Distance Learning Week 2: Fall Down 7 Times Get Up 8

There’s a Japanese saying that’s been running through my mind this week: “Fall down 7 times, get up 8.” In my second week of online teaching, there have been some tumbles. The good news is, my students and I keep getting up. And each time we do, we have learned some things—about poetry, grammar, vocabulary, reading, writing, computers, Google Classroom, and growth mindset. 

Online teacher flops for the week: 

• A vocabulary quiz that told 6th and 7th graders the answer had to be a number.
• Sending 8th graders the sign-in code to the 6th/7th grade class on NoRedInk.
• Realizing as students took a short quiz during a live online class that the answers to pre-quiz review questions engaged students had offered in the chat bar were still sitting there on the screen. Guess we won’t do that again.

Online teacher wins for the week:

• Building in plenty of time to learn and make mistakes—for myself and for students. Helps us all not panic but relax and learn, developing a growth mindset.
• Flipping the switch in my head quite intentionally from “Oh, no, this is a failure, what are we going to do!” to “Hey, we get a chance to solve a problem and learn something different from what I had planned!”
• Elegantly streamlined quizzes on Google Classroom—for my first class, it took 3 tries. By the second and third classes, it only took 2. Now I’m a pro and already have one ready for next week!
• Using a rubric in Google Classroom. I just tried this out for the first time yesterday and today, and it is so quick and easy once I have the rubric in! I think my life as a writing assessor may just have been revolutionized. 

It’s been a long time since I have felt this viscerally that I am truly learning as much as my students. Maybe not the English content and skills, but definitely the online platforms and processes. So it’s vital that I embody the growth mindset, the fail-forward approach to learning and challenge that I hope they'll have. Because yes, these times are challenging for us all. And we can learn.

Taking Learning On Line: 5 Things I Learned in My First Week

Sometimes a good solution in an online learning environment is a low-tech one--like a small whiteboard!

I asked 2 students who showed up early for the live online class how they were feeling about online school. “Excited!” they giggled together. Excited? I hadn’t expected that. When I inquired what they meant, it turned out that they were learning all kinds of things about technology, and using it for real purposes, and feeling quite cool and grown up about it. Well, that’s one positive for all this upheaval!

We’re all experiencing change and challenge right now as our lives, practices, jobs, societies, and more are shaped by responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. I, in addition, have returned to Japan, started a new school year (yes, in Japanese culture that happens in April), in a new school, with new students, and new courses, all in a new format: online. I’m a little late to the game as many teachers and students have been doing this for the last month or so. 

I’ve just finished my first week, and I’m coming up for air to reflect on what I’ve learned:

1. It is possible to get to know new students virtually. I was worried about that. But after the very first day of live class, I was surprised at how much my stress over preparing for classes was dissolved by the reality of meeting the students that were on the other end of all that preparation. 
2. Things that seem like mountains shrink to molehills when there’s no other option. I can record myself teaching. I don’t have to watch it, but I can record it. I do every day. The irony is that I have always resisted doing this. In fact, in the last year my husband laughingly told me that his life goal was to get me to make a video recording of myself. I hope he has another life goal!
3. There is a lot of wonderful stuff people are making available online for schools in this crisis. So much that it can be overwhelming. Jennifer Gonzales has curated some of it here on Cult of Pedagogy. That’s still a lot. My school uses Google Suite, including Classroom (which I’ve used in a limited way before) and Hangouts Meet (which I’ve never used before, but I’m an old hand at now). Quizlet I’ve always used for vocabulary review. And two new platforms I’m exploring and using are CommonLit for literature content and NoRedInk for grammar and writing.
4. Some effective teaching strategies remain the same regardless of course or delivery method. For example, asking students to identify and explain their understanding and their confusion is a good learning tool. Here are some exit tickets I’ve used this week: What 1-3 words from the vocabulary list are you familiar with and what 1-3 words are you least familiar with? What’s a literary term we talked about today that are you fully understand and what’s one that you’re not as confident about? 
5. Not every solution has to be high tech. One of my best hacks this week was getting a hold of a small whiteboard for quick visual explanations that become necessary during a live online class!

That's a lot of learning in one week! Here’s to all I’m going to learn in the coming weeks about my students, myself, and teaching online! It wasn’t what any of us planned on or hoped for, but since it’s what we’re doing, we’ll learn together—teachers and students—and, yes, it will be exciting!