Concurrent Teaching and Learning

Concurrent Teaching and Learning

Mirrored. Hy-Flex. Concurrent. Whatever you call it, it is challenging to teach to a bunch of roomers and a few Zoomers. Having a live class and being responsive to the virtual learner at the same time is the call on teachers these days, and teachers are overcoming challenges to support all students.

I recently had the privilege of spending time teaching concurrently while also supporting teachers who were developing concurrent teaching practices. From this experience, I’d like to reflect on a recent piece by Catlin Tucker in ASCD entitled Navigating the Concurrent Classroom. Catlin Tucker is an expert in blended learning, and this article only scratches the surface of her wisdom on the subject, but it is timely and thought-provoking.

Ms. Tucker addresses four challenges of concurrent teaching and learning, and offers solutions that she has developed.

Challenge #1 Management issues and lost minutes

Challenge explained: Students need routines to feel safe and comfortable and to eliminate wasted time.

Solutions offered: Ms. Tucker suggests a welcome routine that can create relationships and gather data. Varying the welcoming routine keeps students interested. She also suggests a concluding task that allows for data collection and reflection to modify and improve future lessons.

My Take: Routines and consistency are highly valued to create both efficiency and safety in the classroom. I refer to this as Designing for Clarity. Designing for Clarity creates a safe environment where students can be authentic and feel they belong. To do this, having clear norms, routines, roles, values and instructions as well as an easily navigable LMS takes the unknown from the students and allows them to understand expectations and be their authentic selves. In order to design for clarity, anticipating the needs of students is important. Along with the clarity of routines, students want

·      To understand what they are supposed to do

·      To be able to ask questions and find resources in a consistent location

Designing for Clarity allows students to understand what they are supposed to do and where to go when they need support.

Challenge #2: Inequality of teacher attention

Challenge Explained: A natural product of having live students and virtual students, the live students can gain the attention of the teacher more easily with hands up and even non-verbal clues.

Solutions offered: Ms. Tucker offers two solutions. Her first solution is to have all students see support in a single way. She suggests an app like Remind or ClassroomQ. Her other solution is to make time to conference with individual students, both live and virtual, to assess progress and build rapport.

My Take: I like to say that a concurrent teacher is not teaching one class with two audiences, but two related classes and the needs of the students in each class will be different. The disconnection that is felt by Zoomers is real, and the good intention of a teacher to give equal attention is asking for superhuman focus if done without intentionality. It’s just too easy to react to the student in front of you rather than the one on the screen. Here are three easy solutions:

·      Chat moderators (Chat mods): If you have the students to do it, make them chat mods and ask them to monitor the virtual students for responses. It will alleviate the pressure on you and give a student an important job.

·      Clear and visual agenda: It is easy for virtual students to lose track of what is happening because they are missing a lot of context clues. Having an agenda for them to see and remembering to refer to it keeps students on track.

·      Conference Time: I agree with Ms. Tucker that making time for one-on-one conferences is a must. It could also be small groups that include all of the Zoomers, but there must be learning check-ins as well as social-emotional check-ins. Having asynchronous work or pre-recorded videos for other students during check-ins makes a lot of sense.

Challenge #3: Feeling torn and ineffective

Challenge Explained: Trying to keep students’ attention during whole group, teacher-led classes is more daunting than ever with two groups of learners.

Solutions offered

1.    Pre-record information that would be presented to all students allowing students to determine pace

2.    Flip-Flop: A version of the station-rotation model with two stations, this allows students to navigate between virtual activities and offline independent work. The teacher meets with one group while allowing the other group to work independently. Tasks that are social and build relationships should be synchronous and allow students to support one another.

My Take: There will be times when you feel that you are not effective with either group. It’s ok to feel this way, but it is probably not as bad as you think. I like to keep these questions in mind:

Concurrent Teaching Considerations

1.    Where is your attention?

2.    What is the virtual learner experiencing? What are they hearing? What are they seeing?

3.    What are my objectives? Can I keep my eye on the objectives?

4.    How can I anticipate problems and needs so that class will run more smoothly?

You can’t be all things to all students, so being very cognizant of where your attention is and how much of it you are paying to each group is really helpful while keeping your eyes on the goal.

Challenge #4: Lack of student engagement

Challenge Explained: Recognizing the factors of low student engagement is crucial to increasing engagement. Ms. Tucker points to factors including being too easy or difficult, being too slow or fast, lacking relevance or a feeling of disconnection to the learning community.

Solutions offered:

1.    Differentiation: Collecting formative assessment allows for teachers to design learning experiences that meet students where they are at

2.    Prioritizing Student Agency: The incorporation of choice boards, Hyperdocs and playlists give students decision-making agency for their learning

3.    Building and maintaining a learning community: It takes time to build a learning community, and using check-in activities and coloration strengthens a group’s cohesion.

My Take:

Student engagement is challenging in a single class, and it becomes more challenging in this dynamic. When a teacher lets go to give agency to students, there is both risk and work. The risk comes in the fact that students may not take ownership, and the work comes in meeting students where they are at. I am a huge fan of choice, but it has to be well designed and meaningful. Thinking about how work will be assessed should come first as you design the activity. DuFour’s questions are valuable here:

·      What do we want all students to know and be able to do?

·      How will we know if they learn it?

·      How will we respond when some students do not learn?

·      How will we extend the learning for students who are already proficient?

I love the blended learning models, but it takes work to create great learning plans. There are a lot of resources available. Here’s a quick description of some tools:

·      Station Rotation: The Station Rotation model allows students to rotate through stations on a fixed schedule, where at least one of the stations is an online learning station. This model is most common in elementary schools because teachers are already familiar rotating in “centers” or stations.

·      Flipped Learning: The Flipped Classroom model flips the traditional relationship between class time and homework. Students learn at home via online coursework and lectures, and teachers use class time for teacher-guided practice or projects. This model enables teachers to use class time for more than delivering traditional lectures.

·      Playlists: A playlist is a sequence of resources and/or activities for students to complete. ... To personalize, teachers implement playlists in conjunction with personalized learning strategies to target specific student interests, skills, and needs.

·      Learning Menus are forms of differentiated learning that give students a choice in how they learn. Each choice on the Menu encourages students to engage in an activity that requires actively reading, re-reading, and then summarizing important textbook content.

·      HyperDocs are digital lesson plans that are designed by teachers and given to students. They provide access for students to all content and learning in one organized digital space. HyperDocs shift instruction by giving students the content to explore before direct instruction, and by asking students to apply their learning using the 4 C’s: critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity. 

For a more detailed description, see https://www.blendedlearning.org/basics/

Finally, I have created a framework for Designing for a Cognitive Community that speaks to the development of the learning community. It takes time and intentionality, but the concepts are relevant to the concurrent teaching practice.

Conclusion

My experience with concurrent teaching was clunky, mostly because I didn’t put in the work ahead of time to anticipate needs and potential challenges. I’ve watched teachers push through these challenges and make the best situation possible for all of their students.

If you have the ability to use a support staff member to work directly with virtual students, this is a great solution. If you have a say in planning for concurrent teaching in your district, suggest a multi-grade virtual teacher. Try to be creative in finding solutions to best fit the needs of your students (and your teachers).

More than anything, as a teacher, you know that you will face challenges and you will find a way to overcome them because you have to for the sake of your students. I hope that you have a community to lean on as you travel this road.

As always, I’d love to hear your feedback.