Reflective Practice
In my experience, the greatest question of online learning was: What actually works? When I began student teaching, we had entered an unexplored area of education. Tried and true techniques of classroom engagement failed in the online environment, and many hands-on and cooperative strategies were impossible with the limitations of the format. Each day, my mentor teacher and I would try a lesson and hope for the best. There was no way to predict how the inclusion of a new software or technique might turn out. We constantly asked ourselves, how do we engage students that we can't even see? In this environment, reflective practice was more important than ever.
One of the benefits of coming from a scientific background is the ability to analyze a situation. In teaching, I would look at each lesson I taught and decide what worked, what did not, and why that was the case. If a lesson failed, I learned from it. For example, I created one lesson about communication signals and binary waves. It was one of the first lessons we attempted involving student cooperation, and the concept was engaging. However, as soon as we reached the group activity, the lesson completely fell apart. Students did not understand their roles, were confused by the content, or just refused to participate.
After the lesson was finished, I looked back and tried to puzzle out the reason that the lesson had failed, and I realized that it boiled down to the students' inability to communicate with one another. In a classroom setting, students could help correct their group members' mistakes and discuss any problems they were having. But in the online setting, they struggled independently or watched with frustration. From that point forwards, no group work was assigned unless the student groups had a way to communicate with one another directly.
Reflective practice quickly became a habit out of simple necessity. The only way to learn how to teach more effectively is by trying lessons and later analyzing them to understand what makes a lesson fail or succeed.
The above slideshow is an example of student work from the failed binary group activity. While some group members were able to effectively encode their assigned word into binary code, and then into binary waves, no groups made it to the decoding aspect, and many were stuck at the encoding stage. Though this was utilized as an opportunity to talk about what can happen to prevent messages from being transmitted correctly, most students struggled through the lesson and were not able to fully understand or practice the content. I learned from this lesson to assign group work carefully in the online environment, and only when students were able to effectively communicate with one another. Additionally, student names have been blacked out for privacy.