Values & Best Practices
What We Value/Best Practices
As educators, we prefer face-to-face contact with our students in a classroom, however in this situation, of hybrid or eLearning, we no longer have that luxury. There are aspects of our classrooms though, that we value and believe to be best practice, which transfer to remote teaching and learning. Well planned lessons provide both synchronous and asynchronous opportunities for students.
Multimodal Participation & Engagement
Student attendance is important whether we are in a classroom or learning remotely. Attendance is more than simply a physical presence, it means the child is present for instruction and ready to learn. We strive for our students to be actively engaged in lessons and ready to participate, which is essential. To this end remote lessons need to be short, highly focused, and interactive. Working with students in small groups remotely is greatly beneficial. It enables teachers to connect with students on a more personal level and, in turn, enables students to communicate with each other in a more comfortable way. Following a whole class lesson, break out rooms can be used for small group work (NEED LINK), or a teacher may choose to set up appointments for groups throughout the week ensuring each child participates in small group work at least once a week. We key into the work of Caitlin Tucker to consider 3 Ways to Use Video Conferencing with Students Learning Remotely.
Remote lessons should be designed so that they allow multiple access points; ideally they will also include recordings of the lesson so that students can return and review in their own time. Instructions should be multimodal (example: written, oral and visual - Melanie Kitchen) to reach all learning styles and also submission of work should allow for multi-modalities. We believe that these principles will increase student engagement and independence. Angela Stockman, author of Make Writing, amongst other books, helps us to see how we can teach writing by providing explicit instruction by demonstrating skills through short video lessons.
Sustainable Practices
Much as we do in our school based classrooms, we value a regular and consistent schedule. Predictable scheduling allows students and parents to anticipate each day's timing and workload. Consistency regarding the digital platform used is important: students and parents need to find schedules, lessons and links in one place. To help the sustainability of remote learning, for children, teachers and parents, it is important to provide a work/life balance. Adhering to the traditional school day hours, as much as possible, is essential. Children should begin and complete work as soon as possible so that they can play outside and participate in specials activities too.
Communication & Collaboration
Parents are Partners. Providing parents with access to remote learning tools is important. Video lessons are provided for how to access the chosen platforms and also for how to use technological tools to complete student work. This allows parents to understand the challenges their child faces and to provide help should it be necessary. Parents are charged with providing a suitable workspace for students where they can concentrate and where they have any tools needed for their work. The tools will likely include paper, pencils, books, Chromebook or iPad, and access to a printer, etc. The workspace should provide comfortable seating and a table to work on. Expectations include being dressed appropriately for work and consistency in attending instructional lessons. Communications to parents should be provided on a consistent schedule either by email or by using the chosen digital platform.
Timely Student Feedback
We believe that timely feedback is one of the most powerful influences on learning and achievement (John Hattie, Visible Learning for Teachers 2012). Providing our students with effective feedback lets them know their current level of performance and how they can improve. There are four different ways that we provide feedback to our students:
1. Affirming what they did well.
4. Coaching students to critique their own efforts.
When choosing an approach to feedback you need to consider, the nature of the task and the experience and ability of the learner. Effective feedback can be given face-to-face or through any of the many modes of text (print, video, audio, visual, etc.) The most important elements of feedback are that they are timely and effective.
Teaching the Whole-Child
While we value assessments, objectives, and pacing, we always prioritize the human practices in our classrooms, whether they are in-person or virtual. What we know from whole-child centered research is that engaging students in a more humanizing approach to learning reaps greater rewards in a harmonious community of learners and individual student growth. In order to teach the whole-child we strive to understand our students as individuals, finding out about and putting learning experiences at the center of their interests and concerns. We can do this with student interest surveys, six-word memoirs, or life maps. Having this information about our students leads to greater student-engagement.
In addition, we learn about our students out-of-school lives and learn about their families. Knowing students on a personal level and attempting to understand their home experiences gives us access to the important events in a students life. We find out these bits of information about our students through surveys and personal conversations throughout the year. Gaining knowledge about our students out-of-school lives helps us understand how to support that students learning.
Finally, we understand that literacy learning is embedded in social activity (Vygotsky). Frequent opportunities for students to build understanding and grapple with problem-solving as a learning community is valued. Giving students frequent opportunities to engage in partner work, turn-and-talk (may happen in the chat box), and share book club discussions, allows students to learn about one another's thinking, and build their own understanding through dialogic expression.
