This is the third and final post that involves me wittering away about what I have done in my weekly 2hr online lessons with the pre-masters group that I share with my co-ADoS.

Week 5

After the low-point that was Week 4’s lesson (which you can read about in the second post of this series which covers Week 3 and 4 – update: the students also didn’t do their homework/preparation for my co-ADoS’s session with them so at least it wasn’t personal 😉 ), I changed my approach in terms of lesson focus. I shifted from trying to tap into and build on the asynchronous content to a straight-forward focus on CW2, students’ speaking coursework which is a presentation based on their CW3 which is an extended writing coursework. (However, it is worth mentioning that this shift would have taken place regardless of how Week 4 went, as at this stage in the term students need help with their speaking coursework!)

My lesson had 4 objectives. In the event, we only completed 3 of them. This was fine because the final one was only there in case the main task took less time than I’d anticipated, which it didn’t. The final objective will feature in Week 6’s lesson.

At the start of the week, students had received an email about CW2 with all the important information about it in terms of what it is, how it works and a timeline of tasks and deadlines. I started the lesson with a task based on that email (essentially to make sure they had read it and understood it rather than ignored it!) – working in groups to answer a set of questions based on the email on a pre-prepared Padlet:

I know – a lot of questions. However, they were quick and easy to answer so the task did not take too long. This was the follow-up:

Some questions came up and I was able to respond to those, as well as reiterating key information.

Positives: The task forced them to read the email. (Students are good at not reading emails!) They had the opportunity to ask questions. They engaged!

To improve: I think I would probably do this the same way in future! Beats talking at them about it.

For Pre-Masters students, CW2, like CW3, is synoptic. They work on and submit the same pieces of work for their Research Project (Humanities) or Literature Review (Science and Engineering) module and their AES (Academic English Skills – ours!) module. So in theory they should already have been working on it in their other modules (who focus on content and structure where we focus on language skills). The next step in this lesson, then, was to find out where they were at with it. I used Padlet again, but this time an individual task:

The goal of this task was two-fold – as well as to find out what students have done so far, I wanted students to have a clearer idea of where they were headed next. The questions were based on things they need to do as part of their CW2 preparation, leading them to question 8, where their answers to 1-7 guide them as to what they need to do. Some students had done loads already, some had started, some hadn’t started at all. Fairly typical! (They have been advised that next lesson will start with a progress check and I will want to know what they have done since this lesson! We shall see…)  This was the follow-up:

There were a few worries that I was able to address.

Positives: It gave me a snapshot of where they were at, and the opportunity to set up an expectation, based on the task, for next week’s lesson.

To improve: Their answers to question 8 were a bit vague. Next time I would give an example answer to push them to give more useful (to themselves) answers.

The final task of the lesson was completing the practice submission. This was what they were told about it in the information email:

I figured it would be less daunting if we did as much as possible during the lesson and they just had to finish for homework. We did it step by step:

It took them a fair bit of time! In fact, they didn’t quite manage to finish the final stage. Hence why there wasn’t time to embark on the assessment criteria side of things. However, we will now be looking at the criteria at the start of Week 6 and their submission deadline is not til the end of Week 8, so it’s ok.

Positives: It scaffolded an important task (the practice submission) for them. Giving them time in class alleviates (at least slightly) the time pressure they are under currently, which is important.

To improve: I would make more use of the individual chat feature, to prod them/check on them, rather than only the main everyone chatbox.

Overall: Admittedly this wasn’t the most exciting lesson in the world, but it did what it needed to do and they stayed with me! I deliberately over-planned because I just had no idea how long doing the practice task would take them so I wanted to be prepared for whichever eventuality.

Week 6

The final lesson for this term! I started with a chat box warmer, one I’ve used previously – tell me using one adjective how you feel right now. The adjectives were more positive than Week 4 (when I last used this warmer) on the whole, which was encouraging!

These were my lesson objectives:

For the first, I did a similar task to last week – a set of questions to answer on a pre-prepared Padlet:

The answers were more encouraging this time round – there were still some who hadn’t started but they were in the minority rather than the majority this week! I had to cajole some of them into responding – by the end of the task I had won 11/15, having started with about 5. Having responded verbally to some of their answers – to acknowledge their progress, to pick up on answers that indicated confusion and to encourage them to keep working hard/not leave it til the last minute – I followed up with this:

There were some concerns that came out, which I was able to address.

Positives about this stage: Students knew they would be expected to give me a ‘progress report’, as I had told them at the end of last week’s lesson. Hopefully more work got done as a result! Knowing that homework (in this case CW2 work) will be revisited in the next class rather than forgotten about is supposed to be more motivating for students. I am getting better at talking into empty space. I think each week since the start of this way of doing things, I have improved and become more comfortable with it little by little (because I only teach one lesson per week, it’s a slow learning curve!). I had thought through feedback and the feedback elements felt less haphazard than they have been known to feel in past lessons.

To improve: I still don’t know what to do with the students who just don’t respond whatever I do or say! Given the stage in the course and the age of the students, though, to an extent I think all I can do is provide opportunities for participation as best I can and make sure they are clearly set up and scaffolded.

 

Then we moved onto the next stage, which I had carried over from last lesson.

This stage was a preparatory stage for the following evaluation stage and the two in combination were to ensure that students have a clear idea of what they need to do in order to get good marks for their presentations. I introduced the 4 criteria and their subheadings, giving a brief explanation of what each one meant.

 

To try and make it clearer for students and to check understanding, I then did a little matching task. The example below is one of the items. It was a series of sentences starting “I should…” and students had to match each one to the correct criteria. I asked them to write their answers (e.g. for this example, they would write 2a)

Positives: Links the things students need to do with the criteria they need to do them for. Doesn’t require a lot of student writing.

To improve: Next time I would insert a breakout room stage and have a task with the 4 criteria and a list of the statements and get the students to discuss and match them, then use what I actually did as the feedback stage. On the plus side, the way I did it didn’t have a negative impact on the next (important) task, which was the final part of this stage of the lesson – the example presentation evaluation:

The first step was getting them all to watch it individually rather than playing it and sharing screen, to avoid bandwidth and audio quality issues. I asked them to write “done” in the chatbox once they had finished. Once they were done, I put them into breakout rooms in groups to discuss the presentation in terms of the criteria and add to the pre-prepared Padlet.

Positives: they did the task and showed understanding of the criteria and how the presentation mapped to the criteria.

To improve: I think the instruction slide above should have been two slides. One for watching the presentation and evaluating it individually and one for doing the group task. Fortunately, used as above it didn’t impact the task negatively! Next time, I would also include an element of getting them to engage with the content (which was quite humorous!) rather than only the quality. A couple of them spontaneously mentioned things about it in the chatbox as they watched which was nice! When I planned the lesson, I was too focused on the main task and forgot to allow for personalisation.

The final stage of the lesson focused on the Q&A. As students are submitting recorded presentations rather than doing them live, we need a live element to address the answering questions part of the criteria (2b!). These will take place in Week 8 and involve use of a list of questions which students are able to look at in advance of their slot (they are already on Blackboard!).

They’ve already had this information (the first 3 questions) on multiple occasions from multiple sources but it bears repetition! (Inevitably, some got it wrong!) Once clarified, we could focus on the fourth question – useful language.

Because we were running out of time a bit, I displayed the above slide and got them to add examples, before getting them to download the list of questions (most of them hadn’t as yet) and putting them into breakout rooms for a bit of practice. Finally, we came back to the main room and I asked each of them one of the questions, just to give them a feel for it.

Positives: They had a chance to practice in groups and a chance to “try it out” in the main room subsequently. They now all have the questions downloaded and have looked at them and realised that it’s not as easy as they had assumed so might actually do some preparation work towards it!

To improve: Next time, rather than bring them back to the main room, I’d do the “giving a feel for it” element in each breakout room in turn. That way, there would be less waiting time for students and they could continue practising after I move to the next group. The final main room stage could then focus on task reflection.

Overall: I finally won at timing! Ok, not quite but much closer than was the case at the start of this term! Nothing took wildly longer than I had anticipated, everything I had planned was done, just in time. The final stage could have used a bit more time but didn’t suffer unduly for it. So, I’m pleased! It means I am getting the hang of estimating how much time it will take to do stuff. As ever plenty to work on and ways to improve but that’s the joy of it. Anyway that is it, for me, for teaching, till September! When it will be a brand new class who come directly to remote learning (the earliest we will do face to face is January and that’s very much dependent on the state of the world by then – anything could happen!). In the meantime, 3 crazy weeks of assessment and then 4 weeks of MUCH-NEEDED downtime are on the way. (I was sick for the whole of the Christmas holiday, my Easter holiday was a stress fest rather than a trip to Sicily thanks to the pandemic, so really, **really** looking forward to some downtime! And then using what I’ve learned this year come the start of next year. 🙂 )