Humanising Online Teaching
While encouraging students to develop self-reliance and cut down on dependencies, the popular lesson framework can help keep remote teaching only manageable.
Remote Teaching-The Existing Dilemma:
Teachers all around the World infer: Planning (and implementing) for distance learning is taking longer than it does to plan for in-person learning. In reality, it doesn’t have to be.
Is one of the reasons why distance teaching was challenging and unsustainable for so many educators was outdated pedagogies?
Pedagogies often engender paternalism in teachers, subtly encouraging to hover over students and micromanage their every decision, in an effort to guarantee success every second..A mere worksheet-driven pedagogies and rote memorization have always been hard to facilitate in-person, and they are proving even harder to facilitate through distance learning.
We must accept that this isn’t what good teaching is. Good teaching entails helping students learn how to learn, building their stamina for their own independence, and otherwise humanizing the experience of learning—putting their humanity front and center.
Distance Learning can be made sustainable, by making simple changes in pedagogy, grounded in the adoption of the workshop model, which can reduce unnecessary work. Whether in person or through digital means, Teachers should be far enough away to build independence in their students but within arm’s reach when they need a helping hand.
What’s the Workshop Model:
The workshop model (commonly used in Lucy Calkins’s Reading and Writing Workshop) is an instructional practice that consists of three parts: a mini-lesson, a workshop, and a debrief.
The workshop model is one way to teach from a healthy distance while building students’ independence.
The goal of the model is to support learners in reading and writing independently.
a). The mini-lesson:
Teachers model a skill, strategy, or step of a project. The key to an effective mini-lesson is brevity, but that doesn’t have to mean direct instruction.
While some lessons may necessitate direct instruction, erring on the side of open-ended mini-lessons are suggestible as they introduce and encourage flexible strategies or thinking routines that students can use on their own during independent work or small-group time.
b). The Workshop:
Students work on their own or in small groups.
During distance learning, teachers must make space for small-group learning—offering students much-needed socialization—but small-group learning offers opportunities for individualized feedback and the facilitation of learning conversations between students.
The challenges of distance learning also mean that teachers must increase students’ independent time, else, they’ll end up staring at their screens, listening to whole-group lectures for hours on end.
Independent work cuts down on this passive screen time while building students’ self-reliance.
c). The Debrief:
Students come back together as a whole group for a reflection or debrief. They may share samples of their work from small groups or independent work, or share successes and challenges.
Asking Students sometimes for feedback enables teachers to understand what worked and what didn’t work from the day’s lesson. It is important for students to know that teachers are aware of elearning and how to teach from a distance, too, and that their feedback would help to improve and learn how to do remote teaching even better.
This moment of distance learning as an opportunity to innovate, may end up radically changing our pedagogy for the better. Let’s explore.
Using the workshop model, Teachers can continue teaching with student independence as an input to educational equity and student liberation, which further necessitates more than a change in pedagogy—it requires teachers to reposition themselves in their classrooms as guides for students, as opposed to lecturers.
This pandemic has already created a lot of pressure on the teachers. In order to lessen a teacher’s workload without compromising on learning is important. This is where mPowerO not only helps the teachers to manage all the course content in a single place but also helps the teachers to focus more on teaching than battling technology issues.
At mPowerO, We understand and realize the following:
a). That teachers are central to driving learning and giving superior learning outcomes for various schools and institutions. Therefore, we have curated a unified e-Learning and management solution that would benefit the teachers in every sphere.
b). Edtech assists teachers in the following two ways:
- by enhancing what they do now, and
- by expanding what they’re able to do
mPowerO is the best solution for teachers – as mPowerO platform has been developed by educators, for educators, addressing e-learning, communication and engagement functions in a highly secure manner, regardless of the frameworks and models that keep evolving from time-to-time, with the Human factor involved.
The purpose of this article is to showcase that the team of experts at mPowerO are always on the lookout for providing the fraternity with best practices and pave a progressive way to be on par with the technological advancements.
In order to understand our e-Learning and management solution better, contact us for a follow-up meeting and/or demo session. At mPowerO, we help our clients maximize on eLearning capabilities to effectively reach their educational and business goals with fully-managed support.
If you would like to understand how we can help you get started with digital learning mail us at info@mpowero.com
Visit us at https://www.mpowero.com/ for more information.
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