Teaching is hard in the best of times. It's not surprising then that many of us educators are struggling to finish out the school year, which necessitates balancing the demands of designing online learning environments (which, prior to March, few of us had any experience doing) with our own well being. I don't know about everyone else, but I am feeling more and more like Sisyphus with each day that passes. And, at the same time, I have also increasingly come to recognize the unique opportunity that comes with all this disruption. In moving my classes online, I've been forced to clarify what is essential to the student learning experience in my classroom, which in turn has opened up space for me to question past assumptions about what the classroom should (or shouldn't) look like. As I look ahead to a future where students and teachers can be together again in the same physical space, I am optimistic that this experience can help us all become even better teachers. To that end, I've decided to capture some of my own learning and experimentation with online teaching in writing, particularly now that I've started to find my feet in my own (virtual) classroom. On the off chance that these ideas prove useful to other educators trying to navigate this strange new world, even better. So here it goes. While taking Global Online Academy's course, "Designing for Online Learning," back in March, I was struck by the prospect of leveraging online learning platforms to give students greater agency with respect to their learning experience. Student choice can be an effective mechanism when it comes to cultivating and facilitating intrinsic motivation, so this seemed like something worth incorporating into my courses. Last week, I decided to offer a small, low-stakes opportunity for student agency in my senior elective, "Religion in America," where students explored the relationship between Mormonism, religious intolerance, and the First Amendment in the 19th century. The sequence is relatively simple: students began with a common background reading, from which they extrapolated key passages with respect to the framing reading questions. I've become a big fan of using Padlet as a tool to help capture this sort of thinking, which you can see in the image below (I would also add that my school uses Canvas as the primary learning software for our students): At this point, I gave students an option: rather than have them all read the same primary source, they could choose from a variety options based on their specific interests, which I organized into different pages based on topic. After they had a chance to explore these sources, I asked students to respond to a "Connect, Extend, Challenge" thinking prompt from Project Zero, which closed out this particular module. There isn't anything particularly revolutionary about this learning module (it's a bit like a loose Jigsaw, in that students explore different sources on a related theme and then come back together to share what they found). That said, the final Padlet discussion contained more nuance than prior learning sequences: students had an opportunity to educate each other, locate broader themes, and identify connections between their chosen sources. Needless to say, this is something I plan to fold into my courses more and more as the term goes on.
1 Comment
Lori V.
5/2/2020 06:07:01 am
Thanks for sharing, Kurt. I’m looking forward to your next post.
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AuthorKurt Prescott is a Humanities Instructor at Maret School in Washington, D.C. Archives
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