The Tale of Two Lessons

When COVID-19 hit and my school transitioned fully online, I remember quite a few teachers tried to treat online instruction the same as in-person teaching, never adapting their assignments or methods for the new landscape they found themselves in. Often, these same teachers would complain that the students were either not doing their work to their preferred level of competency or that they were simply not doing the work at all.

In my Roles, Rules, Time, Task, Turns, Steps, and Language (RRTTTSL) assignment, I was asked to plan two lessons using the same objective but in different settings. Inspired by my experience, I planned these lessons for a synchronous classroom and a hybrid online class.

My objective for both lessons was for students to create a PSA against cyberbullying. While planning these two lessons, I realized that student cooperation would be a key aspect in each. In the synchronous lesson, it is much easier for students to work together, so I created three distinct roles for them, along with a task that required collaboration to complete. In contrast, the hybrid lesson was more freeform, with students not necessarily in the same vicinity. This required me to make the groups smaller, simplifying cooperation. It also meant that the teacher's role would change slightly.

In the synchronous lesson, the teacher's role includes direct instruction and a more overseer-like position, consistently providing feedback, meeting with groups informally, and acting in the traditional teacher role. In the hybrid lesson, however, the teacher is more removed and unable to directly observe student progress. For example, instead of providing direct instruction on the expectations, the teacher would create a prerecorded video to explain them. This distance necessitated adding a portion of the lesson where the teacher holds a formal Zoom meeting with each group to assess readiness to record.

One final difference that stood out to me while writing these lessons was the task itself. The task is fairly broad, as a PSA can take many forms. However, the steps to accomplish it differ between the two lessons. For instance, in the synchronous lesson, students film in person, as the setting provides a convenient platform for this. On the other hand, hybrid students do not have that “in-person” time to film, so they are asked to do a voiceover for their PSA. To me, this difference, although slight, creates a greater burden on the hybrid students, as they must create visuals for their PSA rather than using the available visuals from filming.

Overall, I found this planning exercise to be a valuable reminder that circumstances will almost always alter expectations, and one should never treat one style of teaching the same as another. Just because the objectives align does not mean the path to achieving them will be the same.