Why it’s ok to take a break from Breakout Rooms & monitoring

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When your students are doing an activity, what method do you like to use to monitor them? Peering over their shoulders? Crouching in front of them? At the front of class while pretending to read some notes? Or by joining their Breakout Rooms on Zoom?

At the time of writing, many of us are under lockdown due to Covid-19. As a result, there has been a huge surge in online teaching, which means our days of crouching and peering are currently on hold. So, in order to be as current as possible, this article about monitoring has a particular focus on the online classroom. However, the research I reference comes from the physical classroom and thus most of the points I raise apply to both.

The first thing to say, especially if you are new to teaching, is that monitoring your students during certain tasks is an absolutely indispensable tool for the teacher — online or offline. It’s one of the reason many ELT schools have opted for Zoom over other platforms. Recently, while working with a Task-based lesson from the excellent blog by Neil Anderson and Neil McCutcheon, I came across another useful blogpost on how you can make monitoring through Zoom more effective. I recommend having a read, but only after you take away the big pinch of salt that I’m about to offer.

Because that reminded me that I’d seen quite a lot of teachers raising questions about how to monitor effectively in their new teaching contexts. And it reminded me that I’ve had an article sitting in my drafts about monitoring since this blog began. As such, I decided it was time to rescue it from my drafts, give it a facelift, and add a new line of argument, which you’ll be glad to hear is basically: relax…chill out!

Take a break from the Breakout rooms and monitoring.

You don’t need to be digitally or physically hunched over the students evaluating their performance with your Terminator-vision. Give yourself time to breathe before popping up beside the students like the shopkeeper from Mr Benn.

I’m not saying you should leave the students/laptop completely unattended while you go and make a sandwich, but I’m willing to bet you probably deserve a minute to collect your thoughts/do the attendance/nip to the bathroom. And if you want to use that time for something your boss wouldn’t condone, like checking your Whatsapp messages, then I’m not going to judge you either.

Not only might taking a quick breather be good for you, some unpublished research might suggest that it can be beneficial for the students too. Findings from the paper, entitled Garland, J. N. (2002). Co-construction of language and activity in low-level ESL pair interactions, are detailed on the Center for Adult English Language Acquisition website, and insights into a related experiment can be gleaned from this presentation I came across.

In these, you’ll find some reassuring conclusions about the benefits of pair/group work:

• There’s no reason why it can’t be done with low-level learners
• The way which students negotiate meaning with each other during pair work means that they “notice the gaps” in their own language, e.g. if their partner has misunderstood them, they may rephrase what they’ve said or pronounce it differently. (Note, this was likely a multilingual class)
• Students approach the tasks in different ways. Meaning that in some ways, they are having mini-lessons that are personal and practical for them.

Now, here comes the surprising conclusion about monitoring. I’ll quote it in full:

• “When teachers approach a pair of students working together, the nature of the students’ interaction changes. Students often stop negotiating and instead (a) ask the teacher to solve the problem they are having (which prevents them from figuring out the solution on their own), (b) attempt to perform successfully for the teacher (which ends the authentic interaction in which students were engaged), or ( c) start to have an independent interaction with the teacher (which ends the conversation and work on the task) (Garland, 2002).”

Take a moment to think about that. Is the gap between the scientific research and your classroom not immediately bridged? How many times have you stood over a pair of students, crouched in front of them, or apparated into their Breakout Room to have them suddenly address you and ask for help? Or for the conversation to suddenly to become weirdly stilted?

A version of Gerald Scarfe’s teacher from Pink Floyd’s The Wall.

Hey! Teachers! Leave those students alone!

Yes, of course, noting down their strengths and weaknesses while monitoring and giving them feedback is important, but if you are doing it continuously, going through the motions, you are quite possibly sacrificing their chance to practice fluency over a focus on accuracy. On training courses, we often tell trainee teachers not to interrupt students while monitoring during fluency activities and to correct them afterwards, but perhaps once in a while we should be going a stage further and resist monitoring too.

Let me pre-empt a couple of concerns here:

Students enjoy the safety of the teacher monitoring and the feedback they get afterwards

All of them? Including your awkward teenagers? How do you know? I suspect that this isn’t true. Regardless, I’m not suggesting you do this every time, but merely that you might hesitate over the “join” Breakout Room before immediately instigating your #zoomloom. You could also compensate for the lack of monitoring through a more robust open-class feedback. You’ve got a genuine information gap if you haven’t been monitoring: what did your partner say (because I don’t have a clue)?

Funny you should mention teenagers, my teenage students would just misbehave and start speaking their native language

We all get those classes from time-to-time (see, previous articles on Troublemakers) And, to be honest, Zoom doesn’t help much with this. In most physical ELT classrooms, a good teacher’s sonar usually picks up those who are not on task. Zoom’s Breakout rooms don’t work like that (unless you’re mitigating it by using a method like the Google Doc one I mentioned at the start of this article). So if your best attempt at whole class monitoring isn’t as effective on Zoom, then should you feel so bad about cutting it out?

However, the real key to addressing this problem is to give students a clear and achievable task that relies on them using the target language to fill an information gap. This doesn’t need to be fancy. “In the Breakout Room, talk to your partner about the weather this week” is useless if they all live in the same place. Whereas, “Ask your partner about a holiday that was memorable because of the weather” is much more effective.

Rebellious students now have limited options. They can opt not to do the task, but this means coming back to the main group and trying to invent what their partner said (embarrassing and usually easy to spot). Alternatively, they could speak in their native language in the Breakout Rooms, but again, they’ll be forced to speak English during open class. So you could argue that popping in to check up on them might stop either of these situations from happening, but you could also argue that pairing them up sensibly and trusting them to do the task without your intervention has its benefits too.

My monitoring is actually pretty subtle, and not intrusive at all

Me too! Isn’t it great? It makes me think I could’ve been a spy. Some of you may correctly point out that much of this article is an argument against intrusive monitoring, rather than no monitoring at all. But don’t we 007 monitors give the game away every time we reveal we have actually been listening all along? Don’t our students catch on to our secret techniques? Also, unless I’m missing something, in the Zoom context, let’s face it: when you enter the Breakout Room you have all the subtlety of the Great and Powerful Wizard of Oz trying to hide behind his curtain.

In summary:

• Pair/group work is a great tool that you should be using online and offline
• Monitoring is also great, and giving students feedback on their language is often what they want and need
• Fluency practice is something students need, and some tentative research, perhaps combined with your own experience, suggests that monitoring can have a negative impact on fluency
• I suggest initially pausing before starting to monitor, and on occasion, resisting the temptation entirely. Mitigate your lack of monitoring by having a robust open class feedback stage. You could also explain to your students what you’re about to do, with the hope that it might encourage their trust

I’d love to hear any thoughts about this, here or on the Facebook group. I’ll finish with just a few resources and ideas particularly suited to the online classroom.

Resources

• The Fluency First ELT blog I mentioned has a section dedicated to Task-Based Learning activities suitable for online teaching.
• A Google Slides Presentation I made, which is an adaption of the Feel-good Movie activity from the Fluency First blog. Feel free to make a copy and adapt it, e.g. you could remove me talking about my favourite film and replace it with your own.
• For those who are newer to pair work and its benefits, I wrote an article for IH CLIC Seville some time ago with practical advice and a few activities you can try out.
• The Better Language Learning Blog guide to using Google Docs and Breakout rooms by teachers, a potentially less intrusive alternative.
• In keeping with my “don’t-make-life-harder-for-yourself” theme, have a look at this blog about Why We Should Stop Looking For Apps from Teach It Simple. (See my final point below for more on this.)

Some tips for online teaching that have been working well for me:

• Use the Waiting Room. This is the equivalent of putting a student out of class. Not for punishment, but for activities. For example, I’ll have 9 students in three groups. I’ll put one person from each group into the waiting room. I’ll give the remaining students an action related to what we’ve been studying “playing tennis/riding a motorbike/jumping on a trampoline” and then mute their mics. I invite the three students back in and they have to watch their classmates miming on their webcams and shout out the vocabulary. Watching the lengths they go to (standing on chairs, props) to convey the language can be pretty funny!
• Use the Broadcast to Breakout Rooms feature in Zoom. I used this to make a very boring activity, a test of past participles, a tiny bit more interesting. I set up the groups, told them to have one writer in each group with paper and a pen ready. I demoed an example where I wrote “1. go” in the chat and they had to write “1. gone”. Then, I sent them into the separate groups and done it as a (admittedly, fairly boring) quiz. The only thing I’d say is that you should leave plenty of time before “Broadcasting” so that students have time to confer and write down their answers. Also, there is no record of your broadcasted messages, so you’ll need to keep a note of what you’ve sent.
• Don’t reinvent the wheel. A few activities from my physical classroom have had to be dropped from my online classes — but most haven’t! There are often simple tweaks that can be made to most of our current practices to make them suitable for online teaching. Perhaps in years to come we will have a whole range of bespoke online teaching tools, that actually do enhance our online classrooms, but for now, our tried-and-tested ones seem to work just fine.