Ideas that incorporate Esteem

Intersperse two or three assessment questions periodically during face-to-face learning. Use the students’ answers to understand what they do and do not know and promptly reteach only the content that they still need to learn. Regular encouragement and direction for development of learning will support students confidence in navigating their learning.

Students get to demonstrate personal expertise.

Create and design quizzes, assignments and instruction for students in other classes and grades.

Could be used as a "Bingo" activity throughout a week

Examples of small goals for students:

1. Work completion

2. Shared frustrations

3. Stayed focused on assignments

4. Showed respect and compassion for others

5. Regrouped and continued to work after a frustrating time

6. Helped another student or teacher

7. Contributed ideas and suggestions to a conversation

8. Used positive language in describing a need or desire

9. Self-reflected about my daily work and interactions

Smaller tasks or chunking tasks to allow for completion within a shorter time frame (especially with practical work) to provide for a feeling of success. This also allows students who are working at a faster pace to be extended.

An optimistic closure is a way to end a lesson or class that reflects on the day’s learning or identifies the next steps. It can build a shared sense of accomplishment while boosting appreciation for being together in strengthening the classroom community. The best closing activities build students’ confidence and confidence on their learning journey, sharpening meta-cognition as essential academic mindsets at the same time as social and emotional skills are honed. When you don’t have a lot of time but want a meaningful wrap-up, this activity gives you a sense of the group and allows every student to contribute in just a few minutes. Go around a circle of students and ask them to respond to a prompt like what’s one word to describe how you’re feeling about the day, but what’s one word that stands out to you from our lesson. You could even write a word cloud on the board while students share and then do a quick debrief while everyone’s still in a circle to see where the class landed as a whole.

How can we best support those students who became disengaged during remote learning?

Notice, reflect, plan is a simple process. You can use it as a template to encourage students to reflect on their online engagement, consider the impact their choices had on their learning and plan how they’d like to act in future.

Given what we know about the importance of students directing their own learning, the return to schools is a good time to pause and consider how we can best turn possibly mediocre student efforts during online learning into valuable learning opportunities, and how we can set our students up for success in the year ahead.

To start the valuable process of having students reflect upon their learning, we must support them to notice how they engaged during learning online. For those who really unplugged, they may be unaware of how much they missed. To remedy this, ask students to rate their engagement on a sheet.

The action of explicitly reflecting upon their work done in relation to each task will help students to notice exactly how much work they did or didn’t do compared to what was set.

The idea of the reflect stage is to give students an opportunity to consider how their achievements make them feel, and also to think about what may have led to, or inhibited, their success regarding remote learning.

Powerful feedback involves combining a focus on the here and now with an eye to the future. As such, the ‘plan’ step aims to have students proactively turn their reflections into actions for the future. You can do this in many ways, but one promising strategy is to ask students how they would like you as the teacher to help them to help themselves. You may like to provide students with a list of options to choose from, such as the following:

• Call my parents and tell them that I haven’t done my homework.

• Give me an extension and only call my parents if I still haven’t done it.

• Have a discussion with me to help me work out how to manage my time better, and call my parents to let them know I’m struggling with my time management.

Together, notice, reflect and plan are a powerful way to help students take charge of their own learning, and to turn their prior remote learning experiences, however successful or challenging, into valuable lessons about how to better achieve their goals in the future.