How to see student thinking remotely
By: Lis Roche Bluford
Tags: Students, Elearning, Charter Schools, Zoom, Eduaction

Photo: Uncommon Schools

Lis Roche is the Master Educator at EdLight and has been a 5th Grade teacher with Uncommon Schools and leader at high performing charter schools for 10 years. Her students consistently earned the highest student growth in the state of Massachusetts. Here’s what she had to say about her experiences with maximizing remote learning this spring:

Ms. Roche behind a computer screen and Ms. Roche in person are two completely different instructors. It took me too long to realize that. When I think about the way I spent my time in the classroom this school year, 50% of it was walking around looking at student work while they were doing it. This helped me inform my instruction to students, it helped me analyze my data with my coach, it helped me to redirect students in the moment as they made mistakes.

So as I transitioned to remote learning, I stepped back after a few weeks and realized — all I was looking at was their submitted work. What was once the biggest lever to student learning had disappeared. I needed a way to see and respond to their thinking — not just their final answers.

I did two major shifts in my instruction in the last weeks of remote learning that dramatically shifted student mastery, and helped me get back to my regular teacher self:

Use the Chat Function

By doing this students can engage synchronously in the moment to a question you may have. Our tip: make the question direct and short, less than one sentence for responses. A lot of wasted time is present for early finishers and students who are slower typers. Plus, it’s hard for you to respond in the moment to longer answers.

It can be a very effective way of engaging ALL students and to see where you might have to intervene and clarify a misunderstanding. Another tip: have a student who got it right explain it to a student who missed a point! This will help you see if their rationale is fully correct and allow others to add on to stamp that understanding.

If the chat function is unavailable to you, teachers seem to prefer to monitor questions in one single class shared google doc, as opposed to shifting between different windows.

Pictures of scrap paper

Seeing work on paper is one of the best ways to see student thinking, but that can be difficult when you can’t look over their shoulder to see their paper or see in a tiny window of a video. Our suggestion: have students keep a notebook and pencil handy, then hand-write their answers. Younger students are often much faster at hand-writing than typing, and you can see all the work and keep the quick pace of class.

A great way to maximize this: screen share a photo of a student misunderstanding and have other students explain how to correct it or why it is wrong. Have students follow-up after class with photos of their work!

Use Slates

When considering your care-package or materials for next year, a great option is to send kids home with white boards and markers. This way you can have them handwrite their answers, then hold up their work to the camera when you are doing synchronous learning. Many teachers are having students do work outside of live class hours, but doing it at the same time provides a window into student thinking and mimics the class structure that is familiar to them.

When doing synchronous work together, it’s important to note that students will likely need more wait time than they needed in a classroom setting. As a teacher, you may be used to cold calling quickly, but the processing time is longer for this type of learning. Allow for that wait time and you will see better student thinking and engagement.

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