With the emerging threat of COVID19 and the closure of schools, teachers are scrambling to move to online learning environments. This will bring with it a myriad of challenges the short time frame is not going to help the situation. While we are fortunate that there are many technological solutions for the provision of remote learning, the more significant challenges will revolve around how we interact with our learners.
If we believe that “all learning is a consequence of thinking” then we will want to ensure that thinking is required and prioritised in the online learning as much as it is in our classrooms. This might prove challenging but some careful planning should ensure that we do not default to learning that focuses on regurgitation of facts and repeated practice of well-rehearsed methods.
In the face-to-face environment, the relationships that we have built with our students allow us to elicit quality thinking through our dialogue with our class. There is a natural flow of ideas and we enhance this with our use of thinking routines and effective questioning techniques. In an online learning environment, it is easy to break from the good habits we have developed and revert to a role as an expert with answers to provide.
In the online learning environment, our goal should be to ask more questions and provide fewer answers.
Assuming we have created opportunities for learning that requires thinking, builds understanding and allows students to develop life worthy dispositions, the next consideration is how will we engage them with this learning. The patterns of learning that are routine in our classroom should not be abandoned as we move online. In the classroom we do not, as a norm, post a task for students to complete and then sit back and wait for completed responses to arrive at our desks ready for assessment. Throughout the process, we engage in the learning with our students. We build in opportunities for questions and we explore incomplete works with our students. As their learning progresses we provide guidance, we nudge them towards deeper understandings and become participants with them in their learning.
The danger in moving to an online learning environment is that this process of learning as a collaborative process between a learner and an empowering educator is broken. A pattern of learning can easily emerge where the teacher sets a task or distributes an activity and the students are expected to complete this with minimal input. Once the task is completed it is submitted for evaluation, the learner moves on to the next task and has forgotten the intent of their initial learning task by the time feedback is received. It is a pattern where there is little to no opportunity for the learner to refine their response while they are engaged in their learning.
A much more productive pattern of learning is maintained when the learner and teacher utilise the affordances of the online learning environment to enhance opportunities for dialogue. The learner engages in the process of learning, shares initial ideas, poses questions, explores their wonderings. Draft ideas are evolved mutually. Misunderstandings are addressed. The learner understands that incomplete works shared with their teacher will be a foundation for their future learning. The teacher poses questions to the learner, offers prompts and suggestions. The teacher acts as a collaborative mentor who uses information illicit through the online dialogue they maintain with their students to provide adaptive support as it is required.
Taking time to consider the patterns of learning that we desire are important. The choices we make about these patterns should be a guide to both our choice of technological platform and the nature of the online learning that we ask our learners to engage in. If the technology we plan to use does not support the ways we hope to engage with our learners then we should select other tools.
There will be challenging times ahead, but with some careful planning, we can find new ways to support our learners. As always, we must aim to put learning front and centre and avoid the temptation to keep our students busy during enforced shut-downs.
By Nigel Coutts