Teaching into the Void of an Online Classroom
A second dispatch from the front lines of a public high school gone virtual.
With a quarter of this most unusual of school years complete, my district’s online schooling experiment has shown itself to have a decidedly different rhythm and flavor than the traditional brick-and-mortar approach.
Each school day offers teachers an opportunity to reflect on what’s working well and what could be improved. Let’s examine the past week at my high school to illustrate.
Monday.
From the start of the school year, my administration set aside Mondays for faculty and departmental meetings, inservices, and teacher planning.
Much of the time during these “Meeting Mondays,” as they’ve come to be called, is spent discussing digital tools — which ten years ago I might have assumed referred to bad actors wreaking havoc in online spaces. Like the students in a Peanuts comic classroom, however, I frequently have trouble making out what’s being said.
“Just install <Wah> by going to the website and entering the access code underneath the <Wah>, and go to the dropdown menu in <Wah> to activate it,” our district’s head of technology carefully explains as she shares her screen, illustrating the steps; what appears smooth as silk on her monitor looks jumpy and stuttered when I view her screen in real-time, with frame rates dipping below double digits.
She continues: “Then, click <Wah> to supply the link to students, but then they’ll have to press the <Wah> button and type their <Wah> in the <Wah> field to connect with the class. But what’s great is that you’ll be able to track them in real time by using the <Wah> feature, found in the <Wah> menu of <Wah>. You can even access statistics about their submissions by signing into <Wah> using your district credentials, but not in the trial version — you’ll have to upgrade to the paid version of <Wah>, which you can do by going to <Wah>. As a district, we have not subscribed to the paid version at this time.”
Good grief!
As personal computers and the internet have encroached on our lives, we’ve had to become digital cab drivers, memorizing the multifarious routes to virtual destinations: namely, the proper steps to becoming functional at using software. The trouble is, every piece of software is idiosyncratic, a point especially driven home by teachers’ necessary over-reliance on computing during the pandemic.
Needless to say, not all of us have mastered navigating the most ubiquitous of computer programs, let alone the latest of Silicon Valley’s masterpieces du jour; we thought we could tiptoe to the end of our careers without ever having to learn anything more complicated than keypresses for the touch-screen interface of the newest copy machine, as we held fast to the belief that instructional technology didn’t make the teacher, good teaching made the teacher (not that we believed technology and good teaching were mutually exclusive, only that such electronic tools could at best complement a well-rounded instructional plan, not replace it). But nature had other plans, thrusting a tremendous amount of change upon us in an incredibly compressed amount of time. “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen,“ Lenin said. We had to become, if not experts, then competent users of a range of software that many of us would have happily circumvented for years — or at least long enough until the Next Big Thing in Instructional Tech arrived, which we promised ourselves we would most definitely learn, all the while crossing our fingers behind our backs.
No doubt, there are quite a number of useful digital tools, online and otherwise, designed for teachers — perhaps too many, which is another problem — but they oftentimes don’t marry or integrate especially well (or at all) with online classroom platforms (for me, Google Meet) or online learning management systems (for me, Canvas).
For that matter, Canvas doesn’t always communicate precisely (or “play nice,” as the district’s head of technology puts it) with my district’s SIS (Student Information System, a separate program that tracks attendance and grades), which can potentially result in all sorts of nightmarish problems during critical times of the school year, such as when finalized grades for the semester are due. Imagine being directed to manually retype all of a class period’s assignment grades for the semester into an SIS because — and I’m quoting tech support here — “a glitch in the grading pass-back system deleted all your data.” A glitch. Worse yet, imagine not having to imagine it.
And there’s another issue. The interfaces and features of these programs can and often do subtly change from one day to the next, forcing you to relearn what you thought you already knew. Big Tech would call this “evolution,” as if it were a natural process apart from the “intelligent design” intentionally directed by human programmers, when it is anything but.
The upshot of all these different, non-standardized approaches to pedagogic technology? Faculty become balkanized in their digital tool use and expertise, with students suffering the consequences: wildly different online expectations from one class period to the next. It’s a digital wild west.
Forgive the skeptical eye I repeatedly cast toward technology, but it does seem warranted. It’s been informed by years of exposure to hype that more often than not results in a cycle of overpromising and under-delivering. Expectations start high, until we inevitably sink into a trough of disillusionment.
Especially useful during Meeting Mondays: discussions of teaching best practices.
Specifically, best practices using only the standard set of digital tools already at our disposal, no new add-ons needed, and especially centering on formative assessment that effectively monitors students’ learning, which seems to be lacking not only in an online classroom — in which some students’ faces are still shrouded in mystery, months into the school year — but in a brick-and-mortar class as well, where the most outspoken of students consume the bulk of a teacher’s attention.
On this particular Monday, several teachers are eager to share what’s been working well for them.
“I tell my students to wait to type an answer in the chat,” one of my colleagues explained, “until I say to them, ‘Three, two, one — Go!’ And then a waterfall of messages bombards the chat, minimizing the chances that students are just copying off each other.”
Another teacher opined: “At various points in the class, I’ll call on a student randomly and ask them a question — something random, like what their favorite color is — just to see if they’re still with me. It’s tough to tell, when not all students turn on their cameras on. I don’t even know what some of my students look like.”
A third teacher chimed in: “I’ve lately been starting every class with a quick poll. Maybe a ‘Would you rather’ question, or a question like, ‘What was the better invention: the fork or the spoon?’ Students seem to laugh and get engaged right away, right at the beginning of class, so then we can dive into the material.”
And a fourth spoke of the importance of feedback: “It’s vital that we gauge students’ perceptions of their success in our classes, along with their challenges. I ask questions in surveys, pushed out to them weekly. Like, ‘What is one thing you are doing that’s working well?’, ‘What is a goal you’d like to set for the next quarter?’, ‘Do you have any questions, concerns, or comments?’ Those sorts of questions.”
Indeed, in the history of schooling on this planet, there has never been more high school students learning through online means than right now. It behooves all teachers to reach out to their students and welcome critical feedback, no matter where it may lead. After all, most teachers have never done anything like this before.
In addition, teachers should be open to trying practices with which others have found success, especially during this online schooling experiment in which every classroom is serving as a laboratory. No teacher has cornered the market on good ideas.
When planning for the coming days and weeks, I have to look ahead — very much ahead, farther than ever before.
At least two, ideally three, weeks in advance, planning for every activity and contingency in each class period over that timeframe, really is necessary, since my face time with students is not only significantly less than at this point last year — only around half — but that limited face time is spread over two days rather than five. That, coupled with the fact that I have multiple sections of my courses, makes it vital that my planning, and timing, is near perfect: I’d better be very confident that the lesson plan for my Tuesday morning class not only fills up the time, is engaging, logically builds upon what came before, and scaffolds students to upcoming content, but that the plan is also suitable for my Wednesday afternoon class periods, which account for my remaining sections of the course. (I’ve set up a complex grid on a spreadsheet to draft my lesson plans; simply “winging it” is not in the cards this year.)
As difficult as this degree of planning is to carry out successfully when online school is regularly scheduled (from Tuesday to Friday), accounting for vacation days — due to district holidays, for example — has been a logistical nightmare. With each online day covering only half of a traditional school day, and only two full cycles through periods 1 to 8 each week, having off on a Wednesday, let’s say, due to a holiday is the equivalent of missing at least two and a half traditional school days.
But it’s even worse than that: with multiple sections of the same course — some sections being held during periods 1 to 4 (Tuesdays and Thursdays) and others during periods 5 to 8 (Wednesdays and Fridays) — no school on a Wednesday means that I met with my other section(s) of the same course the day before, but I still have to keep Wednesday’s section(s) up to date with the same material and content covered live, in class, on Tuesday. There are no easy answers here; I certainly don’t remember spending much time on these thorny scheduling issues during my education classes years ago, despite such vagaries of planning being among the most pressing issues of my day-to-day operations — and not just during these challenging times but beforehand as well.
Meticulous planning not only means deciding on dates for the distribution of worksheets, readings, quizzes, and tests, but also the posting of videos.
In order to maintain the highest fidelity to previous years’ lessons, I’ve made videos of me teaching, rather than finding rough or imprecise equivalents already online; these videos cover the presentation of new content that I would have typically delivered in-person during live instruction (i.e., lectures). After spending four months recording more than three hundred of these videos, most requiring multiple takes, and uploading them, I have a library of content available for the near term, as long as I don’t run afoul of my Big Tech overlords. Now, with the links posted, the onus is placed on students to watch the videos and arrive to class ready to reinforce concepts they’ve already been exposed to on-screen; essentially, my classroom has been flipped out of necessity, since the limited amount of live time online is best spent interacting with students and having them interact with each other, rather than me performing a sage-on-the-stage routine (which is effectively the only role I can play in a video introducing content anyway).
And there is an additional consideration, namely, the assignment of asynchronous work that is both reasonable in length and relevant in design. Would a video of an upcoming lesson make the most sense to assign? That way, students could formulate questions about the presentation that I could then answer during the next face-to-face session (which might not be during class time, but office hours, another novel concept for high school newly instituted by my district in these strange times). Or would extra practice questions outside of class make the most sense? But then, I wouldn’t be hanging over their (virtual) shoulders, ready to assist at a moment’s notice. Or perhaps I should cut the assignments, or the content, out completely. But there’s only so much fat that can be trimmed before the meat itself becomes a casualty. Lesson planning has become one Sophie’s choice after another.
Regardless of how I choose to proceed, what’s not on the table are last-minute changes to lesson plans. Whereas with traditional schooling I was nimbly steering a speedboat through choppy waters, now I’m captain of an ocean liner, sailing on rough seas. If I get thrown off course, it’s much more difficult to right the ship.
Tuesday.
Because of a finite number of buses and bus drivers, the elementary schools, middle years’ schools, and high school in my district — and in districts nationwide — have staggered start times, with high school students beginning the school day earliest and elementary kids the latest.
But with the shift to distance learning, and the scheduling flexibility introduced thereof, administration made an especially wise decision: to have all district schools’ schedules line up, meaning that the earliest high school class period starts at the same time as the elementary school day, 9:00 am. For those of us who aren’t morning people, like myself, this has perhaps been the biggest boon to my teaching: I’m awake, my students are awake, and we don’t have to spend the first ten minutes of class clearing the cobwebs and the brain fog.
If only, when things return to some kind of normal, we could avoid starting the high school day at a 7:35 am morning bell, it might be healthier for everyone. But that’s infeasible, not only because of the logistics of bus routing, but because of high school sports schedules.
At the end of the school day, I reached out via email to a student who had gone MIA from one of my classes for more than a week. She responded — and immediately triggered a crisis of confidence within me:
I got your email. I wanted to explain [to you] why I’ve been absent.
I feel you assign way too much work, honestly. I know that you’re just trying to cover a lot of material, but the way you’re doing just overwhelms me like in every way. It is taking me so much time to do your work that I’m struggling in my other classes. That’s just not fair to me or to the rest of the class, honestly.
So I am going to switch out of your class at the end of the marking period. Once I switch, the grade won’t make a difference anyway, so I will not be showing up to your classes or doing your work anymore.
Well, at least I now knew the reason for her absences.
The message sent me into a tailspin; remembering the importance of gathering regular student feedback, I hastily typed up a survey and pushed it out to all my students via a Canvas Quiz. The survey consisted of only a single question:
Compared to my other classes, this class has:
A. More work
B. About the same amount of work
C. Less work
D. I want to drop this class
Then I braced for the worst, believing the student’s critical email to be a bellwether rather than an anomaly. What if a majority of students voted to “drop this class” — then what? Best case scenario, I figured, nearly everyone would select option “A”, and I would be forced to radically rethink how I plan my lessons, lest I have a potential mutiny on my hands.
But, as the results trickled in through the afternoon and evening hours, my initial suspicions largely proved to be unfounded. Over eighty percent of students responded with “B” or “C”, while nearly all the rest chose “A” (one student clicked on “D” — the same student who wrote me the email).
After what I perceived as a near miss, I vowed to conduct these types of surveys more often. But maybe with the wording of the questions softened a bit so I don’t tempt fate.
Wednesday.
One minute from the start of my first class of the day, I stare at my screen and wonder: Will anyone show up?
Will I hear the distinctive low-frequency chime of Google Meet, signaling the entry of a student into the class period’s Meet room? Or will all be silent, save for the sound of my own labored breathing through the microphone?
Absences, and ways to discourage them, have always been at the forefront of my mind. Certainly, before the pandemic, if a student was chronically absent from my class, I would have not been surprised to find that the student’s grades were not good. Believing the bedrock of success in school to be showing up, I would have — and did — smugly offer chronic offenders the following prescription for doing well in my class: “It has been said that eighty percent of success in life is showing up. There is undoubtedly a strong negative correlation between your attendance and your grades. So, show up to class!” I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve said variations of those lines to teenagers.
But, among other things, this year has poked holes into some of my well-held assumptions. If a motivated student has complete access to all of the course materials — in the form of curated instructional videos, guided notes, and the like — then regular classroom attendance might not necessarily be of a net benefit. This is especially true with an online classroom, where “interactions,” such as they are, transpire entirely through a screen. How much will a student get out of an online class simply by being present and accounted for? Perhaps not much at all.
Five minutes before a class period is scheduled to begin, I log on to Google Meet to prepare.
I create and join an appropriately named room, present my screen, and open up a document that greets students as they enter:
WELCOME TO PERIOD [X]
MUTE YOUR SOUND; TURN YOUR VIDEO ON
TYPE YOUR FULL NAME (LAST, FIRST) INTO THE CHAT AND PRESS ENTER
The middle directive, to “turn your video on,” has proven difficult to enforce. Students offer a variety of reasons why they leave their video feed off: their camera isn’t working; their internet is slow; they don’t feel comfortable with it on. Sometimes, students will turn their cameras on but point them up toward the ceiling, still leaving me unable to see them (their avatar images might as well be photos of their ceilings). Administration has expressed a deep reluctance to get involved, so I can’t necessarily expect their support if I write up a student for failing to turn a camera on. Yet, simultaneously, the stated expectation for teachers is that their students’ faces should be visible on-screen at all times during a class period. If they’re not, and an administrator pops into the classroom, then that teacher will likely be cited. It’s an untenable position.
The last directive plastered to the screen when students enter — for them to type in their name s— functions as a rudimentary means of taking attendance. But without repeated check-ins during a class period, there’s not much to stop a student from typing the “full name,” turning off the camera, and then wandering off to do something else. The whole experience of teaching online simply doesn’t offer the immediacy of feedback that an in-person classroom does; after all, it is unlikely that a student could simply walk out of one of my brick-and-mortar classes without me noticing.
Several minutes into the class period, I’ll post an icebreaker question using the Google Meet Polls feature. Today’s question:
In 500 years, which of the following will be considered the most significant event?
A. Development of the atomic bomb
B. Landing human beings on the moon
C. Creation of the internet
The overwhelming majority of students unsurprisingly answered with choice “C”, the creation of the internet. A few selected “B”, but no one dared to answer with “A”. War is not fashionable among the young.
When describing the experience of teaching online, one of my colleagues put it this way: “It’s like I’m teaching into the void. I’m staring into a webcam, and I’m never really sure if anyone’s looking back.”
Precisely: there’s a disassociated, disconnected feeling that attends to the whole enterprise. As I teach into the void, with little in the way of real-time feedback, are my students only hearing me say, “<Wah>, <wah>, <wah>, <wah>”? If so, the prescription for student success in an online class extends far beyond merely paying attention to the teacher.
The notion of “teaching into the void” brings to mind another telling reference, this time from the mind of cartoonist Bud Blake. In his comic strip Tiger, centered on the adventures of a group of kids, one panel features the character Punkinhead excitedly telling his older brother Tiger about how he trained Stripe, Tiger’s mutt. “I taught stripe how to whistle,” he says. But Tiger isn’t buying it: “I don’t hear him whistling,” he replies. Punkinhead explains, “I said I taught him. I didn’t say he learned it.”
Just because we’re teaching into the void doesn’t mean that our students are receiving the signal.
Thursday.
It’s admittedly quite frustrating to look at my Canvas feed — the list of assignments under the “To Do” panel that I have yet to grade — and see student submissions trickling in hours, days, or even weeks past the due dates.
But the problem is intractable; there’s really nothing I can do about it. (Yes, I know that I could set assignments to be locked past their due dates, so that no additional submissions would be accepted by Canvas, but then students would bombard my school email account with their late work instead.)
Do I have an antediluvian understanding of student accountability? Shouldn’t I expect students to turn in their work on time?
The forced acceptance of late work, without strings attached, is perhaps the most significant erosion of my authority this school year; once the district swung to online instruction, the policy in our faculty handbook was changed to read as follows:
During the district’s temporary period of distance learning, teachers shall accept work and other assignments (including assessments such as quizzes and tests and the equivalent) from students at any time past the teacher-provided due date, with no penalties assessed on students’ grades in any way or for any reason. This policy will be reassessed at the resumption of in-person schooling.
The motivation behind the (presumably) temporary policy change is a good one: since not all students have uninterrupted access to the internet or other required technologies (but students are supposed to be in possession of district-issued Chromebooks), we must, as a school district, make allowances for the purposes of equity.
In practice, however, I have to rely on the good-faith efforts of students to turn in their work on time, since I have no other obvious recourse. For instance, I assigned a quiz for students to complete last weekend. Around eighty-five percent of my students submitted the assignment. But that fifteen percent who didn’t put me in a bind: while I wanted to review the answers to the quiz in class this week, if I do then I’ve just supplied those who didn’t turn in the assignment with the correct answers — and now those students can submit their work, without a late penalty, and earn a perfect score. How is this fair to those who were diligent and submitted on time? On the other hand, am I serving the needs of the diligent students if I don’t review the answers? Plus, if I do review the quiz, at least some of the diligent will take notice and come to an inescapable conclusion: “I can drastically reduce my workload as well as increase my grade if I don’t turn in the assignments on time, since he goes over the answers to everything anyway.” Thus, a moral hazard is introduced into my classroom, to the long-term educational benefit of precisely no one — unless the learning objective was to “Discover ways to effectively play the system.”
A possible way out of this catch-22 is as follows. For every assignment, a roughly parallel assignment could be fashioned, assigned to those who didn’t turn in the work on time. (I wouldn’t dare make the parallel assignment more difficult to complete than the original, since that would be, in effect, assessing a penalty on students who might already be disadvantaged.) But not only would the creation of these alternative assignments increase my workload considerably, pushing out these parallel assignments to only those students who failed to respect due dates would be a tedious, manual task on a learning management system like Canvas. There are only so many hours in the day.
Another possible solution might be to award extra credit on assignments that are turned in on time. However, an ethical dilemma arises here. What if a student was unable to turn in the work because of legitimate accessibility issues, in the form of internet connectivity or other family members requiring use of the technology? Why should that student be deprived of the reward that others — those who perhaps come from families with additional advantages — are able to earn more easily? Viewed in this way, extra credit, or lack thereof, is still assessing a penalty on late work, albeit by other means. Thus, rewarding students with extra credit, under certain circumstances, is discriminatory, if not in intent than in effect.
Friday.
My classes will spend time today working in groups, as they did on Wednesday.
(To clarify: the same class periods are scheduled on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and on Wednesdays and Fridays. When all classes on Tuesday and Wednesday have run, students and teachers have cycled through a full eight-period school day; the same holds true for Thursday and Friday.)
In the traditional classroom setting, I often assigned group work, sometimes to good effect. Not a strategy to be overused, even the most shy students are less reticent to participate and interject in small groups than they might be in larger, full class settings. (In general, it should be noted, students seem braver behind a computer screen than they are in real life; recall the email response I received earlier in the week from the disgruntled student. Such bravery cuts both ways: more willingness to participate, true, but also a higher likelihood to engage in dissent or disruptive behavior because the threshold for speaking out or vocalizing, whether it be via text or audio, is much lower in an online environment.)
Google Meet offers a breakout-rooms feature (as does Zoom), permitting teachers the flexibility to assign students to private rooms or randomly assign them into roughly equal-sized groupings. Within each room, students can discuss the content questions posed, share their screens, and complete the work together.
Students need to click a button in order to enter to their assigned breakout rooms, which offers teachers an unintentional advantage to creating them: to see if all students are really paying rapt attention in class. So far this school year, I’ve had three instances of students remaining in the “main room” with me well after I pushed out the breakout room notifications, likely because these students weren’t even in front of their computers or, at the very least, weren’t paying attention to the classroom goings-on. Now, can Google Meet’s designers isolate and roll out that one ostensibly unintentional feature — “Click OK right now” — for teachers as a spot check? (No doubt Google is deluged daily with such requests for new features, all of which are touted to be “indispensable additions to the software.” But precious few of these proposed features, no matter their usefulness, will ever see the light of day.)
For all the brilliance of the software, these online breakout rooms are where good intentions bump up against the current limitations of technology. In a traditional classroom, when I arrange students into small groups I can monitor them all at once with a quick glance or two around the room — even if I’m in the middle of assisting a student.
But to monitor the breakout rooms of Google Meet, I have to join each room one by one — a process that is far from instantaneous — and I can only see what’s happening in, at most, one breakout room at a time. I’m leaving the vast majority of the class unattended and thus unsupervised, and in the process satisfying neither the spirit nor the letter of in loco parentis. (What if a student is bullied while I’m hopping from room to room? The buck stops with me, so I can certainly be called to the carpet for not monitoring and stopping the inappropriate behavior. Is the ever-looming threat of me popping into a breakout room enough to dissuade students from engaging in any funny business? Perhaps. Or perhaps not.) Our administration has encouraged us to build small-group interactions into most lessons, but they also expect us (and rightly so) to monitor all online interactions during live instruction. The technology, at it stands now, forces us to make a difficult choice.
I can almost hear the more technically savvy teachers reading this and immediately thinking, “There’s a solution for that! All you need to do is download <Wah>, set up an additional monitor by clicking on <Wah> and hooking up a <Wah>, and then if you drag <Wah> over to <Wah>, and make sure you also <Wah> the desktop, you’ll be able to see multiple rooms at the same time. Easy.” Yet the very fact that you need to build a virtual Rube Goldberg machine in order to more closely model real-life classroom groups underscores how (1) Even the most advanced technology involves tradeoffs, (2) Technology typically offers us a poor or at best limited simulacrum of dynamic human interactions, and (3) Software is not principally designed by the people most likely to use it, unless the software is made for the use of those who develop software.
As I was poised to close my laptop late Friday afternoon, exhausted from typing on the keyboard, repeatedly clicking the mouse, and staring at the screen, an email arrived from the superintendent.
I hope this message finds you well and your family safe. As we begin the second quarter of the school year, conversation and planning have already begun in earnest around a hybrid reopening. The transition to a hybrid return to school will require an “all hands on deck” approach by each of us. To that end, I’m asking that you offer your critical feedback by completing the attached survey.
It figures. Right when I’m finally gaining some traction and finding my groove with distance learning despite its many drawbacks, the rug’s about to get pulled out from underneath me — just like when Lucy pulls the football away from Charlie Brown.
So, forgive me for cutting this dispatch short — well, relatively speaking, of course. I have an important survey to fill out. The second great challenge of this unprecedented school year awaits.
