We all know it. The struggle to teach to different groups of students in our current hybrid situation. The factor I’ve struggled most with since our return to school is maintaining equity for all students, but especially the students remaining at home full-time.

With that in mind, I reflected over break about the reading experience in my junior English classes last semester. EdPuzzle enabled me to expand student knowledge about racial issues tied to American history that The Underground Railroad touches on in a way I hadn’t before. The leverage of engaging videos also enabled me to cover many more ideas in the curriculum that I wasn’t able to last year. Still, my ability to promote and hold students accountable to an authentic reading of The Underground Railroad wasn’t what I could do in person. 

Strategies, including team-reading discussion boards were not as effective. Despite posting an agenda and calendar throughout the unit on Schoology, many students simply admitted forgetting to do the discussion board. Many said they forgot about it because it “didn’t show up as an assignment” on Schoology. 

I also noticed that team-reading, small Socratic seminars were hit-and-miss as some students consistently read and many others clearly didn’t. This did happen prior to the Pandemic in my classes, but on a much smaller scale. While I was able to police these strategies and provide daily reminders in the classroom pre-Pandemic, these strategies were largely ineffective in our current situation. I don’t have the same immediate access to students and the ability for check-ins and conversations that students can’t avoid.

So, in preparing for the second semester I wanted to promote authentic reading and also create a new way to hold my students accountable. That has led me to returning to a couple of old-school approaches I haven’t used in my classes in quite some time.

Every time I teach The Great Gatsby I find a new piece of language or concept to analyze, or a student has a brand-new insight. It is the beauty of teaching this masterpiece. However, it also comes with a struggle for how best to teach it as it entails a text that can be difficult and ambiguous at times, especially for teenagers. 

The writer craft choices that F. Scott Fitzgerald makes are subtle.  It is this fact that enables him to characterize not only an infamous time in American history, but also the excess and decadence that an exclusive group had access to from family money or though the free market exploding with the Industrial Revolution.

I have always found that the “aha moments” for students require early modeling of characterization, for example, from the teacher with any novel, let alone The Great Gatsby. So, I focused many class sessions early in the unit on live reading of passages and my modeling and class discussion of characterization. Each class section authentically-genuine in its own way. Fitzgerald’s language, like that of plays, is best heard aloud.

However, I do not have all of my students in class at one time. So, I have decided to employ an audiobook of The Great Gatsby through EdPuzzle, with reading comprehension and thematic questions and historical information built into the audio. The goal is for students to read along with the novel while the strategic questions help prepare them for the small-group discussions and class activities that reinforce the reading and skills of the unit. 

Another added bonus about EdPuzzle is that it tracks the time a student spends on it. For me that is an beyond a bonus as it tells me how much time they are spending answering questions (if any) or if they are just listening to the audio to complete it. Not to mention it shows up as an assignment in Schoology, so no more it “didn’t show up as an assignment” excuses from students. 

The other reality is that kids can find plenty of sources online to cheat their way through the reading, whether in person or in our current hybrid model. So, I have also decided to give short reading quizzes in my classes for the first time in three years. The goal again is to hold students accountable to authentic reading and guidance I have set up through the audio and questions on EdPuzzle. 

Just before posting this blog, I received the following email from a student:

    I was wondering if the second chapter Edpuzzle would be available to be released this weekend if we are going to continue reading like that? I really enjoyed reading along with the audio. I think hearing the voice brings the characters to life and, in return, makes me more invested in the story. The questions were also helpful in making me think deeper about the text. I am excited to continue with the book.

I can only hope that this is the common experience in my classes, for now. I will report back at the end of the unit if this approach was effective overall.

Student Choice 

To help encourage engagement in the classroom and allow students to have options with assignments. This also provides a choice for the student to attend in person or not. 

Giving students meaningful choices with what they are working on can boost engagement and motivation. This allows students to choose something in their area of interest or strength and meet each individuals learning needs. 

In math it is sometimes hard to get students to connect with the material and relate it to themselves. I believe that if you bring creativity into the classroom students can bring in their own interests and connect it to the content. Over the semester we learned many different functions and how to graph them. In order to provide a learning environment where the students would have a more meaningful assignment I created an over arching project to bring in all the chapters we have learned so far. In the assignment students were to represent the parent graph of each function we discussed throughout the semester in some visual representation. I wanted to see that students could clearly graph and state each parent function. They could choose any way they wanted to demonstrate their understanding. I showed and example of my expectations of creativity and listed a few ways they could make something. From there it was up to them and I just awaited the results. I got an overwhelming amount of excitement and variability from the students, including drawings, videos, sketches, etc. Below you can find a couple examples.

There are many ways you can provide your students choice in the classroom. This can be; seating arrangements, group members, ways of being assessed, the problems they do on tests or homework, and more. However you are able to provide choice effectively it is such a powerful tool to foster student engagement.

 This year has been a year for new, big ideas – not because we have a lot of mental space, because we don’t, or a lot of extra time on our hands, because we definitely don’t, but rather because teaching has been SO different that we had to break all of our visions of what standard teaching is/should be in order to meet the new challenges.  I think this is something that, as a school, we’ve done creatively and admirably.  

In chemistry, we completely rearranged our curriculum path and started implementing new methods of communicating expectations to students.  We’ve been switching to a mix of projects and tests to work around potential issues of academic integrity and to create student choice and voice, have students start to make connections between our seemingly esoteric topics and real-world phenomena – all of which are great things, and nothing that we ever would have tried in the Beforetimes.  

But here’s where I echo something that Mitch commented on elsewhere – in redesigning our curriculum flow and creating all of these outlets for potential self-learning, what has to get cut?  How do we fit everything in?  And how do we make authentic learning connections in a time when it’s not feasible to do labs, due to the sheer fact that they can’t be within 6 feet of a lab partner?

As someone who lives through sheer curiosity about the world, it saddens me to think that I am potentially losing an entire year of students who might have loved chemistry if they had been able to experience the experimental side of things, which is where the science truly comes to life, transforming opaque, tedious concepts into windows into the magnificence of the construction of creation. Yes, we are doing virtual versions of the labs, we are doing self-guided exploration to engage student interest, but I can’t help but feel that there is something missing.

Here’s where I start wondering- are there enough students who are not necessarily ‘good at’ science, but who are consumed with curiosity about the world to create a club?  One where they can pursue their own scientific explorations (within reason), maybe work on community science to find their passion before it gets stultified by massive college lecture halls and terrifying college exams? I have this beautiful vision of some of my former chemistry students, especially the ones who didn’t think they were any good at science because they struggled with testing, discovering something that *did* excite them and made them realize that they could be a scientist if they wanted to. It also brings up ideas about sidestepping potential systemic issues that lead to minority students dropping out of science early, because this sort of exploration doesn’t have anything to do with testing or assignments, but is instead driven by passion and curiosity.  There are so many amazing possibilities that could come out of this…and yet.

Would we simply find the same issue there – the issue of time? Students are already massively overscheduled, even in this time, and between 3-4 clubs, 7 classes, leadership, Company, etc etc…where is there time to allow exploration and curiosity, even in a potential cohort situation? Just like we are crunched for time in the classroom, and we have to decide between more but shallower content or less but deeper or self-driven content, students must choose the smartest options for their limited free time…and is a freewheeling exploration of science going to make the cut?