How To Stop Yourself from Drowning: Rethinking Teaching in Distance Learning and Beyond
In the online setting, teachers have realized more than ever that traditional ways of testing do not work anymore.
How we are all drowning in distance learning
A couple of months ago, on a balmy September day, I went for a swim in the Pacific Ocean. The surf was high and the vast ocean drew me in after a long and tiring day of teaching online. As I swam closer to the surfers in the water, suddenly I was pulled under by a wave. I reached toward the sky and broke through the water, took a breath, then was pulled under by another wave. The waves came over me again and again, trying to bury me. No matter how hard I swam, an invincible force had its hold on me. The yells of the lifeguard that I had blissfully ignored moments ago now seemed so obvious — there was a dangerous rip current in the ocean today, and I swam right into it.
Similarly, during the COVID-19 pandemic, our students — and we as educators — have had to deal with one infection wave after another trying to stay afloat without drowning. We are all trapped in a rip current — no matter how hard we try to swim back to the safe shore, we are not able to reach it.
In distance learning, conventional teaching methods do not help us meet our students’ needs or help them achieve certain benchmarks or become independent learners. For students and teachers alike, many days blended into the next with the feeling that one was constantly working, hastily rushing from one lesson to the next, from one subject to another. For many students the question was: what’s the point? Teachers felt that they were working more than ever, desperately trying to help students achieve the same standards as the previous year, only to realize that this was not possible.
Taking the same route back to the shore was an impossible undertaking, as the rip current was pushing them back stronger than they could swim. As I found out, it is impossible to swim faster than the current taking you out to the ocean. One must swim perpendicular to the shore in order to escape the rip current and reach the shore. Our teaching should follow the same approach. We must break with traditional types of teaching and testing and change our course to arrive at new and safe shores.
The ways we test our students shape the way we prepare our students, the way we plan our lessons (backward design), and the way we design learning experiences. In the online setting, teachers have realized more than ever that traditional ways of testing do not work anymore. Due to legal requirements, teachers still have to proctor online exams in the traditional way, resulting in ironic and critical remarks on Twitter and in articles.
Yet, even the most elaborate surveillance setup will not solve the basic problem (which actually shouldn’t be a problem at all): students have access to an unlimited amount of sources online. It is impossible to have 100% control over the sources they can access, and so we have to abandon the illusion of control (as in limiting access) altogether. For many teachers, it is nerve-wracking to lose control but from my perspective, it is liberating to change the way you teach, relate to your students, and perceive your own role as a teacher.
Be your own lifeguard
Fortunately, there are solutions to these problems: more student agency and a new role of the teacher. I am not the inventor of these ideas, I am merely “standing on the shoulders of [past and present] giants”: past giants such as John Dewey, Maria Montessori, and more recent innovators and influencers (e.g. Björn Nölte, Ines Bieler, Axel Krommer, A.J. Juliani, and Lisa Highfill, only to name a few). For me, and many other teachers and institutes, one of the most important starting points is testing.
In the last year, I used the freedom and opportunity to experiment with new types of assessment. For instance, my 10th-grade Economics class conducted a two-month-long startup project. They tackled the real-world problems students are facing in the pandemic, ideated creative solutions collaboratively, and finally pitched their solutions to the class and received formative feedback for the next iteration of their solution.
It was not only very motivating for them to solve current, real-life problems that affect them and their peers, but they also enjoyed working together towards a common cause, especially in these times of social isolation. I also shared detailed expectations for their pitch decks, gave them examples of excellent pitches to model, and shared with them the rubric I used to grade them. This gave them the support and confidence to produce innovative and outstanding results. In addition, the input (e.g., the method of design thinking/scrum, analysis of competitors, and market size) I gave my students was relevant to them, as they were able to apply them directly and helped them improve their solutions. It was clear to them that the lessons and skills they acquired directly helped them achieve their goal of solving the problems they are facing in the pandemic.
Agency is one important aspect of students’ motivation. Students have been cooped up at home for a year, not being able to decide whom to meet and where to go. Studies show that when students’ basic psychological needs of autonomy are met, they engage wholeheartedly in learning activities (Deci & Ryan). This is why giving students choices is crucial. In my project, students were able to choose the problem to tackle, the students to work with, and the solutions to the problems. This agency not only led to intrinsic motivation and gave them ownership of their learning experience but also helped them to experience states of flow.
Finally, projects and assessments like the pitches help us, as educators, get to know our students in new ways and help students find and improve their skills; thus, transforming teachers into coaches and guides on our students’ path to their inner calling. In distance learning, many students do not feel “seen” and “heard” anymore, and they crave real connection.
By taking time to actually see our students and show them how a task relates to their future life, we help them see the point in the individual skill they acquired, the assessment they worked on, and in school more generally. Supporting students in finding their path and developing their potential is not only meaningful for students but also deeply gratifying for educators. Thus, schools pivot from giving out credentials to seeking and nurturing potential. In their pitches, I was able to see new qualities in them I had not noticed before.
For instance, one student impressed me with her skill to tell an engaging story with the help of data. We then continue to nurture this talent and nudge the student to pursue extracurricular activities, do internships, and partake in competitions. When I gave that student feedback on her pitch, I not only talked about the pitch, but we talked about possible internships, hobbies to pursue, and possible future jobs. Hence, we connect the feedback to the respective assessment to our student’s growth potential.
Teachers should become “treasure hunters” who uncover our students’ talents, gifts, and interests. Most of my students put their pitches into their High School portfolios, and I am sure that the pitch decks will be helpful for a job interview one day. I do not think that any future employer will be interested in the grade they received in the project or which concepts they learned, but they might be interested in seeing how the students gained insights in applying these. More importantly, I hope that I have nudged some of my students, if only a little, to find the gift they have to offer to the world.
Lessons learned
This is only one example that stands out to me as positive learning experiences for my students during distance learning and helped me and my students to avoid drowning in distance learning. In the following, I will draw from all of the successful projects I conducted to synthesize factors that make, out of my experience, learning experiences engaging in a distance learning setting and beyond (not in order of importance):
- The assessment is an integral part of the learning process. The students are given formative feedback to improve their products iteratively. The point of the unit is not to write an exam but to learn the skills to solve challenging problems that are relevant to students. At the end of each unit, students present or share their results with their peers to discuss them and not to hand it in to the teacher to get a grade in return. The teacher not only looks at the specific competencies but also at the development of the students so they feel seen and valued as individuals.
- Students have a high degree of agency to choose the topics and/or the authentic problems they want to work on. The topics should be meaningful for the students and connect directly to their experience, e.g. the problems they are encountering during the pandemic. The topics should be controversial, it should encompass the higher levels of Bloom’s Taxonomy, and there should not only be one solution possible. Giving them additional choice in how they want to solve the problem motivates them even more. In this way, students are able to develop intrinsic motivation, the grit to work on their assignments without checking social media, and they are able to experience states of “flow”. All of this helps students to see the point in their assignments.
- Students collaborate, at least for parts of the unit, with their classmates. Pursuing a common goal brings them closer together and helps to mitigate social isolation. Video conferences are used intentionally for higher-level thinking such as giving each other feedback for the next iteration of the product, discussing the topics the students worked on, talking about how the topics connect to the student’s lives and reflecting on the learning experience together.
- The teacher is a coach and guide who supports students’ skills and helps them to find their path. The teacher is available in break-out rooms to give students individualized assistance during the project, asking them helpful questions and giving them advice. Having individual chats with those students and checking in with them on a regular basis also helps them. For the most vulnerable students, just being there for them is important, to at least partially replicate the presence you can provide them in the classroom.
I believe that these four recipes have been crucial before the pandemic; yet, the experience in the pandemic has helped me to see even more clearly the merits of this approach of teaching and assessment. However, there are also challenges and constraints on this path, which I will discuss in a separate article.
In the same way I did not drown that balmy September day because the lifeguard saved my life, there are safeguards that teachers can use to support the students to prevent them from drowning in school work. At the beach, the lifeguard told me that there had been 10 near-drownings that day and many have actually died on that beach before. In distance learning, trying to reach the beach swimming against the current means that our students might be in serious danger of drowning in endless tasks that do not make sense to them.
Getting out of that perilous current means that we will end up somewhere else in the way we teach and test: with more student agency and teachers who are fulfilled in knowing that they are guiding their students on a brighter future. It might be a much sunnier and safer part of the beach, for students and teachers alike. I think there are good reasons not to return to the part of the beach we left before the pandemic.
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