When you left your physical classrooms in March, you lost an environment you had built to work for you and your students. All the things you used to do to monitor students, facilitate learning, and respond in the moment had become second nature. Teaching remotely, you now have to relearn or create these systems anew. You can’t circulate around the room to check on students’ progress, rely on your document camera or Smart board, or tell students to refer to the anchor chart on the wall.
Of course you continue to plan the WHAT of your remote lessons, but figuring out these new HOWS is all of a sudden a huge part of your planning (and likely one reason for your increased exhaustion).
Last week’s newsletter was all about asking ourselves WHY any particular content should be taught synchronously; it pushed you to think about TIMING, INSTRUCTIONAL PURPOSE, and PARTICIPATION. If you missed last week's edition, you can find it
HERE
.
This week we want to get more specific with
the HOW of synchronous learning
,
primarily through
examples of intentions that teachers had before the lesson and their reflections afterwards
. By reflecting on your synchronous lessons, you can slowly build up a set of strategies that will work better for you and your students in a virtual setting.