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.  

Outsourcing Discipline

We’ve all taught that kid that knows how to push your buttons and that, after the first few days of school, is on strike two before ever entering the room. This is the kid who makes your stomach get a little queasy each day before class starts, the one who haunts your dreams at night and turns your days into living nightmares. The one who makes you pray, “Please, please, please, please let him be sick today,” as you are driving to school in the morning. 

For me, that student was Horton (For the sake of anonymity, I’m using a name of no student I ever actually taught). Horton was in my English class, and he was trouble from day one. As soon as I had an inkling he was going to be difficult (probably day two), I promptly called home to establish a relationship with his parent early on. The next day Horton showed up in class more unpleasant than ever and announced belligerently, “You called my mom last night.” He then proceeded to make my day even more miserable. Frustratedly, I pulled Horton into the hall and, in the heat of anger, gave him a big ol’ adult lecture, which made absolutely no difference when we re-entered the classroom and he had to save face in front of his peers. I gave him a warning, followed by a second warning, followed by a detention. 

He failed to show up for the detention, much to my delight, because that meant a double detention, which I immediately issued, and which was also unserved. Good, I thought to myself. This is out of my hands now. I get to send him to Saturday School and make this kid someone else’s problem.  Before the first month of school had ended, Horton had been assigned two Saturday Schools and had received three or four office referrals. He even got to spend a few days out of my class in in-school suspension, but the ISS only served to give me a day or two of rest and to make sure Horton fell impossibly behind, which made him even more of a problem when he returned to class. 

I wish I could tell you that I executed some phenomenal teacher move that got Horton back on my side and that he ended up being my star student by the end of the year. Unfortunately, Horton and I spent an entire semester antagonizing one another, his mom and I became BFFs over the phone, and I finally convinced the counselor to move Horton to another teacher at the semester so “he could get a fresh start.” I passed him off to a colleague and then commiserated with her from time to time about the challenges of dealing with this unruly miscreant, all the while thinking to myself, “Better you than me!”  In hindsight, I was the worst in so many ways. 

For some reason, I had forgotten something taught to me by a very wise Assistant Principal my first year of teaching, Scott Potter. Mr. Potter insisted that we not outsource our discipline, not send our students away to detention halls, not assign Saturday School sessions, and not write stacks of office referrals. When a student was having a problem in our class, it was our responsibility to schedule a detention with that student. The detention wasn’t meant to be a punishment—no scraping gum off desks or pounding erasers. Instead, we were supposed to spend some quality time, one on one, with the student, talking about the problem and thinking together about ways to remedy it.  

As a young teacher, I thought this was a ridiculous torture designed to make me have to spend an agonizing 30 extra minutes with someone I didn’t even want to see during the time I had to see him in class each day. Now that I’m older and perhaps a little wiser, I see the brilliance in this approach. 

Teaching is all about relationships. So is discipline. If a student doesn’t have a relationship with the teacher and feels antagonized, adversarial, or unsafe, the student has little incentive to cooperate in class. Yes, it’s uncomfortable to sit down with a teenager who dislikes you and your class and try to break the ice, but over time, when you put down the authority persona and adopt the ally stance instead, the student eventually learns that you’re on the same side and that you want him or her to succeed. Punishment does little to improve behaviors; building a relationship with a student leads to positive change.

Students know when you don’t like them. They sometime even assume you don’t like them, even when you do. Sitting down in a one-to-one with a student gives you a chance to find things you like about that student and discover ways to make positive connections with him or her. 

Misbehavior happens for a reason. Most often, a student is seeking attention—from you or from peers—and doesn’t do it in ways that are in sync with your lesson plans. Frequently, a student walks into your class carrying excess emotional baggage from home, from parents, from peers, and from other teachers. If you’re just one more angry adult adding to the noise in that student’s life, you can’t expect cooperation or engagement. Your tête-à-tête with that student may allow you to find ways to give that student positive attention and to help that student learn to deal with the baggage. 

When you spend time with students individually and empathize with them, they become more receptive to what you want them to know. Life is hard. Growing up is tough. Being a teenager is pretty terrible sometimes, or at least it feels that way for many. Let your students know that you know that; it may surprise some of them who believe no one understands them or knows what they are going through. Resisting your impulse to lecture, just listen to them. You may be the only one who does, and that listening might be a breakthrough. 

Adult brains are more developed than teenagers’ brains. We are also presumably more skilled at regulating our emotions, adapting our behaviors to various situations, navigating social norms, and solving problems. To expect kids to think and reason like adults is extremely short sighted. Students who come from difficult backgrounds may be even less equipped to handle the emotional and behavioral demands of school. The best teachers are the ones who understand this and are willing to teach problem solving, emotional intelligence, and self-regulation to their students. If we teach students what is expected in our classrooms, how to respond in difficult situations, and which techniques can be used to level things out when their emotions get out of whack, we are giving them tools they can use forever. But they won’t learn them when we lecture, issue consequences, and stack punishment on top of punishment. 

So when you’re faced with your own Hortons and your first inclination is to get them as far away from you as possible and make them someone else’s problem, consider a different approach. Transform detentions from punishment to productivity. Take the difficult steps to form a relationship with that student, become an ally rather than an adversary, and teach the problem-solving and social skills to help Horton handle the stressors that life will hurl at him.  

I heard from another former student—not Horton—the other day. He’s an adult now and doing quite well, traveling the world and writing. When he was a high school freshman, I suspect some of his teachers had their doubts because he couldn’t sit still, was prone to blurt things out, asked incessant questions, lacked impulse control, didn’t pick up on social cues, and always seemed to be talking when it was time to be quiet. He was also incredibly bright, though sometimes his behaviors masked that intelligence. He is a student I didn’t let frustrate me. Instead, I did what I could to build a relationship. In his note to me, he wrote, “Having a teacher who could joke with me, but also point out my shortcomings and how to fix them, but also endeavor to understand what I was all about, but also inspire me to grow bigger than that, etc….super valuable.” I’m glad I took the time to know this young person because he’s become an adult who inspires me with what he’s done. 

Giving your students ways to fix their shortcomings and grow bigger than what they are all about right now—that’s the hidden curriculum that may be more important than the content the state tells us we have to teach. If we outsource our discipline, we are leaving those most essential lessons untaught. 

Don’t Forget the L

Social-Emotional Learning, or SEL, is all the rage these days. It seems we have realized that we can’t just stand in the front of our classrooms and teach, heedless of the fact that there are human beings in our classrooms who have emotional baggage they lug with them to school each day.

The anxiety, interpersonal conflicts, insecurities, fears, abuse, stress, sadness, peer influences, grief, drama, and trauma that weigh down the lives of even the most seemingly well-adjusted kids impede students’ abilities to focus on the business of school. What we now know about the brain is that any kind of stress triggers the brain’s fight-or-flight response, which overrides the rational, thinking part of the brain. Students who enter our classrooms having experienced trauma (or even just a really bad morning) are unable to learn until the amygdala relinquishes control of brain activity and allows the student’s brain to return to normal functioning.

It’s no surprise, then, that the education world has jumped on the bandwagon of Social-Emotional Learning. SEL reminds us that building relationships is crucial. Students need to feel comfortable in our classrooms. They need to trust the teacher and their peers. They need to know that the classroom and the campus are safe spaces, physically and emotionally. They need to develop positive dispositions about themselves and about school. 

Positive reinforcements, praise, chants, cheers, claps, “atta boys,” classroom meetings, and affirmations abound in schools today, and we pat ourselves on the back because our students feel great about themselves. Teachers have filled their students’ social-emotional buckets so full that school has become a happy place for most—and certainly for many who traditionally disengage from classroom connections.

My concern in all of this is that we sometimes forget about the L in SEL. The important thing about Social-Emotional Learning is the learning that results from all of our community building and connecting. We can never lose sight of the SO THAT.

The SO THAT is the reason behind the things we do, the impact our efforts have on student learning.

I make sure my students feel safe in my classroom SO THAT they are comfortable taking risks when I ask them to engage in classroom discussions and think about things that are hard for them. 

I let my students see that failure is a part of learning and provide many low-risk learning activities SO THAT students can push themselves to experiment as thinkers and writers without worrying about a grade being attached to it.

I get to know my students’ as people SO THAT they know I care about them as more than just a number in my gradebook because I am planning to push them to do things they may not believe they can do and I want them to know I’ve got their best interests in mind and that they can trust me when it gets precarious.

I talk with my students about things other than school SO THAT when it comes time to talk about academic things they will pay attention to that, too. 

I ensure my students connect with others in the class SO THAT they have a network of support to rely on as they learn because students learn from one another better than they learn from me.  

I try to make students feel comfortable talking with me SO THAT they aren’t afraid to approach me for help when they face struggles with the rigorous content in my course. 

There are so many worthwhile SO THATs that come from paying attention to our students’ social and emotional needs, but we need to make sure that community building and feel-good strategies are not ends in themselves. Social-Emotional Learning without the Learning is not the goal of school. School needs to be a safe, joyful place because we’ve got big plans to meet students where they are and take them to where they need to be. 

Don’t forget the L.