Everyone Who Says Online Learning Is Ineffective Is Wrong
How to blend and personalise teaching to optimise learning for all
TL;DR:
Schools operate within their own constraints, contexts and values.
This makes a collegiate approach to education design almost impossible with any movements towards 21st century skills such as the 4Cs (creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, communication) being piecemeal.
What is encouraging is the number of conversations now being had surrounding a need to evolve education design, but for some schools, returning to ‘normal’ is perhaps higher up on their agenda.
The double disruption of the pandemic and the economic downturn makes change unfeasible for many schools and parents and yet these disruptions have accelerated the real need for change because they have shone a light on what is an industrial-era system that is not preparing students adequately for their futures.
I think that while many schools want to make a shift but they may feel as thought their hands are tied as they aim to provide, in the first instance, a sense of security and familiarity as students return to the classroom and parents to work.
Are we Focussed on the Wrong Thing?
I am an advocate of the work being done by Project Zero at Harvard Graduate School of Education, particularly the work of Ron Ritchhart.
He says that
“the root of the problem is that we are teaching the wrong thing”.
He talks about creating cultures of visible thinking and teaching for intellectual character as being integral to designing schools.
Ritchhart believes we should be focussed on:
- metacognition
- self-refection
- self-regulation
- open mindedness
- curiosity
- critical thinking
- strategic thinking.
I have hope that there is an appetite for change to make this happen.
Schools need to focus on how learning happens and doesn’t happen, what effective teaching can deliver and whether students’ education experiences are relevant to real-world issues and purpose-driven.
Is Project Based Learning the Silver Bullet?
For the majority of schools, switching to PBL seems like an impossible task. This is because the majority of schools are exam-driven and currently PBL doesn’t fit this model.
There is unpredictability about PBL or even simply shifting away from content-rich direct instruction and moving towards the 4Cs of creativity, critical thinking, communication and collaboration.
It comes down to what schools believe effective learning and teaching look like.
- Does this look like a teacher commanding a room of silent children passively listening to the delivery of knowledge?
- Does this look like a fancy PowerPoint and children’s exercise books filled with notes copied from the presentation?
- Does it look like children working together solving problems with a facilitating teacher?
I expect that for many schools, all of these scenarios exist at some point.
I think that schools can be quite conservative environments and in some respects they will feel they have to be given parental expectations, government guidelines and university entry requirements, so I believe that abandoning everything schools have always done is not desirable or feasible.
Teacher Empowerment and Agency
What schools can do is to move toward a model of equity leadership where teachers are encouraged to collaborate with each other rather than being directed from the top.
Teachers need to be encouraged and given time to design a system that is driven by the needs of learners — now and in the future — this includes content but also competency development.
Collaboration as a form of professional development is essential when making a culture shift.
So if a school believes the 4Cs (creative problem solving, critical thinking, communication and collaboration) are important — and the UN, WEF, British Council and many other major organisations have stated they are — teachers need to look at what they must teach as directed by their district or exam boards, i.e. the content, and identify teaching strategies that are driven by the practise and development of these skills.
In this way the content is covered and then this knowledge is applied to the desirable skills.
Schools need to create a culture of psychological safety so that teachers feel comfortable being uncomfortable and unlearning and relearning really is the way forward here.
Teaching is a craft that needs to be cultivated — it is an ongoing process.
Schools need to consider if they are creating cultures for thinking and welcoming change, however gradual, not only for their students but also their teachers.
Blended Learning and Teaching
The disruption the world has faced meant that teachers needed to pivot overnight to a new model. This was incredibly challenging for everyone concerned.
What the research has shown is that teaching strategies that might work in person, don’t really translate well online.
So there is a need for adaptation but this will require time for teachers develop their knowledge and skills in online learning in order to feel more confident.
Some studies have shown that when teacher record themselves speaking for an hour or speak over a PowerPoint for the same length of time, students become disengaged.
Breaking up a lecture-style lesson in micro-content of 3–5 minute videos and then adding active learning tasks, break out rooms, online office hours, live chat support, etc has proven to be far more effective in terms of student engagement and enjoyment.
Imagine a high school student facing 5 hours of online lecture based content each day for months. Even the most diligent student is going to find this overwhelming.
But this also doesn’t work in a face to face environment for all students.
In order to achieve learning mastery, students must do something with the knowledge they acquire — they must process it through active learning tasks.
As schools move towards full in person attendance, blended learning will be the ideal way to transition.
Blended learning serves to enhance the in-person learning environment.
Blended Learning Approaches That Work
One really simple way to apply blended learning is the flipped classroom.
Teachers can prepare a short video, audio or document that they share digitally with their students ahead of the next lesson.
They could even provide all three as this would help students to personalise their own learning experience by choosing the mode of delivery.
This sounds like additional work for the teacher, but really it is just one piece of content repurposed in 3 ways.
The students are asked to access the content and come to the next lesson with three words that sum up the main ideas, themes or points.
This means that when the students arrive in the next class, they are ‘warmed up’ with even a small amount of prior knowledge onto which they can pin any new knowledge. The lesson will then be devoted to active learning and the processing of the content.
The class shares their words and the teacher notes them on the board. Now the teacher can ask the class to identify the connections between the words and ideas.
The students are using systems thinking to identify the interconnected nature of the ideas. They are encouraged to think critically about the concepts which can now be linked to theories and then real world issues.
So instead of the students coming to the lesson ‘cold’ the teacher has maximised the learning and teaching time by shifting their practice — no lecture, no copying down of notes from the board — the students are focused on communicating and collaborating.
They are actively thinking not passively absorbing.
So blended learning in this simple example has the capacity to focus students and teachers and create a new routine in the classroom.
If you are 100% online, you can provide a short video which you share asynchronously. You then meet synchronously with your students and encourage discussion in the same manner as above.
If your students are reluctant online contributors, you can use a collaborative tool such as Miro or Padlet to gather their ideas and identify and misconceptions.
I found that when students are required to formulate their own questions after accessing the initial content, they engage in higher order thinking very quickly. This strategy works in a face-to-face, online and a blended learning and teaching context.
I use question forming strategies from McTighe and Wiggins — Essential Questions and share with my students what makes a ‘good question’. McTighe and Wiggins point to the following:
A good question…
- Is open-ended.
- Is thought-provoking & intellectually engaging, often sparking discussion & debate.
- Calls for higher-order thinking, such as analysis, inference, evaluation, prediction. It cannot be effectively answered by recall alone.
- Points toward important, transferable ideas within (and sometimes across) disciplines.
- Raises additional questions & sparks further inquiry.
- Requires support and justification, not just an answer.
- Recurs over time; that is, the question can & should be revisited again & again.
The authors offer further scaffolding in the form of these question starters:
- Why….?
- How would it be different if….?
- What are the reasons….?
- Suppose that….?
- What if….?
- What if we knew….?
- What is the purpose of….?
- What would change if….?
- Had…..would…..have occurred?
- How influential was……in……?
- How does…..relate to…..?
- How might……help us to understand…..?
- What does…..reveal about…..?
- Could……have happened without…..?
- Does…..matter when trying to understand the reasons for….?
This can work face to face, online and in a blended scenario.
Designing Learning and Teaching Resources
One piece of research by Mayer focusses on multimedia design and how it is important before planning teaching and learning to really focus on what you are creating.
Read more on Mayer’s work in this article I wrote about designing learning resources.
Mayer has 15 multimedia principles based on the science of how human beings learn and these help guide teachers to meet the needs of all of their students.
Much of Mayer’s research centres around reducing cognitive overload for students.
Thinking about pre-teaching core-concepts, ideas and vocabulary before a main lesson, limiting information to 5–7 chunks only are some ideas that teachers can use to reduce cognitive overload.
Watch this video I made about how to pre-teach core concepts:
Mayer points to how multimedia tools for learning — pdfs, video, PowerPoint are not simply delivery systems but cognitive aids for the construction of knowledge so should be created with the learner not teacher in mind.
Removing what Mayer calls ‘seductive details’ and instead focus on specifics — what they need — helps teachers to reduce extraneous processing for the learner.
Not all learners will experience such difficulties, but when teachers are designing learning, they do need to be mindful the needs and preferences of all of their students.
Using the Universal Design for Learning framework is also a great way to personalise the learning experience for all learners. This can be in relation to the pace, content and method of delivery.
Read more about the Universal Design for Learning framework in one of my previous articles here.
It is easy to view a class as a homogenous group because they are set by age, gender, etc, but we need to start personalising learning so that every student is given the opportunity to thrive.
Watch this video that demonstrates a simple way to personalise learning resources:
Where does Ed Tech Fit?
When teachers had to pivot quickly to online learning, every action was well intentioned. We were all trying to survive in a global emergency while providing a consistent education without training in online teaching.
Now we know more. We have more data. We have a better understanding about what is effective and for me, this means less is more.
We don’t need hundreds of ed tech tools and we don’t need ed tech tools that do not integrate with each other.
The ed tech tools that will survive will be the ones that offer API integration.
When students and teachers have to remember multiple passwords to access all of the different ed tech products, it becomes onerous.
There is also data privacy to consider. Who owns or can access the data about our students? Schools need to know this and this can be tricky to track when individual teachers are using different platforms across their classes.
It is great when teachers share what has worked for them but there needs to be a strategy and this needs to be streamlined otherwise more tools will continue to be added, not taken away.
We need to ask ourselves three fundamental questions:
- Does this serve our students any longer?
- How does this tool improve learning?
- How does this tool support teaching?
Unlearning is an important process in what schools need to do next. This is as important as learning.
How Can Design Thinking Support This Process?
Using design thinking is a great process for schools to use at this stage: We need to firstly ask questions to gain a deep understanding from stakeholders about the issues we face and what we believe we need.
We then need to define the problem to be solved.
Ideation comes next — looking at what could work and what needs to be removed.
Trial and testing follows.
This is an iterative process and as this is an ever changing dynamic landscape schools need to be agile but first and foremost, focus on what effective learning and teaching looks like not the latest shiny ed tech product.
Take a look at this short video that offers a walk through of the concept of design thinking:
I have a FREE design thinking course for educators to use in schools with their students. Access it here.
