeper understanding, and foster peer-to-peer dialogue and collaboration? Or might they not exist yet? I would like to find out.
In the end, all of this simply echoes so much of the research which I explored this semester: relationship and connection matter, and matter deeply. I would hypothesize that students who are successful in a fully asynchronous online program fall into a very narrow demographic: highly independent individuals, who have a goal in which they set great stock; who have an intuitive sense of self-awareness, an inner drive to succeed no matter the obstacles; and who are well-equipped with tools and strategies to adapt and shift and who will advocate for themselves when the circumstances warrant. And while this may be so, it is not a set of parameters which suits almost any of my students right now. As such, and in this moment, my goal is to find and use what I am able to build and to foster relationships, so that one day, my students will themselves flourish as a result of those efforts.
Feature image Photo by Carla Luca de Tena on Unsplash
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