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Online learning is brand new- for teachers and for students. That means figuring out and communicating consistent expectations for how things are work. The more transparent we can be the better.

That’s why we love this video produced by teachers at Kea’au Elementary School in Keaau, Hawaii.

It’s fun and playful but it makes it really clear to students what the school’s shared expectations are for online classes. It shows great work envisioning–you can imagine the meeting where teachers brainstormed all the most important things that could (and probably had) gone wrong with online instruction in the Spring.

Now here they were heading those things off the the Fall.

It’s also an interesting video because it’s probably as helpful to parents as it is to students.

It’s also an exemplary case study in coordination.

If the expectations are the same in every room in the school, students benefit–consistency and predictability let young people focus on learning more important things.

Great job Kea’au Elementary!

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Good online instruction will probably always involve a combination of synchronous and asynchronous methods. After all they have different strengths and limitations. Synchronous instruction allows us to connect with students and build relationships. And it lets us understand and support their learning in real time. But asynchronous instruction deals better with technology problems: it resists glitchy internet access. Because you can watch any time it’s helpful when you’ve got a household with one laptop and three kids trying to use it.

So what’s the key to effective asynchronous lessons? You can see one of the big ones in action in the first seconds of this lesson by Joshua Humphrey:

Thirty seconds into the video he’s signaling that asynchronous lessons are an active experience for students. Pause this video and complete your DO Now. Students–no, people, assume that video equals passive content. You press play and then it washes over you. You have no agency. Joshua’s message is: you will engage with this video. You control it.

You can see that theme expressed here too, in a different way:

In this video Chloe Hykin reminds her students that if they are struggling they are in charge. They might re-watch an explanation or–as she suggests here–watch a special video designed to give a more in depth explanation to those who find it tricky. Over and over she reminds students: you own this. You have control.

In this video Denise Karratti makes that process even more explicit.

This is a beginning of the year video and making an “introduce yourself to the class�� video. But at the end you can see she’s also building the mindset among students: be an active not a passive consumer of all the videos this year. If you feel information overload go back and re-watch.

This in fact is one of the few small silver linings of online teaching. It’s often easier to go back and review–or skip ahead to more advanced work–than it might be in a typical classroom.

The theme here is agency. You own this video. You must watch it in the way that supports your own learning. There are in fact, dozens of ways you could encourage students to exert agency. This slide shows you a few examples of how that might sound.

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I’m happy to say we’re still tracking for a December release for my book for sports coaches, The Coach’s Guide to Teaching. I’m trying to post some excerpts here. Though most of the book focuses on what we can do during training and practice to accelerate learning, in Chapter 6 I try to reflect on two of the most common challenges of coaching during games/matches.

This book is almost entirely about what is to me the most important part of a coach’s job: how he or she teaches in training sessions and practices. But athletes are learning and coaches are guiding them during competition as well. In this section I will offer some reflections on how coaches might think about interactions during competition from a learning point of view. That said, if most of this book comes with the caveat that some of what I have to offer must surely be wrong, this section gets a double dose of that disclaimer. Here, especially, I speak from a lack of experience. That said I hope to offer a few breadcrumbs.

The first thing to consider is that it is very difficult to teach anything new during competition, and efforts to do so will probably detract from performance. Why do I say that? Because consciously learning something new requires the engagement of working memory which as you have probably already recognized, is problematic. The capacity of working memory is severely limited.  If I what I am explaining to players requires it, I am diverting some of its capacity from performance tasks demanded by the match.

If I ask players to do something we have discussed and rehearsed in training, however, they may be able to manage the load on their working memory. Especially if I cue them with words I carefully encoded as part of practice. Saying “Higher, Jordan. Press high,�� is viable if we spent time in training studying how to press and what I mean when I say ‘press high�� is absolutely clear and she can process it nearly automatically. Then I am mostly reminding Jordan of what she already knows.

It’s hard to over-emphasize the importance of language. The more familiar a cue, the more consistently associated with an action, the more likely players are to be able to use it. If you want to say it in the game, make sure your players have heard it over and over and over in training and that they’ve heard it used precisely and well.

So if she’s heard your words frequently and associates them with a consistent response, Jordan may be able to use your feedback during the game, but if you have not taught pressing in training and familiarized Jordan with the terminology you use, one of two things will happen.

1) Jordan will begin using her working memory to think about pressing and how to do it. This will degrade her perception and reduce her ability to execute. She likely won’t press well and there’s a good chance other aspects of her performance will suffer as well. If you respond by giving her further directions–“Higher, Jordan. Anticipate the ball. See if you can jump the pass. Read the pass, Jordan“–there’s a good chance you will make the situation even worse.

2) Jordan may also realize what is happening-that she is struggling at trying to do something she doesn’t really know how to do and that it is distracting her from something important to her: the game. In that case, there’s a good chance she will choose to ignore you instead. This will establish a precedent for her of ignoring what you say during competition (or more generally). It will probably effect her level of frustration, and possibly her relationship with you as well.

So a good rule of thumb is: during games you can occasionally remind players of what you are sure they already know using language they are familiar with.

That said, if a player is trying to distribute the ball and you shout “wide, Carlos, wide�� in the half-second before he strikes the ball, the chances of a poor play are higher, even if Carlos knows what you mean by ‘wide.�� Talking to players about what they are doing in the moment they are trying to do it is asking them to multitask and many cognitive psychologists, it is worth noting, would say there is no such thing as multi-tasking, only distraction and reduced concentration. It will almost never help Carlos, or the team and will often harm performance. It also increases the likelihood that Carlos will strive to ignore you so that you don’t disrupt his performance. So coach during live play sparingly and strive to give guidance only at breaks in play.

In chapter 4 I talked about the importance of taking notes during training exercises. It’s also important during games. What you see during the game you will soon forget unless you record it. If you take notes, you’ll have data to keep you focused on the most important things when you talk to players at half time or time outs. But there’s another reason to take notes during the match. It can help keep you from over-talking. If you have no other way to keep track of the fact that Jordan is slow to press, you will be more likely to shout it at Jordan in the moment. After all, that’s the only channel for your game observations to get back to players. But taking notes��Jordan slow to press. Doesn’t recognize slow pass is a cue. 3x.��gives permanence to the observations. You know you won’t lose them if you wait to talk to Jordan about it so you’ll feel more in control and won’t have to shout.

The tendency of competition to make us more likely to shout or lose control of our tone of voice is another reason to try to coach only (or at least mostly) at breaks when we’re likely to be a little calmer. The emotion–and often judgment–communicated by the sorts of strident directions required to communicate during live play��Jordan! Press! JORDAN! Press!!—encourages athletes to wonder: Why is she blaming me? All of this reduces players�� from focus on and presence in the moment. Calmer delivery of technical guidance is usually better and that tends to happen when players have at least half a second to listen.

What about other opportunities to teach during competition? One of my favorite teaching moves used by the many fine coaches my children had growing up was one used by a youth soccer coach name Khris Clemons. When a player made a mistake instead of trying to tell him while he was playing (distraction) and shouting at him (more distraction; emotion), Khris would take him out of the game very briefly, stand next to him on the sideline, usually with his hand on his shoulder in a fatherly way, and quietly explain the correct action. Then he would immediately put the player back in.  Obviously, you can’t do that at every level—it requires unlimited substitutions—but it was a thing of beauty. The message very clearly was I will teach you. I still believe in you. I want you to listen and learn but I’m not going to bench you for mistakes. Not coincidentally there were immense relationship benefits to this approach.

Half time and after the game are
the two other times often put in the service of teaching on match day. What
about them?

After a game emotions are likely to be raw—yours and theirs—which means more opportunity to respond unwisely, half-baked, without getting your ego in check because you lost to a team you wanted to beat and therefore not hastily blame the players for ‘not wanting it bad enough.�� A lot of post-game talks start with good intentions but—since they are rarely planned—can veer quickly into ‘let’s establish who is to blame.�� Establishing blame is rarely the basis of a productive public conversation. So maybe just skip it. Veering off topic–to whatever triggers you emotionally or talking a lot seems to express the idea that this game was important—is a result of lack of clarity about what you want to say before you start, so why not take 20 seconds to plan? In your phone or on a note card, jot down two or three most important things to say. Glance down at your notes to keep on task.

One NBA franchise has a simple system for this at both its pro and developmental league teams. The players go into the locker room after the game and the coaches into an adjacent room where they debrief in a way that first lets them vocalize what they’re dying to say but perhaps shouldn’t. e.g. “Can you believe Smith? Does he even understand the defense?”�� Then the head coach says some version of, “Okay, what’s our message in there?�� All of the coaches share ideas but they choose one or perhaps two that everyone thinks are most worthwhile. Then they walk in the next room, deliver their shared message collectively in about a minute and that’s that. No around the horn: “Coach Wilson, anything else?”��

Given the chance to think it through together the coaches almost always highlight process and mindset.  “We lost focus after halftime, but our fight was much better in the fourth quarter, you wanted it more than them, that’s why we pulled it out.�� Or “We did the little things today, diving for loose balls, boxing out the shooter after free throws, winning habits.��  The process lets coaches put a check on one another, keeps the message less personal—it’s from the staff—and gives assistant coaches a voice. And of course it ensures that everyone focuses on the main idea.

Another theme of this book: We often assume, falsely, that volume of words and importance of topic are correlated. If we think something is important we often try to signal that by talking about it a lot. Again, this correlation is false. We want people to listen well. We want our words to be memorable and actionable, to expresses importance. Not only are those purposes not necessarily brought about through quantity of verbiage, but they often operate in conflict with it. I talk more and you remember each sentence a little less. I talk more and you start to think, you already told us that; I heard you. I talk more and your attention wanders to the play you can’t stop thinking about or the drive home and where you can get something to eat.

This is important because a lot of the talking coaches do after a match is talking done to express the idea that this game and its lessons were important. Frustrating tie=long talk. Big loss=longer talk. Often in those cases the more we talk the more their eyes glaze over- and therefore just maybe the more we talk because their eyes are glazing over which suggests that they do not understand how important this game and its lessons were. Cue more talking to reinforce that idea that this game was important. Five minutes later athletes have begun practicing ignoring us. It’s a downward spiral.

If there’s a lot to say it’s worth
thinking about alternatives to post game talks. There could be a post game
question: What did you take from today’s game? But rather than asking rhetorically
in the moment and having the words fall on the group like a smothering blanket,
why not say: Please text me your thoughts by tomorrow morning. Or: Please
text me one thing you can do more of to make your teammates better. Or: I
have texted you all two key lines from our principles of play document. Can you
each take a minute to tell me one moment in which you think we did each of
theses well and each of these poorly. Or perhaps practice Tuesday starts
with: “I asked you all to think about X. Let me hear some of your thoughts
�ԴǷ�…���

Or perhaps you want to be more
systematic about it. Maybe you want your players to keep journals in which they
reflect briefly after every game and which you can occasionally collect and
discuss. Or maybe the journals are just for them. Yaya Toure famously kept such
a notebook throughout his career;
it became a part of him and his life in the game.

Video review might also work.
Especially if you want to review critical moments such as the goal #12 scored
in which no one marked her. Much more effective to present tape of the few
seconds before her goal in moments of calm at the next practice, say, than to
ask the team to try to remember how she got so open in the moments after the
game.

It’s worth reviewing here some of the key elements that make feedback effective: it works best when it’s close to the antecedent, when it’s focused on one or two things only, when recipients can see what we’re talking about, and when people get the chance to use it right away. For the most part none of those things are easily accomplished after a game. The failure of the midfield to mark #12 is now long in the past. No one really remembers it- certainly not objectively. There’s no chance to try the guidance of scanning to make sure you see her movements. Players are in their own emotional space. They may not even want to think about #12 and the goal she scored until they’ve processed something else. In light of that, a good rule of thumb is that the longer post game talks go on worse they get. At the youth level at least, my suggestion would be: Steady players emotions. Offer one or two insights for reflection. Give them a question to respond to or a topic to reflect on before practice. Stop talking. Three minutes max.

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Just wanted to take a minute to share some fantastic video of Susie Kim’s 7th grade Social Studies class at Achievement First’s East New York Middle School. It’s a great example of a lot of good teaching things, not least strong Ratio and Checking for Understanding

Susie and her students are reading a passage from teaching Upton Sinclair’s the Jungle (1906) to study reforms in labor and public health brought about by early ‘muckraker�� journalists. If you haven’t read it, it’s a complex text using language that is archaic to many modern readers- a tough read, and as you’ll see, Susie’s students struggle. They get the gist; they miss the key moment.

The clip opens as Susie asks her students to read a particularly important section on their own. Then she asks them to write a response re. how Sinclair’s word choice and imagery impact the reader. This causes everyone to answer a challenging question in writing. They have to craft a careful response. They’re required to engage. First they write it in their own personal google sheet where they take notes and which Susie can collect Then she asks them to paste it into a separate classroom thread that allows Susie to see everyone’s work in one place to assess and potentially to share��

Which she does. And as she shares, we, like her students, can read everyone else’s work and study it. We see there are some good ideas but they’re incomplete. And there are some very specific misunderstandings. As a result Susie takes her students back to the text. They re-read. Her Cold Call of Darius makes it clear that students got the gist of the passage but missed the most important part. Angel does a beautiful job of explaining what they missed.

Making writing visible has not only helped students learn from each other it’s helped her Check for Understanding

Notice how critical–and priceless!–their facial reactions are when they figure out what becomes of the fertilizer men! Amazing to see how critical to understanding students�� experience the expectation of ‘face visible/camera on�� is. Without it this lesson just doesn’t come to life.

Now that students understand the text, the work is not done though. Susie wants her students to think deeply about what this means and how readers might have reacted so she sends them to breakout rooms to process.

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Last week of Denise Karratti, a middle school math teacher from Hawaii teaching her kiddos remotely back in May.

Here procedures and routines and her culture were fantastic.

Today I thought I’d take a more careful look at how she starts her lesson because it’s a really nice case study. So having taken her first few minutes and edited them down a little to make everything more visible, I wanted to share some notes:

At the outset we see her warm welcome greeting of students, making them feel seen.

at :10 class starts and she’s got her orientation screen up. This tells students what they need and how to be successful in her session and shows that she’s prepared ready herself.

:42 she frames expectations. Love that she reinforces for students how to ask questions in chat or email. Love her clarity and simplicity in asking what is maybe the single most important expectation in online learning: camera on and face visible. You cannot connect with students or fully understand their learning experience if you can’t see them.

At 1:12 she’s off and running. Admittedly I made some small edits for simplicity’s sake so it might have taken 20 more seconds in real life but the idea is still clear. 1) She gets going right away. She’s warm and gracious but it’s also school and she’s reminding her students of that in the way she honors time. 2) THEY get going right away. They’re asked to do something active–that she can see whether they’ve competed–within the first minute or two. Message: this will be a fun lesson but this will be an active lesson. You will be doing things and attentiveness will be required.

Again we see her do a beautiful job of installing and reinforcing one of her systems for using the chat: In this case waiting to answer til everyone has thought through the question- a “Wait Question.��

Students affirm her directions with thumbs up. Thus she constantly reconnects the circuit with them and assures that they’re listening and not off in some corner of the internet. She can only do this if cameras are on.

One of the best things about the Chat is that students potentially get to see and learn from one another’s thinking. Denise makes this explicit by telling them what to do after they’ve answered: to read their peers responses and even better some of the things they might be looking for as they do so: “See if anyone write the same idea as you. See if there were other ideas that were shared that you forgot about.��

Then she does a beautiful job of carefully reading the chat and showing students how important their participation is to her.

And there you have it. We’re three or four minutes into the lesson and she’s connected with her students and gotten all of them actively engaged. It’s going to be a great class.

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Just sat in on a few minutes of our own Emily Badillo and Jen Rugani training teachers to use our new reading curriculum.

They were discussing the three types of prompts we use and how and why we balance them and shared this slide with examples from our unit of Brown Girl Dreaming.

The first prompt is formative. As the word might implies, you don’t have to know what you think before you start writing. There are, as Jen put it, ‘multiple entry points�� to the question and the point is to lower the stakes. to let writing be a vehicle by which students learn to think.

The second prompt is summative. It does ask students to have an opinion and to explain and defend it with evidence.

The third prompt is developmental. It’s designed to give students practice developing syntactic tools that will help them answer the above kinds of prompts better- in this case the goal is to build students ability to use subordination more fluidly but more broadly the goal is to both capture and develop their thinking more because their writing is capable of more.

But the point is that students need a balance of these. You end up writing a brilliant expression of your strongly held or insightful opinion in a summative prompt because you’ve wrestled at low stakes with lots of ideas in developmental prompts and because you’ve had lots of deliberate practice refining ideas in syntactic forms that expand your range.

Simple but critical. Not all writing is the same. Students need a healthy diet of all three.

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Recently I shared an online lesson template that Darryl Williams develop for schools. The idea was to build a model for what “typical�� online lessons looked like and that included a balance of activities to ensure student engagement and focus and a variety of modes of interaction.

We’ve since updated and simplified it slightly for clarity.

I’d also like to share a great video that I think shows how a teach uses several of these lesson elements successfully in a single lesson.

The teacher is Arianna Chopp. She teaches 6th grade English at in Los Angeles. She’s reading Eperanza Rising with her kiddos and you can see her use three of the four parts of the framework here.

Lesson Opening: Students write briefly about the main character, Esperanza, and how she’s dynamic. They follow up with a discussion. Then they read a section of the text aloud together. I shared a brief piece of that. Note that Arianna keeps the text visible.

Then students do Independent Work for 3 minutes answering a set of questions in more depth. Some students are able to go on to more advanced ‘starred�� questions. Cameras stay on so she can help and assist them.

Interestingly, Arianna then jumps to Flex Time from there. She commits a lot of time to it and it’s one of the best examples I’ve seen. Note that:

Some students have earned the right to log off and work on their own here!

Remaining students are split into two groups with a co-teacher so they can get more support and attention on their writing. They work independently and Arianna cycles through and simply reads students�� work and gives feedback.

If they are attentive and manage time they earn a nice break before the next class.

Arianna does such a great job of balancing the types of learning students do and the ways they interact while making sure everyone is focused involved and engaged. And she does an incredible job of differentiating for her students in terms of the support and autonomy they get. Great stuff!!

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My daughters just came downstairs giggling. My older daughter gently teasing my littlest for asking if her in a game what the ren-dezz-vuss (i.e. rendezvous) point would be. “No silly,�� said my elder. “Ron-day-voo.��

But as I told my littlest, she should be proud. The mispronunciation meant that she’d learned the word through reading- she’d never heard it pronounced but knew it from books.

In this case, ironically she had also learned the word “rendezvous�� through conversation�� she knows it when she hears it, she just doesn’t connect her reading-based word knowledge with her listening-based word knowledge because of the incongruity of pronunciation. Every once in a while you get parallel but disconnected word knowledge like this. (For me there was the word In-NOV-ative which i thought was a totally separate word from innovative.)

Which is why it’s a tiny but important reminder how important it is to teach students to pronounce new words as they encounter them in reading. To simply say, when we they come across a word, “that word is ‘ron-day-vous�� can be as important as the definition. (This by the way is yet another argument for students reading aloud.)

The story reveals that half of my my daughter’s interactions with the word, with it’s shades of meaning and applications, was disconnected from the other half. If at some point she’d have known how to say it she would have accelerated her learning about the word. Times ten in other cases because what kids often do when they don’t know a word is to skip over it. Once you can pronounce it, even if you’re hazy on meaning, you attend to the word and start learning.

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It’s a choice between bad and bad for schools: Do they go hybrid/in-person & risk spreading sickness or do they go online only & ensure devastating educational losses that will almost assuredly be deeply inequitable?

For those choosing the latter I want to offer two tiny observations about how this fall will be different from last Spring.

First, that what we did online last Spring was poor because we had not time to prepare or plan but it had one thing going for it: the relationships students and teachers had build for six or seven months of face-to-face instruction and thus relationships. This time around we won’t have that foundation. Finding efficient ways to establish & build relationships is critical.

But on the other hand it’s not April. Thirty kids in a classroom might be impossible, but face to face isn’t what it was at the height of the pandemic either. We all put our masks on now and go to the store. We didn’t do that in April. We’ve figured some things out.

I thought of that when I read a tweet by the economist Joshua Goodman a few days ago.

Goodman’s fifth grader has a point. It would make a huge difference for kids to meet their teacher in person�� once�� or a few times�� to start the year�� every couple of weeks��. and what’s remarkable about it is how doable it is. Simple in fact: It’s not April. We can mask up and meet people. Outdoors is very safe. Indoors can be done. It would be so easy to schedule occasional one-on-one get to know yous or meetings.

Imagine if we built them around books. Each 5th grade teacher–choosing at random because that’s Goodman’s child’s age–meets with each kid in her class. She says, “The first book we’re going to read together is X. What if we read the first chapter aloud to each other��.�� They read it and discussed. Having broken the ice they then chatted about other things�� favorite hobbies, that kind of thing�� maybe each kid leaves with a care package of a white board and a set of markers to make classwork more visible online.

If you wanted to go a step further the teacher could have book groups occasionally. Say it’s three kids and the teacher. Mostly we read aloud together and practice enjoying and sharing a great book. It’s easy for the teacher to prepare. It brings joy and connection to kids. Of course they could be optional for families that don’t want to take a risk–you could do an online version too–but the level of risk for a teacher would be very low and very manageable.

It’s not April, in other words, when every interaction in person was fraught. Even if we’re “Online�� there are things we can do.

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One of the best things about my team’s study of online learning techniques is that we get to ‘live the learning.�� As soon as we learn something we get to try it out in the workshops we do.

Here’s a tiny little example. We talk in all of our workshops about dissolving the screen–connecting with students and building relationships from afar. One of the most important tools we have to do that is maintaining and valuing facial contact. It’s important for us to see the students we teach so we can better understand their responses to the materials we teach. And it also helps keep them engaged.

But that can be challenging as a teacher because your slides are often up and on Zoom or a similar platform that means you can really only see three or four other students.

But we started to notice how some teachers when they went to discussion took their slides down very deliberately so they could see more faces during discussion. And of course not being expected to look at slides makes it easier for students to observe each other.

At a recent workshop, Erica put that into action with a little bit of meta and I thought I’d show you the video as she did such a nice job of it

You can see her set up her question, ask everyone to chat a response and review what their colleagues wrote and then, for the discussions she takes down the slide very deliberately (well, technically she asks me to do it since we were co-presenting). In fact she goes meta in a way you could just as easily go with students and with adults. Smiling warmly she says, “We’ve learned it’s beneficial to minimize the power point so you can have those face to face connections.��

And, really, even before Taylor kicks off the conversation it suddenly feels different. A tiny bit like we’re more connected. That we can all see each other is visual reminder that we’re transitioning to discussion.

Anyway, we’re calling this idea of taking down your slides temporarily to reinforce peer-to-peer listening and improve your ability to read participants�� reactions “Dissolve the Slide.�� Now that we’ve tried it out a few times we’re sure we really like it.

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