What's different about remote teaching?
Remote teaching is webinar-style by default - but that often comes with a poor student experience.
The overarching goal of this training session, "What's different about remote teaching?", is to embed awareness that things can be much better than the default, and to give some practical tools to help trainees achieve this.
The main point of this slide is not actually to go through the table - it's to stimulate thought in the trainees about the different dimensions in which teaching remotely might be different to teaching in-person.
The original intention was for this to be done via emoji-vote in Slack - create a separate post for each of these and ask trainees to emoji vote on each one as
- 💻: easier remote
- 🤷: about the same
- 🎓: easier in-person
but in the absence of Slack, you can also go through each C one-by-one and do this through visual voting - e.g. ask trainees to gesture on webcam:
- ☝️: easier remotely
- 🤏: about the same
- 👇: harder remotely
This also serves two goals: 1. Gives you a gauge of what the feeling is inside the group 2. Actively involves trainees early on
Split into breakout rooms of 3-5 people (with breakout room numbers being their designated group number).
I would advise giving each group a specific C to focus on (Care, Confer, Captivate, Consolidate) - e.g., Group 1 does Care, Group 2 does Captivate, and so on... - with the idea that they can move onto the others if they have time in the 10 minutes.
There's a suggested brief template intro for them to give to each other (“Hi, I’m Richard. I’ve been involved with CYF London since January 2020.”) so that groups can become acquainted with each other without descending into infinitely stretching casual conversation.
There should be a single shared Google doc which contains all notes from every group (but each group focuses on their relevant page): 1. This makes it easier for you to see how discussions are progressing in each group; and 2. This adds a small but healthy amount of pressure to each group to stay focused.
After 10 minutes, bring them back and try to lead a discussion based on what different groups have input into the doc (to demonstrate that their input matters).
In anticipation of this, I would recommend that you (the trainer) watch the entirety of the video linked to in the slide, which explains a lot about this idea and why.
The main things which I took away from watching the video were: 1. It's possible to create a sense of 'presence' through performance; and 2. Creating such a sense of presence makes a big difference to student experience.
(I would happily watch more of the first teacher!)
The hope is that this is something which trainees also pick up through watching the video, but you can add some emphasis to this as well.
In the actual training session, I would perhaps recommend only watching the clip of the first teacher (up to 1:52) - I think it a very strong demonstration of 'Dissolve the Screen' (and I don't think the others are as strong).
The subsequent discussion is also probably worth watching - this takes you up to ~3 minutes in the video.
The video doesn't need much, if any, preamble from you (since the video itself has an intro built into it) - except perhaps to direct trainees to take notes and be ready to share reflections on what they've seen.
The mental model I use here is that, when teaching remotely, concentration is constantly on the decline as time passes (at an ever-increasing rate) - but you can periodically bump it up through engagement points.
For example, on this slide, rather than listing bullets on "here are all the ways in which active engagement is more difficult to maintain remotely", ask the trainees to think about this and list different answers (e.g. in a Slack thread or the Zoom chat) - this is an engagement bump.
('Pause Point' is perhaps a slightly catchier name than 'engagement bump', though.)
The hope is that by making relatively frequent use of Pause Points, trainees can establish a culture of active engagement in their classes.
I would typically ask them to spend 1-2 minutes thinking about this, and then invite a couple of trainees to share.