Tuesday Teaching Tips:  Tips for Distance or Hybrid Learning

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Hello MCTM!  Welcome to a new monthly column.  Each month in this column, you will find some of the tips shared on Twitter and Facebook in response to our MCTM Tuesday Teaching Tips (#MCTMTTT).

Videos

What I have found is that kids need to hear my voice.  Even though I can find many quality videos for a lesson in an instant, the kids still prefer to hear me talk through it.  So if you are using videos, I highly recommend making your own.  I have used Screen CastOMatic to record me talking through pre-written notes from my Smart Notebook files.  I like using pre-written notes because it makes the video shorter.  I cover up pieces of information using white boxes and uncover one piece at a time.  That way, it isn’t too much information all at once, but still saves time.

Kristen Helland, Barnum Schools, Region 8 Director

 

Breakout Rooms

Kids need to talk to learn and they can’t talk, while they watch videos or listen in big google meets/zoom meetings. My grade alike planning partner, Mac Nies, and I teach 6th grade math at Sanford Middle School in Minneapolis.  We’ve been in DL since March.  We give them groupworthy problems, usually on a Jamboard, and set them loose to work & talk in breakout rooms for 15-20 minutes twice a week. It isn’t perfect, some of it is social and not everyone talks, but more do than anything else we’ve t

ried. Since we believe in group work at school, we believe in group work for DL too. The kids like it and need it for academic and SEL reasons. 

Tips:

  • We use group roles, keep groups mostly the same since early October, give community building questions, modeled good group work with teachers video clips, put all groups work in one jamboard to help monitor and let go of some of the supervising/worrying about each groups behavior.  
  • We use breakout rooms and group work twice a week, every week so kids have learned to expect it and adjust to it. 
  • We grade work based on communication on those days and not on correctness or work completion.  
  • While kids are working, we circulate through the rooms checking to see how things are going and looking for kids’ communication levels. 
  • We love the launch, explore, summary lesson structure and try to still use that with groups sharing out their strategies at the end of class with each other. 
  • We type names into the groups, while music is playing and kids work on a do now (sometime mathy, sometime social) at the start of class.  I have a printed list of the groups for each class so I can just read and type quickly.
  • We asked kids early on who they knew in class and made sure to put at least one person who they know, feel comfortable with in their group.   

We hope you will try breakout rooms too.   It’s tedious and clumsy at first.  But it gets easier.  Kids need that small group time to be with other kids in so many ways.  Don’t we all crave social interaction right now?  I give most of the credit for making this work to Mac Nies, my wonderful thought partner through all of this.

Here is an example of a problem that we used in breakout rooms with our students.

Libby O’Connell, Sanford Middle School

Desmos Check-Ins

I have been doing a weekly check-in with students using Desmos.  (Example linked here.)  This is the first thing we do each week in class.  I absolutely love that this allows me to connect with each student every week and gain some insight into what’s going on in their lives when we aren’t physically together.  Using the Lesson Feedback feature in Desmos, I am able to respond to what students write.  I have learned so many new things about my students through this that I think this is something I will continue doing even when we get back to being fully in person.

Greta Bergman, Royalton Schools, Region 7 Director