Here's the TL;DR version: 100% online, then be grateful for if/when I get to spend time in person with students.

While I've been out of the classroom for a few years, I'm still far more comfortable with my ability to build relationships and engage students in content when I'm in person rather than trying to do so digitally (whether synchronous or asynchronous). Knowing this helps me prepare for a few different scenarios, the most intense of which I'll try to explain in this post. I'm aware that being a high school teacher affords me privileges that elementary does not have. I'm aware that my location affords me privileges that more rural areas do not have. 

Assuming that we begin on a completely digital platform (remote 100%), I have started to build out all of my content into modules on our new Learning Management System, Canvas. Sure, why not learn a new LMS while also learning differently?! I'm up for it, to be honest. Why not? In terms of pacing and content, I am hopeful that I can run it like an online college course. Lectures and in-class activities will be kept to a minimum, and a lot of the energy will be put into the forum. The online college courses I took (now, keep in mind that I was paying for them, so I recognize there will be a slight difference in motivation) were weak on community-building and strong on relationship-building. Right now, I need to realize this.

Here's our tentative schedule, which I appreciate our district sharing with more than a month to plan for it.

The idea of in-person instruction is optimistic, but this schedule seems like it would be easy to transition to online if we needed to. Therefore, I'll have 5 sessions of ~45 minutes for each group each day. Let's assume that this is what happens. If so, I get 90 minutes a week with my students in an online setting, so my job will be to plan for the best possible experience with that parameter. 

The thing I've been talking to my teams about is the desire to reduce the number of variables. The reason why is because as much as I like taking risks, they need to be calculated risks. With fewer variables, the risks can be more guided. I'll be using Mathematics Vision Project (Integrated 1 and Integrated 2) to guide the flow of concepts, Desmos Activity Builder to elicit a lot of the student responses, and Canvas to host it all. 

(Nearly) every lesson will:

• start with a wellness check or relationship-building prompt (probably a version of Sara's name tents)
• engage in a brief warm-up (I'm a big fan of Would You Rather Math, ya know)
• lean on a "blue sheet" thanks to the idea from Sara Ven Der Werf. We won't want to reteach content from previous grades, so we will be providing a support sheet that offers the foundational material that students may need for the module.
• allow students to engage with a mathematical prompt (guided by the Mathematics Vision Project content)
• build in as much time for students to talk to each other as possible
• lower academic expectations (can I say that? I think I can. After all, this is not normal!)
• maintain professional expectations (because yeah, we still have those)
• end with an exit ticket to help me prepare for the next day
• follow up with a mathematician from this list (thanks, Annie!)
• be accompanied by practice problems, solutions, and a video to explain some of them

I'm not the person who can wait until the week before school to get everything planned out. Yes, I'm aware that this is probably going to change. However, my hope is that by planning right now, it will limit how stressed I'll be when the actual plan comes out.

This sounds like a lot. Maybe I'll just go on a 300-day deep sea fishing trip instead...

What are you planning for? Any ideas to share?

Happy "Who The Hell Knows" Fishing

A long, long time ago, I created videos for my students, and even with all the criticism of the Flipped Classroom, it added so much value to my classroom. Here’s what I learned about what not to do. Do not:

• Think too far ahead. I learned very quickly that making a few videos ahead of time felt disingenuous and created more work in the long run. A couple of my longer videos (see below) could have been much shorter because it turned out that my students already knew about the coordinate plane. Oops. However, because I had already recorded the video, it was still their assignment. Oops again. This fall, I plan to set aside 10 minutes every couple days to make a quick video that addresses some potential pitfalls of their current (or forecasted) troubles.
• Upload videos without organizing them. When I started, I just put them onto YouTube, then would share a link for the kids to view. Even with Google Classroom, it isn’t organized. I ended up building a website that has the videos categorized for easy access (it isn’t great, but it helped my students: mrstevens.weebly.com). Another teacher I know has all of his videos with Bitly links and they are customized to be really organized.
• Teach as though you were teaching your class. The first few videos I made were 17, 21, and 22 minutes long. Participation was low and enthusiasm was as well. Based on informal surveys to my students, I learned that 3-5 minute videos worked the best. The shorter, the better.
• Teach to an imaginary whole room. My teaching style is built on the energy in the room. When I started making videos (after school hours), nobody was in the seats. It felt… empty. At the time, I had a couple students who liked to stay after and help, so I put them to work. They sat right behind the camera and I taught to them as if I was tutoring rather than instructing an entire class. It made life a lot easier for me, and the feedback from students was positive.
• Assume students will watch the entire video. Even with short videos, my students would skip around. Hey, I even do that when I’m trying to find something. Knowing that they would skip through the explanations and just copy it down helped me prepare my live lessons differently, and I think they were better.
• Assume students have no opinion. When I started creating videos, it was just plug and chug, head down, get through them. It wasn’t until I started asking my students, about two weeks into it, for their thoughts. It’s weird, right? Having a video version of me teaching a live version of you? At the end of every week, I would ask if the videos were helping, and what I could do to make them better. If you look at my website, which you definitely don’t need to do, you’ll see that I tried different variations. The one my students disliked the most was when I used a screen recording app. They wanted to see the problems worked out by hand. It made sense to me, so I did that for them. 
• Assume you are the only ones who want to record. Yes, when we were a couple months into the video-making, my students started asking if they could do the next lesson. Being that they were some of my higher-performing students anyways, it made the decision easier. I taught them the content for a couple lessons ahead, then they made the video and we put it onto the site. This was a fun way to hand over ownership as the class got more comfortable with the format.
• Feel like you need to be perfect. But it’s going on video! Once I gave up on the need to be perfect, my videos became more me. Now, if I royally screwed up, sure, I’d re-record. However, a few mistakes here and there, a dropped marker, a quick erasure, all made the final cut.
• Feel like the videos are worthless. During this process, I doubted whether the videos had value. That was until I received messages from parents, asking about a certain step in the video. Yes, parents were using the videos to help their kids with the work. Also, before state testing, an assignment for the students was to take a previous topic, go back, watch the video(s) for it, and create a new one based on their new understanding. The videos served as a spiral tool, something I never planned for (but have since)!

I think that’s all for now. Does that help a little? Is it too much? Truth be told, I’ll be figuring this whole thing out all over again in the fall, so there’s a good chance I’m missing something—or a lot of things. 

Where is your head at with the video-making process?

Happy "You're Gonna Do Just Fine" Fishing