WRITING TO LEARN IN THE COVID CLASSROOM

Ryan Korstange & Zachary Nolan: Middle Tennessee State University

The COVID pandemic challenged the long-established norms of college teaching. One uncomfortable result of policies and practices undertaken to quell the spread of COVID-19 is broad-based isolation. To be sure, these policies are appropriate and important as we work together to quell the spread of COVID-19. At the same time, these policy decisions had a dramatic impact on instruction. The reality is that COVID mitigation policies serve to isolate students from each other, from faculty, and leave them tenuously connected to the institution. These changes have promoted innovation across the university – but certainly required a new approach to teaching and learning. The depersonalized lecture built on the assumption that learning only requires motivation and proximity to compelling new information is recognized as ineffective afresh. Engaging pedagogies are increasingly necessary – though engagement is itself challenging in the distanced COVID classroom where students are necessarily distanced, either chronologically (as in asynchronous instructional approaches), or spatially. Group work cannot take the same form, nor can think-pairshare and other quick formative activities that give the instructor vital information about what the students are learning or where they are struggling. As a result, new instructional approaches must be constructed.

Effective teaching requires more than simply transmitting information to students clearly and effectively; but requires that students be actively involved in their learning (for a summary of strategic teaching moves see McEwan, 2010). Of particular importance are discursive moves including inviting student participation, teacher revoicing, student revoicing, probing a student’s thinking, creating opportunities to engage with another’s reasoning and using wait time (Herbel-Eisenmann, Steel, & Cirillo, 2013). These moves create an intellectually and personally engaging space where students know they are valued, where they productively struggle with difficult information, and where they deeply learn.

Alone we can do so little; together we can do so much.

— Helen Keller

Collaborative writing provides a useful technique for engaging students in significant learning while respecting the social distancing standards teaching during COVID requires and is easily transferable to the post-pandemic instructional toolbox.

Two presuppositions undergird the instructional approach:

1. The primary task of the college classroom is for students to make meaning of the content presented to them. This requires them to think, reimagine, re-conceptualize, and interact with the material.

2. Students are intelligent and valuable and know a lot of valuable information. Beyond that, they are eager and capable of learning.

Here we describe three strategies that invite students to learn.

1: Whiteboard conversation starter

Students come to class with varied experiences, which makes the introduction of new concepts difficult. The result is that instructors create an arbitrary starting point, which often does not meet each student in a class where they are in their understanding. Google Jamboard (https://jamboard.google.com/) can be a great way to invite students to identify their starting presuppositions at the beginning of the conversation.

The setup is simple: Jamboard offers an easily editable whiteboard-type virtual platform. Students access Jamboard through a shared URL that can be opened on a computer, tablet, or cell phone. The platform can be used in several ways, as its architecture operates around the creation and organization of virtual post-it notes.

As a discussion starter, a Jamboard can be marshaled to allows students to anonymously declare their thoughts about any subject. For example, Figure 1 what students think contributes to learning. This material was used in a freshman seminar course to ground a conversation about what successful learning in college requires.

The net result is that discussion can begin from perspectives, vantage points, and experiences that students have. In this way, students are valued and heard.

2: Audience Polling as discussion Kickstarter

Discussions can also be kickstarted through the use of audience response software (e.g., Polleverywhere, Kahoot). These web-based resources operate using a different type of collaborative authorship, in which students are providing information by answering predetermined questions that do not always require that students write text. Consider the following questions about procrastination that were distributed at the beginning of a conversation about time management:

1. I believe procrastination should be avoided.

2. I procrastinated this week.

Several discursive questions follow from this data. For example, “Help me understand why 40% of students might feel neutral about procrastination.” Or, “Does it surprise you that 40% of students think that procrastination should be avoided?”

A follow-up question (Figure 3) personalizes student behavior and yields a whole different set of questions. Some questions compare the responses to the two questions, others dive into particulars of the responses on this question, like “who hasn’t procrastinated this week? what tips can you give us?” Or “what are the factors that lead to procrastination?”. In either case, beginning with student responses localizes the conversation. It grounds the topic in the student’s experience not in the generic student experience, in so doing this method provides an authentic mechanism for deeper conversation.

By getting information about the students’ experience of procrastination, a deeper conversation is possible. In part, pairing information about what students say that they believe about procrastination with their recent experience of procrastination can be marshaled to identify discontinuities between belief and experience, but also beneficial conversation arises around the amount of procrastination that students in the class have engaged in.

3: Student-generated presentation

Inviting the student’s perspective can also be facilitated through the use of collaboratively created presentations. Google Slides provides an ideal mechanism for distributing an empty presentation shell and for collaboratively authoring content for use in class. Moving from the presentation software from a mechanism for information dissemination to a venue for shared authorship requires a few alterations. First, a rough outline or template for work should be included because it focuses the student’s work on creating the necessary content and eliminates questions about the structure and form of the project itself. To this end, instructions for students’ work should be included early in the presentation; template slides should also be included.

An example will illustrate the concept. A google slides presentation shell can be given to the students containing each of these types of slides:

1. Instructions

2. Resources (Figure 4)

3. Blank slides to be filled in by individual students or groups (Figure 5 & Figure 6)

4. Analytical Slides to be completed during a whole class discussion (Figure 7 & Figure 8)

Instructions

Take 5 minutes to do quick internet-based research on the system. Answer these questions:

» What materials and setup does the system require?

» How does the system promise to improve your productivity?

» Provide examples of the system in practice?

Once given the slides, students complete their assigned work. The presentation they create becomes the fodder for subsequent conversation in class. The example slides provided here come from a class session devoted to research and analysis of various productivity systems (Korstange, 2018).

Once this presentation is completed by students, it becomes a record of the class conversation. It is, therefore, an emergent note-taking system while also creating conditions for class conversation.

The assignment is completed in phases:

» The slides contain hyperlinks to resources – these links have been lost in the formatting, which is fine, but indicating that they are hyperlinked would be helpfuls (Figure 4).

» Next, they summarize what they think is essential to the setup of the system (Figure 5) and provide some articulation of the promised benefits of the productivity method (Figure 6).

After students have filled out their assigned slides, the next stage is to display the completed presentation to the class (shared screen in video conferencing platforms, or via a projector in face-to-face classes). At this phase, the remainder of the dialogical moves described above are employed:

» Students present their findings, and the teacher revoices or restates their observations, asking probing questions where appropriate. The goal in this phase of the discussion is to ensure that the students are on the same page and have some rudimentary understanding of the system being discussed.

» The discussion is deepened by inviting other students, who were not in the group initially tasked with understanding the system, to revoice and explain what they understand the system to be doing.

» Undoubtedly, students will both get things right and demonstrate misunderstanding, which can be corrected through further conversation. Wherever possible, students should be put into the conversation with other students. Phrases like, “that’s an interesting point student A, Student B, does that match your understanding?” or “Student B, what is student A leaving out or missing in their description?” will be common.

» Finally, after the discursive phase, students are in a position to complete analysis, both of the individual content pieces (Figure 7) and the overarching topic of discussion as a whole (Figure 8).

The last point is about the wait time. Student meaning-making will take time. The questions that both undergird the construction of the lesson and those that come up in the discursive phase will be novel questions that require student thought. Silence does not mean that the lesson has failed, or that the question was misunderstood. Rather, silence may indicate students are thinking about new aspects of the content.

Benefits of Collaborative Authorship

Why does this matter? Simply - students learn better when they are engaged (Michael, 2006). They know this, and so do we. Students are looking to be engaged. As a student, the most crucial factor that determines how much is gained from a class is the level of engagement. Continuous interaction between the instructor and classmates is especially important in the distanced learning environment where it can be difficult to maintain focus. Further, students participate in class more actively when the delivery of information takes the form of a conversation as opposed to a traditional lecture. Collaborative authorship strategies provide students with an opportunity to utilize their critical thinking skills, and to practice effective communication skills. Since thinking is a prerequisite for learning (Willingham, 2010), increasing the thinking that is done in class also increases the learning that happens in class.

A final consideration that distinguishes a successful class session is how the instructor incites the discussion. The instructor can randomly invite students to speak or allow them to voluntarily raise their hands (either physically or virtually). While some students prefer to volunteer simply because it makes them feel more in control of the engagement process, there are some advantages presented by the instructor directly engaging students. That creates accountability for the students. Knowing that any student could be called on at any point makes them more likely to pay attention to the discussion and less likely to walk away from the screen, or to disengage while in class. Furthermore, this method ensures that the opinions of all students are included in the dialogue (Sathy & Hogan, 2019). Establishing an expectation for thoughtful contribution early in the semester eases stress for students because they understand what is expected of them.

Conclusion

Learning is always challenging. It always requires that time and effort be spent on educationally significant tasks. At the same time, learning has become more challenging as a result of the restrictions adopted, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Classes function differently, and therefore they require a different set of practices for both instructors and students to maximize learning. Collaborative authorship serves as a vital foundation for effective learning because it centers the student’s experience in the classroom discussion. It demonstrates to each student that they matter, their opinions matter, and that they are more than just a number. Finally, collaborative authorship ensures that class sessions are more authentic.

REFERENCES

Herbel-Eisenmann, B. A., Steele, M. D., & Cirillo, M. (2013). (Developing) teacher discourse moves: A framework for professional development. Mathematics Teacher Educator, 1(2), 181-196. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5951/mathteaceduc.1.2.0181

Korstange, R. (2018). Building Personal Productivity in FYE Courses. E-Source for College Transitions, 15(2), 5-7. http://bit.ly/ESource1522

McEwan, E. K. (2010). The teaching moves of a strategic teacher. http://www.adlit.org/article/39993/

Michael, J. (2006). Where’s the evidence that active learning works? Advances in Physiology Education, 30(4), 159-167. https://doi.org/10.1152/advan.00053.2006

Sathy, V., & Hogan, K. (2019, July 22). How to make your teaching more inclusive. The Chronicle for Higher Education. https://www.chronicle.com/article/how-to-make-your-teaching-moreinclusive/

Willingham, D. T. (2010). Why Don’t Students Like School?: A Cognitive Scientist Answers Questions About How the Mind Works and What It Means for Your Classroom. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.