Has Your Teaching Method Changed?

Many k-12 schools, as well as colleges and universities, are making the switch to online learning. With this switch, there is a lot of training and information about learning management systems, video conferencing, and how to flip your classroom. While all of these things are important, they’re just tools, and tools will only take you so far.

What is your goal?

What is your learning philosophy and how is that reflected?

What are the pros of online learning and how are you using them?

COVID forced methods of teaching and learning to shift. It forced an already broken system, to break even farther.

If you’re trying to take what you did in person and mirror that online, you’re doing it wrong. You will then lose the advantages of in person learning, while also losing the advantages of online learning.

This is a time to reimagine what a class is?

For example, I teach 3 courses online AP Art History, AP 2D Design, and AP Drawing. I’ve always had my AP 2D Design and AP Drawing students grouped together. They are able to learn from, inspire, and support each other. This year, I’m adding featured workshops that bring all 3 groups together, but only students from the groups that need help with the specific topic.

Our first workshop was about creating a schedule. Online learning brings flexibility, which is great, but only if you know how to make a schedule, which most students (and adults), never learn. This isn’t a subject-specific skill, so everyone is coming together, that NEEDS it.

This allows me to commit to teaching the content once really well. It will also be recorded. Instead of doing it 3 times. It’s also fun for students to get to interact with and meet different students and helps them to understand how knowledge from one class can connect to another.

I realize that it’s likely that you don’t have the flexibility in your teaching that I do. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t push for it.

One of the 21st-century learning skills is collaboration. Online learning creates the perfect platform to demonstrate to students how collaboration works. Let’s not keep teachers in their prescribed box. Let’s collaborate. Let’s mix and match.

What is one piece of content that you could create that would help more than one of the classes that you teach?

Who is one other teacher that you can invite to your class, or pre-record a video with, taking advantage of online learning and collaboration?