B1. The teacher actively and effectively engages all learners.
As educators who have been working for the past year know, actively engaging and holding students’ attention during class has been a challenge. If struggling to get students to participate was an issue pre-Covid times, then it seems as though this challenge will be impossible to overcome with students joining the virtual classrooms from the comfort of their own homes nowadays.
However, despite the challenges brought on through and by the virtual classroom, I was and am still determined to incorporate and engage all the students in the classroom – whether they are in person or on Google Meeting.
During my student teaching time at Altoona Area High School, I experienced teaching from my own home while the students were at home, as well, along with teaching from the classroom while the students were split between their homes and the physical classroom.
I found that one way to get the students more comfortable with talking in the classroom was to have them write their thoughts down first (in the Google Meeting chat or the assignment posted to Google Classroom) and then ask them to share their thoughts out loud to everyone. One example is shown with the screenshot below:
As shown above, with this Google Forms activity, forty-three responses were recorded over the course of three classes with fifty-five students total. The twelve students who did not turn anything in were not in class over Google Meeting nor the physical classroom.
Another tactic I have picked up since teaching students both in the classroom and at home (hybrid technique) is standing in front of the camera (and in front of the in-person students) and waiting until every student in class submits his/her Form before moving on with the agenda. If there is some lag or slow beginnings, then calling out the students by their names in order to grab their attention and have them participate was necessary to keep the flow of class going.
Although I am not a professional (yet), I have been slowly gaining different ways and ideas in order to receive participation from each and every student in class (both in-person and virtual). Continuing to experiment and explore different possibilities in order to seek out professional development for engaging unique groups of students is all part of the process (and dealing with how different life is due to Covid-19), and I only hope to improve and improve and improve.