Communication involves both expressing and understanding meaning. The role of a classroom teacher shifts significantly when school moves online. A teacher-mentor in a blended and online learning environment attends to learning and assessment, but also attends to supporting learners with active and empathetic listening and specific strategies to support each learner's success in the classroom. My learning in EDIT 764 was situated in authentic, scenario-based cases, in which I responded to almost ten different "students," who had some challenge with online learning.
The main communication medium that I experienced this semester was print-based: email, discussion forums, texts, instant messages, etc. A successful online mentor assesses a learner's communication for potential struggles, responds to the struggles with specific strategies, and targets a response to the individual learner. A mentor uses the power of relationship to connect with the student and incorporates best practice strategies to support student progress. The question "Are you listening?" applied to every single email that I read, even if I couldn't actually hear the students' voices. The most powerful lessons I learned about listening go beyond the power of the spoken word:
Do's
Quiet your mind to eliminate distraction while listening
Give your full attention
Put yourself in the other person's shoes to understand their perspective
Listen for unspoken words, feelings, and needs
Reflect the speaker's feelings ("I understand that you feel...")
Don'ts
Be distracted with outside influences, such as cell phones or other people
Interrupt with your own judgments or opinions
Make demands or threaten consequences
Ask open-ended questions to indicate interest and opportunity to explore
Encourage further discussion and clarity what you have already heard
Paraphrase observations through the other's perspective
Listen for and reflect feelings
Know when to use empathetic responses ("You" messages) vs. "I" messages
Summarize feelings and content
A teacher-mentor's ability to understand the meaning of a student's message is pivotal to reaching the next step: influencing the student in a way to help them access specific strategies and support them in progressing towards their goals. Influencing can come in many shapes and sizes, but I learned that it always has to come back to the learner. Any reframing, questioning, or confronting that I did was always learner-focused: "What would happen if you...?" "Can you walk me through how you...?" "You say that you...but you do not..." "I" messages also played a role in my communication when I relayed my own experiences as a way to make a shared connection.
By providing opportunities for the student to consider the hypothetical and explain their thought processes, the mentor provides opportunities of reflection on and evaluation of a situation. A mentor purposefully designs communication to move the student from a less favorable situation to a preferred one. Supporting the development of a student's self-regulation skills, such as time management, reading, and note-taking, requires specific knowledge of what those skills are and how to integrate them into the online learning classroom. When each student has a different challenge, a good teacher-mentor assesses the situation and identifies the appropriate strategies to provide just-in-time support for the online learner.
I trained to become a mentor within a Community of Practice Learning System and an asynchronous blend of online learning, being assigned a teacher-learner to mentor and to be mentored while engaging in authentic problem solving opportunities. I received mentoring from both my teacher-learner partner, my instructor, and other teacher-learners in the EDIT 764 cohort who provided feedback on my assignments. Mentoring and communication dispositions were modeled through course content and the three essential interactions of online learning: learner-learner, learner-instructor, and learner-content. We were afforded reciprocal teaching opportunities: we learned about mentoring and communication strategies that our instructor used on us and that we might use with our learners. Feedback was provided clearly and consistently that established standards and recognized good communication and mentoring.
The Fall 2020 semester was the perfect opportunity to learn about blended and online learning in schools while trying to implement blended and online learning in my own remote classes. As I learned in EDIT 760, remote learning is not true online learning, but remote learners need many of the same supports as online learners. With PK12 and higher education learning shifting online between March and December 2020, asynchronous email communication became a staple of learner-instructor interactions. While I was learning to respond to the scenario-based cases of EDIT 764, I was also applying my learning to my own teaching practice. I learned to respond to emails from my own students with empathy, active listening, open-ended questions, and self-regulation support strategies. I pushed remote learners to consider how they needed to adjust their typical way of doing things to meet the challenges of remote learning. I emphasized that I was learning along with my remote learners, that flexibility and grace are necessities, and that I am just an email away.