Given that most of the learning our students are doing is asynchronous, one our best proxies for whether students are learning is the rate at which they are submitting high-quality work. I spent the past few weeks interviewing a dozen Ednovate teachers who are achieving network-leading work submission rates to learn about the best practices that are driving their students' success.

I expected to hear teachers speak to strategies they used to follow up with students who don’t submit work. But that was only a small part of the story. Most teachers attributed their students’ progress to the design of their lesson materials. This brought to mind the old adage that “an ounce of prevention beats a pound of cure.” It’s far easier to set something up right than to have to fix it after the fact!

During this session, we’re going to focus on the principles that these teachers shared in common:

1) Keep Everything in One Place

2) Build in Supports for Student Success

3) Pace for Quality (Over Quantity)

4) Insert Frequent "Pause Points"

5) Remember That "It Takes a Village"

If you prefer to go “lower tech,” consider what you could learn from examining Victor Gonzalez's lesson materials (See: Example 2). He's able to capture all lesson materials for College Prep US History in a clean, two-page Google Doc, in part because he keeps his directions incredibly concise, embeds his text and comprehension questions directly into the lesson materials (freeing students from needing to toggle between the handouts and text), and pares the length of readings down to what he believes students will be able to deeply read and re-read (~1-2 pages). He also asks students to produce a short summary (20-30 words), which is a length that's manageable for him to provide feedback on and for students to complete every day. To make his materials more navigable, Victor divides his lesson into sections by activity and then numbers them sequentially. Not to mention, he sticks to this exact format for each lesson. At every turn, Victor places a premium on quality over quantity, and simplicity over complexity.

Teachers with high submission rates do two things impeccably well: 1) They clearly define their bar for “excellence” (with we'll call "Success Points") and 2) Build in scaffolds that target specific errors.

"Success Points" are the one or two things that most readily distinguish excellence at the task from mere completion of it. They answer the question, “What would ‘great’ look like?” Specific errors are the things students are most likely to struggle with in a given task. These errors complete the phrase, “If they get it wrong, they will probably ...” It can help to keep one or two specific errors in mind per task. More than that is too much to meaningfully support students with.

A key first step in identifying success points and specific errors can be to draft an ideal answer or target response for the question. This clarifies your sense of what students will likely succeed or struggle with, and lets you more efficiently track for specifics and respond appropriately with reteaching or stretch opportunities that can help students take work from “good” to “great.”

Once you've identified the success points for an activity, share them with your students. You could do this by embedding success points directly in students’ materials in the form of a “tip box” as self-checks (“You know you’re on the right track if ...” or when Victor Gonzalez notified students that “This video is short...Play it multiple times or pause to jot notes.”). Alternatively, you could include exemplar responses to tasks so that students have a clear picture of what a high-quality work product looks like (See: Example 3). Similarly, math teachers can embed their materials with “worked” examples where all the steps and work are shown, or by completing the first few steps of a problem and leaving the rest blank.

You can do the same with specific errors, which I recently saw a math teacher include as a note to her students. In one lesson video, she cautioned students to “be careful with [their] symbols. Think about what kind of line you should have when you’re graphing.”

Another way that teachers can build in scaffolds is by providing students with supplementary materials that could expose students to alternative explanations of the same concept (See: Example 4). This empowers students with access to other teaching styles and tools, and nudges them to take ownership of their learning.

A final way teachers eliminate potential barriers to work completion is by including accommodations that are meant to help students overcome likely errors. To see an example of what that could look like in action, see Example #5, which shows two versions of an assignment from Jana Matsuuchi’s 12th grade science class: one that includes accommodations and another that does not (See: Example 5).

What I like about Jana's accommodations is that they provide support, but don’t preclude students from doing the thinking work of the task. For instance, in the accommodated version, when Jana includes page numbers where answers can be found, this merely nudges her students them in the right direction. To answer the questions, her students must still read and comprehend the text. Additionally, she uses sentence starters to help shape students' thinking without giving the answers away (e.g., how she sets students up to contrast the male and female reproductive systems with the sentence starter 'Unlike males...").

Click HERE to take a closer look at Jana's lesson materials.

To support students with self-pacing, include specific recommendations for the amount of time students should spend on each task (or step of a task) or embed digital timers in online materials. Here are some other tips from teachers and instructional leaders for keeping assignments at a manageable length for students:

One of our biggest challenges and opportunities as virtual instructors is finding ways for students to interact with the content and begin encoding it into long-term memory. Working against this is the unspoken expectation that online learning is inherently passive. That’s why it’s critical that we work against this narrative by building in frequent “pause points,” which we’ll define as moments when you instruct students to stop the video and complete a task. To maximize engagement and learning, it’s critical to use a healthy balance of “Pause Points” that serve each of these three purposes....

To boost accountability of the Check for Understanding, I've heard Katie MacMillan say things like: "Send me a photo of your complete work (all steps, nothing cut out!"). She and other teachers understand that it's not enough just to talk about ideas online. Students need to do things to consolidate concepts into memory and to help them maintain focus and engagement. It’s just too easy to tune out otherwise. So a good asynchronous lesson should include lots of pause points… and ideally many of them would include an accountability loop as well.

Directions: Choose ONE of the following examples to analyze, and identify what makes it effective.

NOTE: If you're looking for resource that synthesizes all of these principles together, check out the one-page checklist on design criteria below. These design criteria are merely recommendations, but I encourage you to take from them what's useful to you in your work!

Priya Pandya of East College Prep Recommends doing a morning check-in with each class while using the app "Discord." She uses that daily check-in to review:

A. What today’s assignment is

B. When the assignment is due

C. What time is office hours

D. To “like” my message to confirm they have read it

Also note how Hybrid's Brandon Patterson leverages the "Power of the Positive" through his weekly email blasts to students and their families. I especially liked his photos of students attending his virtual Office Hours (message: your classmates ARE attending these and finding them useful!), as well as the public praise and accountability that comes with sharing assignment turn-in rates for each period. To make his newsletters, he uses a program called Campayn, which also provides him with rich analytics on student engagement--so he can track which students have opened it and how they're engaging with the email content.

Another tried-and-true strategy is establishing strong systems to frequent communication with key influencers in students' lives, such as their' parents, grade level team, and other students. You want to establish a continuous feedback loop, which starts with careful tracking of student submissions, and then feeds out to advisors (who subsequently check in with students), parents, and to students themselves in the form of grades. For an example tracking system, check out the one that Rex Williams is using with his 10th Grade Team. For each student, it tracks the percentage of work completed, number of assignments that they haven't completed, and their turn-in rates for each course. It also lists each students' advisor for easy follow up and support. Rex adds: "Where students are not completing work, we're tagging in advisors, RSPs, and our culture team. Everyone there has worked enormously hard to check in with and support students."