Make Friends With The Chat

Teaching live online is scary, but it looks like a necessity for the immediate future. Sure, there are teachers who are wonderfully comfortable setting up virtual classrooms, sharing screens, juggling multiple windows, and pasting links, all while appearing calm, composed, and charming on the webcam. Meanwhile, others struggle with multitasking. They cringe when they catch a glimpse of their resting Zoom face. They share their screen to present yet panic when the familiar screen layout disappears. They are flummoxed by multiple tabs and layers upon layers of windows. Their colleagues' talk of apps, extensions, and add-ons is a foreign language. Though they spent the summer immersed in training to build up their online instruction prowess, they freeze when the pressure is on because their new learning is still new, and they can't yet navigate everything fluently. If you are an educator in this second group, please know you are not alone. You are in a silent majority, I suspect.  

If the thought of teaching online is giving you nightmares, it's time to make friends with The Chat. Every synchronous learning platform I know has a feature that allows participants to post text into a stream that everyone else in the session can read. Different platforms have different bells and whistles, but a standard chat feature is constant in all. With the goal of engaging students in mind, the chat can be your best friend and not-so-secret weapon to get learners to respond without having to execute any fancy online maneuvers. 

When you are teaching online, the chat may be the only tool you need for synchronous engagement. Once you give it a try, you'll discover that the chat feature is a simple yet effective tool to meet a multiplicity of teacher needs. 

Getting to Know Your Students:  The first few minutes of an online session is a great time to pose a question for students to answer so you and their classmates can get to know them. As a "bell ringer," have students add their responses to the chat:  What's your favorite food (or animal, team, place, YouTuber, thing to watch or listen to, blog)? What is something everyone should know about you? What was something embarrassing you did that you're willing to share with others? What makes you laugh? What's a quality you admire in others? in yourself? Be sure to share your own answer so others can get to know you, too. You get teacher bonus points as an educator if you can devise an opening question that also provides an engaging focus to build students' interest in the day's lesson. As the year goes on, invite students to submit their own ideas for opening questions.  

Taking a Temperature Check:  Social-emotional learning is especially important in a remote learning environments where teachers can't pick up on nonverbal cues and body language as they greet their students each day. Part of your daily routine can involve checking in with students to see how they are doing emotionally. Post a number in the chat from 1 to 5 to let me know how you're feeling today. 5 means fantastic; 1 means lousy. As you get to know your students better, you can ask them to elaborate on or explain their responses if they choose. Another option is to ask students to post an emoji that tells how they're doing. To access emojis in Google Meets, students can right click (or two-finger click on a touchpad)  and select "Emoji" from the menu.  

Assessing Prior Knowledge: Have you ever been in a class where the teacher didn't realize that all the students already knew everything they were teaching that day? Or have you, as a teacher, ever discovered midway through a unit that one of your students is an expert on the topic being covered? The chat can be a great place to ascertain what your students may already know before you teach a lesson. You can ask students to rate their own knowledge of a subject or proficiency of a skill with a simple numeric or letter-grade scale. You could also pose an open-ended prompt or question:  What is everything you know or think you know about reptiles? List as many US politicians as you can. When I say the word "Renaissance," what names, places, or ideas come to mind? In the chat, give me examples of adjectives. Take notice of who is responding and the accuracy of their responses to give you an idea of how to proceed. 

Checking for Attention: Sometimes you just want to know if your students are still awake or paying attention or if they are flipping through Tik Tok videos as you teach to an empty e-classroom. Asking students to provide a quick response in the chat every few minutes encourages them to stay mentally online during instruction. This is the virtual learning equivalent of "Can I get an 'amen'?" Try using some check-ins like these:  Type yes or no to tell us whether you agree or disagree with that. If you're following what I am saying, type, "Got it" in the chat. Give me an LOL if you thought that dad joke was at least a little bit funny and a NLOL if you are not laughing. Put that definition into your own words. What are some qualities of a good friend? Keeping the pace lively with lots of opportunities to respond in the chat will promote active attention and engagement and will keep your students on their toes (or at least their fingertips on their keyboards).   

Building Community: When your students celebrate one another's contributions and affirm one another, they grow closer as a community of learners. Many great AVID teachers I know incorporate a variety of claps, cheers, and chants to create group celebrations in live classrooms. The chat can be a channel for similar affirmations. When a student gives a well-reasoned response, invite your students to add some words of praise or encouragement into the chat. Develop some class traditions. I like the Power Wooosh, where everyone types the word "Woooosh!"(spelling is not standardized in onomatopoeia world, so spell it however you think it is spelled) into the chat but doesn't press send until I give the signal. Then, on the count of three, we all press send and overwhelm the chat with simultaneous explosions of positive energy directed toward the student(s) who did something praiseworthy. Ask your students to come up with ways to affirm one another, to celebrate accomplishments, to acknowledge birthdays, etc. Pretty soon, your virtual classroom will feel more and more like an in-person community. 

Encouraging Curiosity:  What questions do you have about. . . ? What do you want to know about this topic? Post one thing you wonder about this topic. Questions like these can turn your chat into a wonderland of wonderment. Ask students to add a question to their notes and then add it to the chat. These questions can form the basis for future instruction or for a class research assignment. Using students' questions as the basis for later research assignments and activities can build buy-in. 

Taking a Brain Break: For a fun one-minute activity each day, play a quick round of Truth or Falsehood. You can start by stating one true or untrue statement about yourself and then asking students to put in the chat to indicate whether they think the statement is a truth or a falsehood. Did my teacher really meet Cher in an elevator in Vegas? Did my teacher really once live in a house previously owned by a murderer? Has my teacher really never eaten broccoli? Once the votes are cast, reveal the answer and see how many students you stumped (BTW, only one of those is true about me). A different student can be assigned each day to try to stump the class. 

Formative Assessment: Use the chat as a quick check to see how well students are understanding what you are teaching. A 1-5 self-score about level of comprehension, a multiple choice question, or a one-sentence summary of what you've learned can be a speedy way to take a snapshot of how students are doing. It's not the most accurate since students are self reporting and could just copy the answer of the people who posted more quickly, but it's better than not checking in at all. When you don't have the time or the expertise to do a Google Form or use another tool, the chat can provide some data to help you know whether to keep teaching, slow down, or speed ahead. Consider saving the chat at the end of your class session to have more time to peruse student responses. 

Developing Language:  Providing students with language stems or with sentence frames can help students build confidence in putting words together using correct English syntax (or another language if you're a LOTE teacher). Create intentional moments where you ask students to compose a complete sentence in the chat, and give them a frame to help the reluctant ones start. A compare or contrast lesson can turn into a writing skill builder with a frames like these: Although many mammals __________, humans are among the only ones that ________.  The Great Depression and the Recession of 2020 were both characterized by ___________; however, the Great Depression ________.  As students write complex sentences and receive praise for their efforts, they will begin transfer that skill to other writing and to speaking. Another way the chat can be a language learner's friend is to use it to generate academic vocabulary prior to writing. Before having students summarize their learning, ask the class to add to the chat any academic words they think should appear in most good summaries of the content. Ask students to incorporate a specified number of words from the community word bank into their summaries. 

Building Writing Fluency: The more students write, the better they will get and the more easily they will put words together. Operating a classroom where the chat feature is in heavy use can increase the amount of linguistic output of your students significantly. Find opportunities to encourage increasingly lengthy and elaborate responses using correct sentence structure and conventions, but don't correct aggressively. It's better to praise what you want to see than shame students for taking unsuccessful risks.  

Synthesizing and Summarizing Learning: Asking students to sum up their learning or pull everything together from a series of lessons can be an effective exit ticket in an online classroom. Write one great sentence that captures the gist of what we learned today. In exactly 25 words, summarize what you want to remember about insects after today's lesson. Add to the chat the most important thing you learned in class today. Write your prediction about what you think will happen to the main character when we resume this story next time. Summarizing is an essential life skill that will make students more effective note-takers, create better writers, reinforce the learning for long-term retention, and prevent them from boring others with long-winded stories at dinner parties in their future. 

Speaking of becoming long-winded and boring, I've probably maxed out your attention span with these ideas. I'd love to hear some of yours, though, so if you have other thoughts about how to use the chat to improve instruction online, add them to the comments (the asynchronous chat, if you will) below.  

Giving Myself Feedback on Giving My Students Feedback

Imagine the worst football coach ever. He watches his team play a losing season but waits until the very end of the final game to let the players know everything they’ve done wrong in each game. As the team is getting chewed out and lectured, they feel terrible about what they’ve done. They feel like failures (though the scores on the scoreboard also have given them some hint of that all along), some want to quit and never play again, and even if they wanted to change and improve, it’s too late now. The games have been played and the record books are closed.

In my English classes, I was sometimes like that coach. I let my students work on pieces of writing, gave them little guidance beyond the initial assignment and perhaps a skills lesson at the beginning, and then collected their completed papers, which I spent hours of my outside-of-school life grading. It was like a second job, and I was the manager who was writing hundreds of scathing employee evaluations. My students received their grades--usually not as high as they’d hoped for--along with countless corrections and frustratedly scribbled comments explaining how far they had fallen short of my expectations. And that was that. No wonder many students shut down and began to view themselves as failures. I had prevented any hope of a growth mindset taking hold. Except for the most resilient and determined ones who sought help to pull their grades up, most of my students decided then and there that writing was a skill they just weren’t any good at, and they lost all hope for future improvement.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately about the feedback we give our students. I have yet to find one expert in the field who says that the time and effort I spent writing comments on my students’ finished papers was worth it. I should have known that already. My students had already given me the feedback I needed in the form of crumpled up essays left in the trashcan or abandoned on the classroom floor. They weren’t planning to use my comments to help them improve; mostly, they resented me for writing them.

Several things were problematic about the way I was approaching writing in my classes. First, I had created a culture where the grade was the one important goal. Learning and improvement were not on the students’ radar screens at all. Second, I didn’t realize when the feedback was necessary and welcome: along the way as the students were doing the writing. I should have been working feverishly while my students were writing, holding brief conferences with each student to pinpoint precise moves that would help that student along the way, and I should have spent much less out-of-class time scrawling comments on student papers. Of course, this was often impossible because much of my students’ writing time occurred at home where I was not available for assessment. My class time, I thought, was too precious to waste on allowing students to sit there and write. Finally, I mistakenly believed that it was my job to rewrite my students’ papers for them, to use my expert editing and revision skills to spot and correct every error and to reword, reorganize, and clarify their writing for them. It was a rigorous mental exercise for me; my students, however, learned nothing from it.  

I’m embarrassed now as I think back on some of the types of comments I wrote on student papers. Here are some of the types of things I said and what I really meant:

What I wrote: Why didn’t you [whatever thing you were supposed to have done but didn’t]? We talked about this in class!

What I meant: By “we talked about it,” I mean that I mentioned it to the class as part of my lecture on things to include in your paper. Why didn’t you do the thing I told you to do but never checked to see if you knew how nor even understood what I was saying. Though I didn’t let you do any thinking about this on your own or process this skill with other students, I am still holding you fully accountable for this concept.

_____________________________

What I wrote:  Fragment!

What I meant:  I know the difference between a fragment and a complete sentence, and I have just proven that by pointing it out on your paper. Apparently, you have not mastered this skill, and it’s probably because I didn’t spend any time allowing you to explore this grammatical concept with any guidance.

____________________________

What I wrote:  (I didn’t write any words here; I just circled a bunch of errors, added some necessary commas, and corrected some capitalization issues)

What I meant: Proofreading is the most important thing, and you don’t do it well. In fact, it’s more important than the ideas you are writing about or whether your writing communicates its intended message. Since I have clearly spent a ton of time finding every error and correcting it in red pen, you can just make the changes that I’ve made for you on your original draft and know that your paper will be better. I just hope you’re learning about punctuation and capitalization while you make those changes.

__________________________

What I wrote: Good job! Nice! Excellent!

What I meant: I have access to a thesaurus so that I can give you many positive words that are actually rather vague and don’t let you know what you have done that has met my approval. I hope you’re a mind reader so you’ll know to keep doing those things in future essays.

__________________________

What I wrote: Weak thesis.

What I meant:  You may have noticed that I wrote this on nearly every student’s paper in the class. I taught it. Why didn’t you or anyone else get it? Surely it couldn’t be my fault, right?

__________________________

What I wrote: You need to [whatever I think the student should have done instead of what the student did…].

What I meant: Obviously, I know best, and this has become my paper instead of yours. Writing is a science, not an art, and it’s full of rights and wrongs. What you did was wrong. I’m not going to make suggestions or ask you questions to help you make the best choice; I’m going to issue a commandment.  Your omnipotent teacher has spoken.  

__________________________

I could go on, but I will spare you the gory details.

In hindsight, I could have been more thoughtful about the way I worded much of my feedback in written comments and in conversations with my students. My feedback frequently took the form of “you” statements and commands (“You should…,” “Move this…,” “Don’t…”). In my writing interactions with student writers, I now try to focus on “I” statements:

• “I see what you’re trying to do here, but I’m a bit confused by what you mean.”
• “I’d love to hear more about this.”
• “I am a little unclear about how this quotation relates to the point you’re trying to make.”
• “I generally expect to find a thesis statement somewhere in the first paragraph of an essay, but I’m not sure which sentence you’re intending to be your thesis.”  

Statements such as these put the writer in the driver’s seat and make my comments seem a lot less like attacks. I’m speaking as a reader who is interested in what the writer has to say and is sharing reactions with her. I hope that my reader responses will prompt the writer to think about the choices she made and to consider making some changes to help other readers.

Improving the quality of my written feedback is one step toward improvement, but I think there are still better ways to achieve the results I wanted. If I had been more intentional about providing feedback along the way rather than at the end of the writing process, I could have had small conferences with students to address the aspects of their writing that would produce the most improvement in the moment. If I noticed that several students were experiencing the same difficulty, I could have stopped class for a bit to teach a quick  mini-lesson to address this common issue. Then I could have followed up with any students who needed some individual attention to master that concept as they practiced.

On mornings like today as I leave my car and walk into work, I see and hear the Vines High School marching band practicing on the parking lot across the street. Their director, whose comments I often hear as he addresses his students on a loudspeaker from atop his observation tower, offers excellent feedback in the moment. He’s consistently encouraging but meticulous as he pinpoints his musicians’ point of confusion, gives them some instruction or advice, and then asks them to retry the trouble spot and make the necessary adjustments. I imagine he gets exactly the results he seeks.

I wish I had been more deliberate at offering that sort of feedback for my students when they needed it most rather than waiting until the end and providing them with a lengthy list of problems to address.

Like many teachers, I struggled with assessment and providing feedback and did what I thought I was supposed to do. I wasn’t deliberately negligent and certainly put in ample effort, but I seldom saw the growth and results I hoped to achieve. I needed to remember that I was a coach too--a writing coach--and that timeouts and halftime pep talks were necessary to redirect my students, to pump them up when they were feeling defeated, and to send them back into the game with a plan to lead themselves to victory.