What I Tried During Distance Learning: Communicating With Students (Part 3)

I'm a reflective writer--it helps me organize and think through things. My administration asked me to do a writeup of the things I tried and did during our time of distance learning, to include as a part of my professional evaluation. So I figured I'd try to pivot it, and turn it into something that's useful for my practice and continued development. I hope this is helpful for other people too.

• Part 1: Necessary Changes
• Part 2: The Classwork
• Part 3: Communicating with Students (this post)
• Part 4: Questions I Still Have

Being systematic in my communication

• One of my first instincts with distance learning, in the middle of a pandemic, was that the goal and focus of our education should change in response. My working theory was that the thing that kids are going to experience, learn, and remember from this time is not math content. The thing kids are going to learn about is self-direction, independent learning, and communicating digitally.
• That being the assumption, I reallocated a ton of my teacher energy away from curriculum to building a strong and consistent structure for communication and connection with students. In doing so, I focused on coaching students on things like goal-setting, managing longer-term assignments, accessing resources independently, and keeping abreast of the constantly changing landscape of participating in school. That is to say, I focused on building student cognitive and emotional capacity.
• This was one of the most complicated new systems I had to work out. I never had to do anything like it before. And I do not like talking on the phone. But I knew it was important to do.
• Initially, I said I was going to call up each of my 80 kids at least once a week, and then expect to text/call follow up with all of them again a second time, later in the week. I used Google Voice, and a spreadsheet I had developed to track my communication. The calling each kid, over the course of two days, was somewhat manageable, if exhausting. I immediately discovered that calling/texting each kid twice a week was unmanageable. Then after about six weeks, I dialed it back a little bit, to be a bit more strategic with my energies, in the name of sustainability. And here is the system I have developed.

A tiered system of contact

• The big idea I had to eventually figure out, was that I should have a clear tiered system of communication. At the bottom, I should have a communication method that is low demand, to capture most students. Then as we proceed gradually down the spectrum, the communication attempts are harder to ignore, ending with direct phone calls to parents and referrals to the school's student support team (SST). I also had to figure a timeline that seemed reasonable to match with this system.
• Below, I have represented this tiered system, along with a timeline. This system is based on the goal of weekly two-way communication between me and the student, where two weeks is too long to go without any prior communication. The tiers are:
• Text student --> call student --> email student --> email student, cc'ing guardians --> text guardians --> call guardians --> loop in SST.

• Note that the first two steps happen on the same day. I would text each kid in the morning, the following message:
• "How's your week going? I'd like to check in today. Unless I hear from you by then, we'll plan on our regular phone call check in at 2:40. Looking for an update on how you're doing and how [week's assignment] is going. Talk to you soon!"
• Towards the end of the school year, especially if it was a "light" week, or if it was a particularly exhausting week for the kids or I, I might change it up by sending either of the following messages:
• If we had solid two-way contact last week:
• "We can check in over text this week. I want to check in about how you're doing and how [week's assignment] is going."
• If I hadn't heard from them last week:
• "I'd like to check in today. Unless I hear from you by then, we'll plan on our regular phone call check in at 2:40. Looking for an update on how you're doing and how [week's assignment] is going. Talk to you soon!"
• The first option usually got a bunch of good responses. Kids were motivated to respond, because they don't like talking on the phone #GenZ. It also allows them to communicate in a way that fits their schedule a bit more. And it lets them plan their responses a little more, if need be.
• Offering the first option (text w/ no expectation of call) was also good for me, because it dramatically reduced the number of students I needed to call, reducing demand on my end. On the flip side, however, it did lead to a slight increase in the number of students I'd go more than a week without hearing from. So maybe a more appropriate use system would be to only extend this option to students who have demonstrated multiple consecutive weeks of successful communication via text, without me needing to call or email them or their guardians.
• All students had a pre-scheduled time that I called them--same time each week. I also did my calls on the same day each week. Initially that was Monday, but I switched that to Thursdays. This was because students typically hadn't started work for the week by Monday, so they didn't have a ton of questions yet. I also wanted to give a kid a few more days to reach out to me on their own, through office hours or something--which would then count as their point of contact for the week. If I could pick again, I might go for Wednesday next time, because it still gives kids a couple days for us to work with, in terms of planning for completing work later in the week. 

Tracking contact

• I wanted to pair this tiered communication system with a tracker that allows me to quickly update a kid's status, filter and sort for different kids with different statuses, all while putting any contact info I may need at the ready (namely phone numbers, emails, and preferred contact info). Some may ask, "Don't you have a student information system, that has all this?" To which I respond, "Yes," as well as, "LOL." Cumbersome at best, for this purpose.
• I made a spreadsheet that does this pretty well. It has adapted and grown over time, so this is the most advanced, cleanest version. Here is a blank template. Note the communication template. It has a drop-down menu with statuses for students that align to the communication system outlined above. Throw in a couple filters, and you're in business.
• Column H indicated the default mode for how I reach out to those students:
• Text: they've effectively communicated with me for multiple consecutive weeks via text, and so are extended the option to check in via text, w/o expectation of phone call later that day should they not respond
• Call: call unless they text back before scheduled time
• Hangouts: for students who don't use phones, I taught them how to use Google Hangouts. It's much quicker/easier than email
• Email: for the very few students who didn't want to use Hangouts, for whatever reason. This wasn't typically effective.
• Note, this was made to be useful for teachers and their work. Throughout all of this, downtown, administration, SST, and guidance were all constantly hitting us with different versions of different spreadsheets, the same spreadsheets, all requiring of teachers different levels of fluency with spreadsheets. I believe that it would be possible to give a school full of 50 teachers this kind of tracker, train them in how to use this, and then have a connected "admin view" that collects all of this information, and complies it. I'd be interested in hearing if any of your schools have done something like that.
• My school instituted daily "office hours," which were times where teachers were technically supposed to make themselves available for students. I was always available for students who needed help then, but I was also pretty much available whenever any students needed a quick support-session in general. Combined with the already existing regularity of my weekly communication routine, the office hours were pretty unused. So the existence of office hours didn't impact students accessing real-time support from me.

The next post in this series is Part 4: Questions I Still Have.

What I Tried During Distance Learning: Necessary Changes (Part 1)

I'm a reflective writer--it helps me organize and think through things. My administration asked me to do a writeup of the things I tried and did during our time of distance learning, to include as a part of my professional evaluation. So I figured I'd try to pivot it, and turn it into something that's useful for my practice and continued development. I hope this is helpful for other people too.

• Part 1: Necessary Changes (this post)
• Part 2: The Classwork
• Part 3: Communicating with Students
• Part 4: Questions I Still Have

Necessary Changes

• In the classroom, we all have a collection of classroom routines and structures that are always working with. We then add in a "toolkit" of instructional routines and moves that we access every day, choosing whatever the right tool is for the job that day. Having a bigger, deeper toolkit, full of routines and moves you've thought deeply about, is helpful as a teacher.
• And this is good! Kids know that any given day is going to be different. And what's happening between their classes is going to be different. They have a schema for how days and classes can be different, because they've been doing this for years. Most of my 9th graders have been in school for almost a decade. They've developed a level of capacity and understanding, so they can roll with things changing quickly and often--they expect it. And even if something doesn't make sense one day, there are 30 other kids buzzing around doing the same thing, providing quick feedback and direction. Worst case scenario, they've got 179 other days that year.
• But when we are teaching things online, for the first time, most students don't have a decade of online learning experiences to provide a schema for what's going on. So every new routine and structure is VERY NEW, and as such has a much higher cognitive demand. Layer upon that the demand of simply navigating computers in general. Then seat that kid in the middle of a global health crisis, an economic implosion, and a nation's renewed public attention on anti-black racism. The bank of cognitive and emotional capacity is constantly being withdrawn from, simply trying to figure out what is going on. This leaves little cognitive space to dedicate to doing math.
• That is not to say that these are all excuses for not providing students with a rigorous and worthwhile education. This is simply evidence that to the greatest extent possible, in addition to build academic capacity, our schoolwork should do two things:
• build student cognitive and emotional capacity
• minimize unnecessary cognitive and emotional demand, while focusing it on necessary things (relevant and rigorous content)
• Yes, our school work would be doing this all the time. That's the goal, anyways. But on the spectrum between "don't do these at all" and "do these all the time," the context demands that we move in the direction on increased sensitivity.

Asynchronous > Synchronous

• Synchronous learning puts a lot of pressure on those students who can't dedicate their entire day to the schedules set by their teachers. And especially if your school is one of the majority schools in the country, and doesn't have a particularly coordinated or united instructional or administrative leadership, then your kids probably have anywhere from 4-7 different adults trying to schedule times to meet with students.
• And their means of communication are probably just as all over the place. Some are scheduling things on Google Calendar, some are emailing, some are posting in their online classrooms, some are texting/calling. So teachers can't just shrug and say, "Well I emailed them my office hours, so..." Or worse, "Within the first week of distance learning, every kid at least logged in to my Google Classroom. So they have no excuse!"
• I'm not saying that synchronous learning is never right. But based on what I know about my school, my kids, my context, and me...I'm putting all my chips in asynchronous learning this round.

The next post in this series is Part 2: The Classwork.

What I Tried During Distance Learning: Questions I Still Have (Part 4, final)

I'm a reflective writer--it helps me organize and think through things. My administration asked me to do a writeup of the things I tried and did during our time of distance learning, to include as a part of my professional evaluation. So I figured I'd try to pivot it, and turn it into something that's useful for my practice and continued development. I hope this is helpful for other people too.

• Part 1: Necessary Changes
• Part 2: The Classwork
• Part 3: Communicating with Students
• Part 4: Questions I Still Have (this post)

Helping students get familiar with "platforms"

• Whatever platforms I end up picking, there is a ton of fluency that students are going to need to develop, with respect to the platform itself.
• Tired: written instructions, possibly with screenshots
• Wired: video walkthroughs from the student perspectives
• Inspired: scavenger hunts
• Right away, I knew I was going to need to be able to provide screenshots of the student perspective when providing instructions that included navigation. I've also started including some kind of video instructions with many of my big assignments and updates, and putting those at the head of written instructions.
• I attended a Desmos PD last summer (pretty chill). One of the things they had us do on the first day (dedicated to the Desmos Calculator), was this scavenger hunt. It's just a list of challenges of increasing sophistication. The challenges are reasonable interesting puzzles on their own, and include a solution key. But they are an example of how to problematize fluency with a platform, making it a more authentic context for learning and exploration. I could make a scavenger hunt for Slides, Docs, Classroom, Gmail, Khan Academy, etc.
• I also would just be generally interested in getting familiar myself with more, different, effective platforms. Forward any reccs you have to me on Twitter @bearstmichael.

Choice boards

• There is a "board" (usually a slide), where there are a bunch of options for students to do different things. Often, they'll click on a link on that first page, which will take them to a document (or other slide) where it has the assignment or whatever.
• One of my more creative colleagues has a funny way of talking about
• Mustard: students must do everything in this section
• Mayo: students may do some items from this section, if they want
• Pickles: students pick which one (or more) of the items in this section they want to do
• Providing multiple options for students to pick from is generally a good move in any context. And for distance learning, it's especially powerful if the options are meaningful accommodations for students trying to manage learning from home, in the middle of a pandemic.
• What are some meaningful choices we can give kids? Record a video vs. write something vs. make a presentation? What do we need to do to make sure that students know how to use and explore the board, so they understand all the options available to them, at which point they can make an informed decision that actually feels like a real choice.
• Even though they're opting into these options, it's still possible for the variety of platforms, and their relative novelty, to be overwhelming for students. So we still want to be judicious with what platforms our options engage. Maybe some of our options can be "learn about this new platform"?

Google teacher training

• My district is big on the GSuite. I've never taught in any other district, so I don't know if it's universal. But it's probably pretty universal, right? Regardless, Google has a series of online PDs about how to use their stuff. I've heard the PD is decent. Especially if Google is a big part of my vision for an online class, it could be useful?

Student-student collaboration

• Student-student collaboration is probably the number one focus of my math class (importantly, above the math, even). It was a swift and certain casualty of my commitment to asynchronous learning. This has been the biggest impact on my pedagogy. Which sucks. Student-student connection is so incredibly good for improving the socioemotional experience of learning, while also significantly improving the academic rigor and relevance as well.
• In the online classes I've taken, the teachers have had us do forum posts, and then required us to respond to 2-3 other students' responses, as a part of the assignment. This was always more annoying than educational, and I think it's because it's such an inauthentic practice. It's not useful! Collaboration for its own sake has questionable value (I think). But what are the applications, what is the classwork, for which collaboration is an authentic support?
• I also don't just want to make every assignment a group assignment, because that's exhausting. I want students to be able to collaborate in groups, on work that is ultimately their own individual classwork.
• As far as digital collaboration, having students draw on AwwApp.com is pretty good, b/c they can draw with each other. It's a little awkward, but if you play around with it, even the free version is pretty effective. I understand that a best practice for synchronous collaboration is having students collaborate on Google Slides, instead of Docs. This adds a ton more flexibility, in terms of the kinds of objects they can interact with. It also avoids some of the awkwardness that comes with multiple people editing the same Google Doc.
• Unfortunately the drawing "scribble" tool in Slides is super inadequate, because it requires you to click the button after each stroke.
• There would also need to be a TON of support in teaching kids how to do all the cool things you can do with slides. You can get really creative with all the flexibility it allows, but that takes training. And I don't just mean changing font, size, and type. I'm talking images, GIFs, tables, shapes, hyperlinks, comments, etc. These tools push Slides into the realm of feasible math platforms.

Technology literacy

• Even as our students are born into a digital age, not all of them are as fluent as their teachers think. I've had to show multiple students how to compose an email. I have had to teach two different students how to minimize a window. Raise your hand if you have watch a student use caps lock to capitalize the first letter of a sentence. Even now, I still get emails from students where the whole body of the email is written in the subject line.
• None of these are intended to shame any kid or adult who does these things. It's meant to communicate the negligence we have demonstrated by assuming too much about our students' computer skills, and so failed to develop them.
• This doesn't even include the many many computer functionalities that can tremendously improve student capacity to work on computers. Pinning tabs. Keeping an organized Google Drive. Keyboard shortcuts for efficiency. Screenshots. What is the best way to do this? How do we roll this out over the course of the year, on a need-to-know basis, so as not to overwhelm?
• Surely some of these platforms are within the domain of all students' classes, right? Especially in the context of distance learning, Gmail and the whole GSuite have got to be worth explicitly teaching students how to use. Cross-disciplinary work is tough though. Maybe different content teams at schools take responsibility for using different common platforms extra, and including development on how to use them well? For example, all ELA teachers teach kids how to use emails. Science teachers teach Google Slides. Math teachers teach kids how to take pictures, screenshots, and edit them, and upload them on different platforms.

Building community

• One of my colleagues (who has really been leading the charge on creatively adapting to distance learning), would post a daily question designed to get kids logged into the Classroom, and responding to her and each other. She would post questions in Google Classroom, intentionally chosen to get kids to log into the classroom. This marginally boosted engagement on actually classwork--the question got kids in the door, so to speak. It also generally improved the flow of "student gets an email about a thing in Google Classroom --> then goes to Classroom to do it right then."
• Splitting up all your students into sections of 20-30 students is a constraint forced upon us by budgets and schedules. Is it still useful during virtual learning? Or is it better to have smaller "teams," where students are in groups of like 7-10? Maybe smaller groups are easier to build community? Maybe we can take advantage of things like group competitions and stuff to build community within smaller groups?
• What about competition in general? Personally, I'm a very competitive person, and it has pushed me very hard in my academics and extracurriculars. But it has also filled me with tons of stress and anxiety about school. I generally try to avoid it in the classroom at basically every opportunity. But I also know how competition with other groups does a lot to promote in-group cohesion. How can I engage that positive aspect, while disrupting the negative ones? I've got a pretty clear philosophy on where that belongs in a regular classroom....but how does that change since we're online, where motivating connection is more important than ever?
• How do I want to balance a student's desire for, and right to, privacy, while at the same time, trying to push them a little out of their comfort zone? I mean, next year I'm teaching 9th graders, in a 9-12. So this is going to be kids' first times in the whole school. They won't have many pre-existing friendships with other students, or relationships with teachers. What can we do then?

Thank you for reflecting with me! If you have any questions, comments, or thoughts related to this series "What I tried During Distance Learning," please feel free to @ me, or message me, on Twitter @bearstmichael

What I Tried During Distance Learning: The Classwork (Part 2)

I'm a reflective writer--it helps me organize and think through things. My administration asked me to do a writeup of the things I tried and did during our time of distance learning, to include as a part of my professional evaluation. So I figured I'd try to pivot it, and turn it into something that's useful for my practice and continued development. I hope this is helpful for other people too.

• Part 1: Necessary Changes
• Part 2: The Classwork (this post)
• Part 3: Communicating with Students
• Part 4: Questions I Still Have

Fewer, more versatile platforms

• Consider:
• Desmos is great for interactive lessons.
• Google Slides is great for group collaboration and presentations.
• Google Forms is great for regular, qualitative, in depth responses from students
• EdPuzzle is great for making interactive videos
• Khan Academy is great for developing procedural fluency with frequence immediate evaluative feedback
• Uploading pictures of handwritten work is great for math that can't easily or naturally be done on the computer
• AwwApp is great for online collaboration
• The Questions feature in Google Classroom is great for quick, public questions, where students and respond to each other
• CK12, DeltaMath, are probably great for different things
• But every new platform is a new investment of precious energy and time. So I wanted to remain as strategic as possible. I chose a few: Khan Academy, Desmos Activity Builders, and Google Classroom.

Khan Academy

• Why I chose it:
• It's very quick and easy to assign a bunch of pretty specific chunks of work.
• The videos, hints, and teacher dashboard are robust and about as good as it gets for what it is.
• Many kids are already pretty familiar with it.
• How I used it:
• Assign a big chunk of work that I am expecting kids to take a couple months to finish.
• I assign it all at once, so that different students can work at different paces.
• Through weekly check-ins, the majority of support I provide is in goal-setting and managing the big assignment in general.
• How I wish I'd used it:
• Only assign the problems, not the notes or videos. This reduces the "clutter" of the "things I need to do" part of the student-facing portal. The videos and notes are all right there if they need them. I also don't want a kid to feel like they have to watch a video if they don't need to.
• Assign things a week at a time. Lots of students had no idea how to manage such a big project. Some did, and it was cool, but most didn't. And the conversation, "Last week you said you'd do two hours of Khan, and you didn't do any? What do you think got in the way of that?" gets really old and discouraging, really quickly. This also allows me to easily change tack as the class unfolds over time.
• Have all the topics in Khan posted, linked, and shared, so that if a student wanted to jump ahead, they could.
• Provide some instructional videos for how to use Khan. I underestimated the difficulty of this. There were a bunch of onboarding, and ongoing, difficulties that could have been cleared up and prevented. It would have been effective to provide a walkthrough of the student-facing navigation.
• Have some differentiated pathways. Through a combination of teacher recommendation, and student self-selection, provide ~3 "pathways" of topics on Khan for students to pick. These pathways would be mostly differentiated based on readiness level. Ideally, adjacent pathways would overlap in about half their topics. It's also 
• The biggest way to differentiate Khan work is to simply assign different work--which can fine, if done appropriately. Some students need a review of earlier procedures before learning new procedures. Fortunately, this is the minority of what math is, as a whole, which is why tracking is largely unnecessary. But it is literally 100% of Khan. It's not particularly flexible for students with different levels of readiness.
• Questions I still have about Khan:
• How can I make it so that students can do more to pick the Khan they want to do? Like, we figure out what their goal is, and then they go through and pick the Khan Academy topics from the courses they want to do on their own? This would be a super amazing skills/disposition for their long-term education. Just an an example, my significant other basically used Khan to put herself through most of pre-med on her own. What a tremendous resource! I'd love to learn more about how to help students use it better.
• I'm not excited about how narrowly defined success is on Khan Academy, and the impact it has on differentiation. But for what it is (structured support for procedural fluency for accuracy), it's totally solid. Is it possible to use as like...20% of a kid's experience? Just a supplement? How little can I use it, while still having it be a meaningful thing to do on the side for students?
• What are the other things kids need to learn, in order for Khan to fulfill it's potential as a self-paced, adaptive, opportunity for students to take some real agency in their learning?

Desmos Activity Builders (ABs)

• In addition to the big, long-term assignment of working through the Khan Academy I assigned, I assigned weekly Desmos Activity Builders, as "Review/Previews," to borrow a term from CPM. These were meant to review the major work of the course. They started out more as mixed-spaced practice, with a handful of different math topics, and then over time I opted more into the pre-built Desmos ABs, which are less mixed, and more focused on individual topics.
• Active learning that's not assessment
• Khan Academy basically has two modalities:
• "Take Notes": students as mostly-passive receptor during videos or notes passages.
• "Performance": students being quizzed on content they ostensibly should be able to do, after the videos/notes. Note, even if they aren't called "quizzes," and they're just "practice problems," they're basically the same thing.
• But there is another major modality that should make up the vast majority of a student's work: exploration, attempts, guessing/checking, looking for mistakes, tracking what other people are trying, and literally every other math-doing verb. Desmos does a better job of this. It's actually one of their design principles. [ensure students are doing a variety of verbs.] This made it feel like the natural supplement to Khan Academy.
• Automatic feedback
• Dan Meyer and the Desmos team have shared a lot of reasoning, and concrete examples about the difference between evaluative and interpretive feedback. One of many incredibly influential concepts I've learned from them. Go check it out, if you're not already familiar. I've tried to incorporate a variety of automatic feedback mechanisms into the activities, because prompt (not always immediate) feedback is helpful for student learning.
• Below is an example of how I tried to design for interpretive feedback in the ABs I made. It doesn't immediately tell them what is right/wrong, but it signals that something is wrong. It also provides a model for thinking about the problem in a different way (graphically, as opposed to algebraically).

via GIPHY

• On the final slide of the AB, I also included a slide outlining which problems they got "probably right" or if they needed to "keep trying." Here's an example of what that might look like:

• Students seemed to value this slide. In opted to put it on the final slide to make it intentionally a bit of a hassle, hopefully motivating students to rely on the interpretive feedback provided directly on the slide. But I also know how some students appreciate some direct feedback, especially if they're too lost to be able to make enough use of the interpretive feedback.
• Share Classmate's Response
• Goal 1: Increase opportunities for students to meaningfully communicate with other students.
• Every time a student clicks "Share with Class," they are given a few other student responses. Importantly, not all student responses are definitely correct, or easy to understand. But students have a natural desire to see what other students said, to see if it validates their own response. Students are motivated to try to make sense of what other people are saying. This, in and of itself is an educational experience.
• Goal 2: Increase visibility of other students doing the same work.
• In the context of asynchronous learning, students don't have nearly as much interaction with each other, as a result of their common work in the class. But seeing other students' names, and seeing that they're doing the same work, can hopefully make students feel more like they are in community with other students.
• It was difficult to manage wanting students to look at other students' work, while also not wanting them to see all the work done for them, spoiling the problem. Over time, I got better at figuring out how to ask helpful "follow up" questions, the responses of which provide some general feedback, without spoiling most of the work on the slide.
• Focus of the work
• Lessons: These are ABs focused on a single topic, to some depth. For these, I typically used a relevant pre-made Desmos AB that I liked. Or tweaked one so that it fit my class better. Here's an example of the Desmos classic Match My Line, edited with love by me.
• Review/Preview: Here is an example of a Review/Preview AB I made from scratch. For reasons outlined above, most RPs followed this same structure:
• Private check in (shared only w/ me)
• Public check in (shared w/ class)
• Hints: a link to a helpful video, article, or example related to each problem
• Notice/Wonder
• ~6 problems, one problem per slide
• Correctness checker: indicating whether all the check-able work was correct.
• Questions I still have about Desmos:
• Most Desmos ABs that are single lessons are mostly designed to be executed in a class, with other kids, and other teachers. They are meant to facilitate classroom learning. How does the design of a "lesson" AB have to be different, in the absence of a teach? Of other students?

Problem Sets

• Problem Sets (PSets) were the primary mode of classwork for my elective, whereas my Math 1 class was Khan + Desmos. I wrote a bunch about what they are here. In particular, I wrote about how I used them during distance learning here. The two things I really liked about them were their natural capacity for offering choice as well as a reasonable system for feedback and revision.

The next post in this series is Part 3: Communicating with Students.