Since the schools began to close in March, we’ve provided hundreds of hours of assistance for education from home and online tutoring. We know this is new terrain for parents and teachers alike, and we wanted to share some helpful tips for teaching or tutoring remotely. All of these are designed to encourage student participation and apply to whole group lessons, one-on-one tutoring, and office hours.
In order to help students be more engaged, remember these dos and don’ts of education from home:
Do remind participants to put mute on during lecture
The first tip is tech related. Technology can be fickle, and you want to make sure you’re leveraging it in the best way possible to best support e-learning for your kids.
Even for adults, listening to someone’s background noise is extremely distracting. Create a class rule that participants must be muted during lecture unless you unmute them. Even better, you can mute participants yourself upon arrival and only unmute when you reach the discussion portion of your lesson.
Don’t talk too fast
Without the benefit of live student interaction, you may not be able to control your voice speed as easily as usual. It’s okay to slow down your speaking speed to the point that it feels awkwardly slow. This allows students to really be able to absorb the information and reduces the chances that they’ll get behind and then check out.
Make sure you pause frequently to check in with your students. Ask them for feedback, check for understanding, and conduct quick informal assessments to ensure they’re getting the information they need. This is especially true for online tutoring when students are already struggling with the content.
Do make use of breakout sessions, polls, and other features
This tip is for larger groups, and it’s a valuable one. Zoom has a ton of features to support e-learning for kids, from screen sharing to polls to a virtual ‘hand raise’ function. One of the best of these are breakout sessions — where you can split a larger class into small groups for a pre-set period of time. These groups can be randomly assigned, or you can manually assign people to groups.
By mixing up the teaching format between large group, small group, screen share, polls, and more, you allow students to stay engaged throughout the session.
Don’t forget to allow time for Q and A
Don’t just lecture and leave. Make sure you allow time to answer students’ questions, whether it’s in real time immediately after the lesson or during your office hours. Asking students “what questions do you have?” rather than “do you have any questions?” normalizes the process of asking questions and helps hesitant students get the clarification they need and gives you a sense of who may need more support through online tutoring. Allowing an opportunity for question and answer will increase student confidence and therefore increase engagement and participation during education from home.
You may consider stopping periodically throughout your lecture or lesson to answer questions, or divide students into breakout rooms to allow them time to work through their own questions or wonderings.
Do consider offering prizes or rewards
If you’re struggling with student participation, you may want to think about offering a prize or drawing a name out of a hat to reward students who arrive on time or consistently attend online tutoring or office hours. Make it random and rare, so students never know when it’s going to happen. This type of incentive can increase excitement level among students and make them want to show up.
Do remain flexible on this education from home adventure!
Teaching remotely has a constant learning curve, and that’s okay! As technology changes and students adapt to an online environment, the tools we have at our disposal change, too. But at the end of the day, quality education is still based on the same foundational principles. Your child’s critical thinking skills can continue to grow, even in a virtual environment. Keep our dos and don’ts of education from home in mind and you should see an increase in student participation!
