Advice from Stacey Margarita Johnson (A language pedagogy specialist from the Vanderbilt Center for Learning)
Putting your course online in a hurry is not the same thing as designing a fully online course from the start. We have to be realistic about how stressed out everyone is, how disruptive the shift to online will be, and how much grace we need to show ourselves and others.
Two caveats before you read this detailed model below:
If at any point I find materials online that someone has already created, or if a company or textbook publisher has already developed something that I can assign my students INSTEAD of making it all myself, I would 100% do that with NO REGRETS.
If I find myself or my students scrambling or stressed out, I will scale way back. It might be necessary to skip parts of this model go so we can breathe more deeply and focus MORE on FEWER things.
That said, I use the experiential learning model (discussed in episode 133 of We Teach Languages) to plan almost everything I teach, and a quick shift to remote learning is no exception. My Spanish 101 class is 50 minutes long, 4 times a week. Here’s how I would spend that 50 minutes in a remote teaching situation. The four steps are:
1. Concrete Experience aka Input!
To start, students need to read and/or listen to real language that communicates something: authentic language. This should be almost entirely comprehensible (to learn why listen to episode 111 of We Teach Languages with Gianfranco Conti) and interesting or engaging for students! People just learn more when they actually want to understand.
If I am switching my instruction online, the primary way I am going to provide this input for students is through pre-recorded videos that I make using ExplainEverything which is a pretty cool screencasting/white board app. In class, the input I provide students is a mix of just interacting naturally with the world of our classroom and the people in it, telling funny stories, and talking about the people and perspectives of the Spanish-speaking world. I use the same stories/lectures/input and the same Google slides for my face-to-face classes, I narrate the slides, draw on the slides, pull in cool elements to help make the input more comprehensible.
And here’s the important thing: I stop every few sentences and ask students a question. The question has a number and is written on the slide, and they hear me say it out loud. These are pretty basic questions. So, if I asked students to watch a music video, my lecture might be a description of the singers. I might say “Marc Anthony es un cantante muy famoso. Canta muy bien y tiene colaboraciones con otros cantantes.” All the while, students can also see the words on the screen, they see a picture of Marc and pictures of him with other artists. My slides are providing visual support for my words. Then I’ll say and show on the slide “1.) Marc Anthony prefiere cantar solo. ¿Sí o no?” Students need to pause the video and type into their own document, “1.) No.” Then they can move on to the next section.
There is research to suggest that students can’t really process videos longer than 6 minutes, therefore they can’t learn from them (I learned this from this teaching guideby my colleague Dr.Cynthia Brame). So, I would need to be very careful to keep my video at about 6 minutes. With the time it takes students to pause, write answers, back up to relisten, etc, I assume this 6-minute video input will take them about 10 minutes to work through.
2. Reflective Observation aka Processing!
In the language classroom we are often doing our input and our processing hand-in-hand. We read, we do a few activities to help students better understand what we are reading, we read again, and so on. Same thing online! The activity above where I stop and do check-in questions every few sentences? That is helping students to pause and process what I am saying as I say it. As evidence of their processing, I will have them submit that document with their 10-20 very short answers to my questions. A quick assignment in our course management system and everyone gets full credit just for submitting. This is not really an assignment worth grading, but it is one worth doing.
Another really great way to get students to work through and process input is by using the quiz tool in a course management system. First, I ask students to read a particular, level-appropriate authentic resource in its entirety. Then, the students start the quiz in which I ask them processing questions. Maybe one question gives them a small chunk of the text and they have to pick the word from the text that is a synonym. I could list four multiple choice answers for them to pick from. Or maybe one of the quiz questions is a string of emojis and I list six lines from the text as the multiple choices and ask students to pick which line has the same meaning as the emojis. Then I use show them an image and the same six lines of text, and ask them to determine which one best matches the image. There are so many activities you can do to help students process a text, and a lot of them work really well in quiz format. It’s also important to consider how long are the quizzes I give students. I have a 50 minute class period. I burned through 10 minutes with that short input activity, I don’t want this to take them more that 10 minutes. It has to be short and sweet.
3. Abstract Experimentation aka Conceptualizing!
The classes I teach at the college level require students to have a working knowledge of grammatical concepts, be able to reflect on and articulate cultural products, practices, an perspectives, and develop skill in speaking and academic writing in the L2. The textbook my students are required to purchase does all the grammar work they need using an online platform, but culture and writing skill both require intentional development. So, I want to be sure to take time after we get the input and processing done to include some sort of work on all of those concepts. If I am in a position to put my classes online in a hurry, then I will probably use live video conferencing (like Zoom or Google Hangout) to work on culture, conversation, and to practice and share short writing exercises. These meetings are like 25-30 minutes long, but only about 10 minutes of it should be spent on these bigger concepts. We’re going to need the other 15 or so minutes for step 4!
4. Active Experimentation aka Try it out!
Last but not least, after examining language in detail in the input and learning about the big concepts that give context to the language, students need to try it out! At this point, we are still in our live video conference, and we have about 15 minutes until class ends. If writing is our focus, they may get time to write. I’m there to answer questions and check in on everyone, so there is less chance of them resorting to a translator. I want to help, and I make that clear! I would expect students to submit what they wrote to an assignment by the end of class. I do not need my students obsessing over an informal writing task. They can write while I am there, ask questions, get started, and then submit! I review the assignments and give some quick, specific praise to each student. I also note for myself what language and concepts we need to reinforce in my next input and processing activities. For example, if half my students are saying “yo gusta” that is a CLEAR sign that they have not seen that structure enough in the input, so I need to bump that way up in future videos and text quizzes. If the focus is on conversation, I will use that live video conferencing time to facilitate a group discussion. Once again, while I don’t point out student errors to them directly, I do make a careful note of what we need to see again in the input, and I adjust my teaching accordingly.
This system allows me to replace my face-to-face teaching with two input-oriented activities that are about 10 minutes each and one video conference that is about 25 minutes long. It’s a predictable structure, but also allows me to vary the content enough that we don’t get bored. It’s efficient for me and very useful learning for my students.
The first few times you use this model, building two different input activities for each class will feel like a lot, but creating those short 5-6 minute videos gets much easier over time after you have made a few, as does creating quizzes. You also might just find that these activities don’t suit your style, which is fine. But maybe the structure of 1) input, 2) processing, 3) concepts, then 4) trying it out, can be a guide for creating meaningful remote learning experiences.