When are we ready to learn?
One of the most challenging things about being a young person learning at home isn’t the stigma that still haunts them about a generation of coddled and cushioned through life. It’s not the lack of toilet paper (though that is disturbing), or the fear of a pandemic. One of the most difficult things for many young adults is that one in four of them, before the pandemic was even a denial in the headlines, is a survivor of childhood trauma, including abuse (Blue Knot 2017). One in four of our students, our young Australians, has experienced mental illness and one in four are likely to have anxiety or a mood disorder they are struggling with.
School for many of these young adults can be the safest place they have available to them. The routine, and contact with peers can be the most normal thing about their lives. It might be sometimes mundane or less than stimulating … 4pm double math periods for example … but it can also be safer than being home or being alone.
Having worked for years with cohorts of young adults that almost exclusively suffer from these types of conditions that have been pushed out out of mainstream education, I can tell you that drawing them back into study can be hard.
To think that so many of these young people are being pushed into lockdown, hothouses of confusion and frustration as the weeks wear on, is beyond troubling. Many will not bear up well under these conditions.
So what can we do as teachers to support them? What can we provide them that helps and comforts them and puts them in a position where they are even ready to contemplate learning? How can we put them in a place where they are ready to learn?
At the centre of what works, at the top of every list whether it’s online learning or bricks and mortar classrooms, is relationships. Building and maintaining them is key, it’s number one, and if you don’t have that you won’t get much further.
Most good teachers know this intuitively, but online learning is quite a different beast and isolation is often a critical hurdle to overcome with them. Without physiological feedback and some routine, it can be challenging to build and maintain a relationship sufficient to encourage them to take part in learning.
Regular calls, frequent asynchronous contact and opportunities to insert your ‘teachers voice’ into materials, instruction, welcome messages, feedback etc are crucial.
There are a bunch of ways you can achieve this, but what follows are the three most critical considerations IMHO.
Avoid sending long tracts of text without support. In the classroom you’d support their release into your class with guidance and advice on how to approach any reading of significance. You’d explain it’s relevance and guide your young people through that text. Without your voice to guide them, most students will struggle with context or to even get started. Context incidentally, is something most young adults struggle with most when working online (PEW 2017). Provide audio files to explain the purpose of the text, and short videos to help them reflect on what they’ve seen. Provide feedback videos instead of scratches in the margins of their work. Keep your voice in mind, how you’re inserting into the work, where it’s being employed to guide and make them feel less alone.
Collaborative work is HARD online. There’s a good reason we’re taught in the classroom at a young age how to interact and share. Primary teachers are amazing and often unappreciated for the size of the impact this very explicit work has on us in later life. When working with collaborative tasks online, start small in both in the size of the task and the size of the group. Keep the same groups as long as you can, because building trust takes much longer online. Allow longer lead times for submission but check in regularly to conduct assessment and to identify impediments to communication between them. Provide lots of exemplars and again, video and audio are your friends. If you’re not screencasting yet, start now. Thank me later.
Online classes are great, but navigating times that will suit students, parents working at home, bandwidth, equity in access to computer hardware … it’s quite a challenge. Organise for regular catch ups, but anticipate having to run them more than once. Record any sessions and make them available to your students afterwards. Keep the lessons to about 45 mins at most, and use them to draw consensus in opinion, to reinforce learning intentions and to encourage participation. Anticipate that the core work you undertake in your synchronous classes will be making sense of asynchronous materials and instruction, socialising your students, and dispelling misunderstandings. Critically, keep in mind that you are intruding into people’s homes. Some of them won’t be ready for this, some won’t be willing or eager, and many simply won’t have considered the ramifications of school intruding so immediately and intimately in their homes. Have a conversation with your colleagues about what you’re doing regarding Child Safe Standards and remind yourself of your obligations in this area. Ensure you are crystal clear about what is expected of you in supporting these young people.
There’s a great deal more advice I could offer here, but I think that these three things and the ones in particular to consider strongly if you’ve never taught online before … in a pandemic … without enough toilet paper.
Most importantly, take it slow and have reasonable expectations … of yourself. Online pedagogy IS different, and it’s important that as you build your support and guide your students you’re ensuring you don’t drown in your own expectations.
This can be fun if you let it, if you encourage the notion in your students that you’re along for the ride with them. Taking a ‘let’s get the most out of this and have some fun along the way’ approach and you’ll win a great deal more support … you’ll all learn a great deal more together.