Two adages come to mind at this time of year when wintry weather continues with cold and flu season following suit:
- Under stress, we regress.
- When it rains, it pours.
Fortunately, there are some helpful routines we can establish in our classes that can increase student learning while reducing everyone’s stress.
Ask three before me. Although I first learned this as an elementary teacher, it has validity at all levels and works well online, too. Rather than setting yourself up to be overwhelmed with a barrage of student questions each time you give a new assignment or introduce new material, let students know that they need to ask three of their peers before coming to you. If you haven’t already, you may want to use Moodle to establish a student-driven forum for this to happen asynchronously. (Hint: You can set this forum as “Forced subscription” so that students will get a notification every time another student posts a question or response to the forum.)- Take five. It’s easy to lose the first five minutes of class while talking with individual students as they ask you questions on the way in. An effective way to make sure that every class minute is useful for all is to have a different volunteer arranged ahead of time to be responsible for the first five minutes. A few ideas for using this time to move learning forward and increase student engagement include students: sharing a connection they made with the material from the previous class, asking true or false questions about the readings as a review, or writing a prompt for reflection on the whiteboard for everyone to respond.
- Plan B. Even the best laid plans of mice and men can go astray, and having Plan B established with your class for common scenarios is important to communicate multiple times throughout the semester. Consider that even if you and your students each only have one unexpected missed class, it can actually result in a three week gap between classes! For yourself, one simple strategy to pull out of your back pocket in a time of need is to have a video title ready for students to view along with a few timeless critical thinking questions. For example, “How would the content you just viewed change if we were to record it in present day Traverse City?” Check out NMC’s video libraries or open source content such as MIT OpenCourseWare. Posting your content in Moodle is another strategy that can benefit both you and your students as you can easily notify them of any changes and make items available for them. For your students, make sure that you’ve discussed your expectations and communication plan in the case of your/their emergencies. Connecting them with other students in the class through active learning strategies is another way to help them help themselves by making sure they know people to call when they have an unexpected situation.
Resources for those who want to know more:
Phillips, W. and Chen, B. (2013). Three-before-me. In K. Thompson and B. Chen (Eds.), Teaching Online Pedagogical Repository. Orlando, FL: University of Central Florida Center for Distributed Learning. Retrieved November 14, 2013 from http://topr.online.ucf.edu/index.php?title=Three-before-me&oldid=2786