Partners in Surviving Virtual Education

Classroom Assessment/Activities Techniques – CATs

Part 1 – A Guide for Faculty and Teaching Assistants

Part 2 – Selected CATs with descriptions and strategies

A Guide for Faculty and Teaching Assistants

The following guide is designed to explain and give examples of how in-class assessment can enhance university teaching and learning. These techniques are based on the work of Angelo and Cross (1993).

What Are CATs?

Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs) are, typically, ungraded activities conducted in the classroom setting. Their purpose is to provide the instructor feedback on whether or not students understand course material so that adjustments can be made before the end of the term. Frequent use of CATs also can assure students that the instructor takes a genuine, active interest in their learning process throughout the course, before the summative assessment (e.g., final exam) is given at the end of the term.

Why Should I Use CATs?

Frequent use of CATs:

• Provides regular feedback about student learning, addressing difficulties and misunderstanding before heavily-weighted assessments.
• Models learning as an ongoing and evolving process that can be modified as needed.
• Provides students with a means of gauging their own learning practices and then modify study strategies as appropriate.
• Helps students feel less anonymous in large class settings, since it is concrete evidence that the instructor cares about student learning.
• Provides “food for thought” for instructors as they reflect on their teaching and on a particular course at the end of term.

Implementation and Examples of CATs

Tips on implementation:

• Start off simple by choosing a technique that easily fits your teaching style and classroom time limits.
• Conduct at least one CAT before the first major assignment, so that you can intercept any problems or questions before the fact.
• Don’t feel obligated to do a CAT every day or every week. You’ll create information overload for yourself and your students.
• When you do any CAT, explain its purpose and your goal clearly to students.
• Report your findings to your students and let them know what you plan to do in terms of their feedback.

Selected CATs, or Classroom Assessment Techniques, for Use in Sparking & Assessing Students’ Learning
Organized by Prep Levels, from Low to Medium to High

Name	Description	What to do with the data	Prep Levels
Minute paper	Commonly administered at the end of class, the minute paper typically asks “What was the most important concept you learned in class today?” or, “What do you see at 1 or 2 main points of today’s activities/lecture/discussion?” to gain a sense of student comprehension related to the day’s specific focus. Prompts can also pose reflection-oriented questions.	Review responses and note any useful comments. During the next class period emphasize the issues illuminated by your students’ comments. For a helpful inventory of comprehension and reflection questions, see theOnCourse Minute Paper resource. This writing often provides the foundation for the “Think * Pair * Share” strategy: students write, then talk in pairs or trios about ideas, with some sharing with the entire class.	Prep: Low In class: Low Analysis: Low
Chain notes	Students pass around an envelope on which the teacher has written one question related to the class session. When the envelope reaches a student they write a brief response to the question, returns the response sheet to the envelope, and passes it to a next student.	Go through the student responses and determine the best criteria for categorizing the data with the goal of detecting response patterns. Discuss the patterns of responses with your students.	Prep: Low In class: Low Analysis: Low
Focused listing	In a given time period, students write down as many ideas that are closely related to a single important term, name, or concept. Useful in large & small courses in which a large amount of new information is regularly introduced.	The simplest way is to sort the responses into “related” or “unrelated.” Then you can classify the responses according to the type or degree of relation to the focus topic (e.g., examples, definitions, illustrations; primary, secondary, tertiary relations).	Prep: Low In class: Low Analysis: Low
Application cards	After teaching about an important theory, principle, or procedure, ask students to write down at least one context-specified application for what they have just learned..	Quickly read once through the application and categorize them according to their quality. Pick out a broad range of examples and present them to the class.	Prep: Low In class: Low Analysis: Medium
Approximate analogies	To find out whether students understand the relationship between two concepts, the complete the second half of an analogy – A is to B as X is to Y – for which their instructor has supplied the first half (A is to B).	Quickly sort the responses into three piles, “good,” “poor/wrong,” and “in doubt.” Go over the “in doubt” pile several times to exhaust it. Select examples from each group to bring to the class and discuss what makes the analogy a good/poor choice.	Prep: Low In class: Low Analysis: Medium
Difficulties / Muddy point	Ask students to write an informal response to one question: “What was the muddiest point in _____?” The focus could be a lecture, a discussion, homework, a play, or a film.	Quickly read through at least half of the responses, looking for common types of muddy points. Sort them by affinity. Use a principle (number, concepts, skills) to decide which to deal with in class.	Prep: Low In class: Low Analysis: Low
Insights / Clear skies	As with the Muddy Point prompt, ask students to write a response to a single question: “What was the clearest point for you in ___? The focus here could be a reading, presentation, in class discussion/activity, or class prep task.	Quickly read through at least half of the responses, looking for a pattern in what students identify as points of understanding/connection related to course materials/concepts. Sort them by affinity to begin determining what to address and/or how to build on these in class.	Prep: Low In class: Low Analysis: Low
Directed paraphrasing	Students write a “translation” of something they have just learned for a specified individual, audience, or purpose audience to demonstrate comprehension and engage retrieval.	Categorize student responses according to characteristics you feel are most important. Analyze those responses both within and across categories, noting ways you could address student needs.	Prep: Low In class: Medium Analysis: Medium
3 – 2 – 1 response	As preparation for class: Students read/annotate assigned readings, review in order to respond to the following: ● 3 things learned – ideas, issues, insights. ● 2 examples of how to apply the ideas, issues, insights to case challenge. ● 1 unresolved “something,” which you can express as a question, name as an area of confusion, or point to as a difficulty.	In small discussion groups, individuals can draw on what they’ve written to set out the group’s multiple and/or shared perspectives, and then collaborate to create a 3-2-1 that can be shared with the entire class for follow up discussion. Teachers might collect each group-generated 3-2-1 response to review and draw on as the basis for follow up full group discussion. Evaluate the individual and/or group writings to assess students’ critical reading acumen.	Prep: Low In class: Medium Analysis: Medium
One-sentence summary	Students summarize knowledge of a topic by constructing a single sentence that answers the questions, “Who does what to whom, when, where, how, and why?” The purpose is for students to define features of an idea.	Evaluate the quality of each summary quickly and holistically. Note whether students have identified the essential concepts of the class topic and their interrelationships. Share observations with your students.	Prep: Low In class: Medium Analysis: Medium
Background knowledge probe	Before introducing an important new concept, subject, or topic, students respond to questions that will probe their existing knowledge of that concept, subject or topic.	Classify responses into groups (e.g., prepared/non-prepared; no knowledge/erroneous knowledge/OK knowledge). Use the information to revise your plans for teaching this topic.	Prep: Medium In class: Low Analysis: Medium
Goal ranking/ matching	Used in the first week of class; students list the learning goals they hope to achieve through the course and rank the relative importance of those goals.	Look for patterns in students’ goals and categorize them accordingly. Contrast the list and rankings with your own ranked goals. Report back indicating how and why you will include (or not) the goals mentioned by the students.	Prep: Medium In class: Low Analysis: Low/ Medium
Misconception check	Students respond to a questionnaire that elicits information about ideas and beliefs that may hinder or block further learning.	Organize the information to answer these questions: What misperceptions or preconceptions do students have that may interfere with learning? How many students have them? How deeply embedded are these?	Prep: Medium In class: Low Analysis: Medium
Memory matrix	Students fill in cells of a two-dimensional diagram for which the instructor has provided labels. For example, in a music course labels might consist of periods (Baroque, Classical) by countries (Germany, France); students enter composers in cells to demonstrate their ability to remember and classify key concepts.	Tally the numbers of correct and incorrect responses in each cell. Analyze differences both between and among the cells. Look for patterns among the incorrect responses and try to determine what the cause might be.	Prep: Medium In class: Medium Analysis: Medium
Student generated test questions	Ask students to write test questions and model answers for specified topics. This will engage students in evaluating course topics, reflecting on what they understand, and in learning to develop good questions.	Make a rough tally of the questions your students propose and the topics that they cover. Evaluate the questions and use the good ones as prompts for discussion. You may also want to revise the questions and use them on the upcoming exam.	Prep: Medium In class: High Analysis: High
RSQC2	This 5-step protocol – Recall, Summarize, Question, Comment, and Connect – can be used to engage students in focusing on a previous class/lab session, a section/unit at its mid-point or closing stages, or even to focus on single reading/lecture or set of either. Teachers develop one question/prompt for each of the five steps, aiming to engage students in gathering and synthesizing data, expressing new questions, and connecting the pieces to express new understandings and/or insights.	The five steps can be woven into a class session, providing a framework for actively engaging students throughout a lecture or activity; the Recall and Summarize steps can be embedded in students’ assigned preparing for class work, serving as the “ticket in” for a class session. The development of questions provides opportunities for students to engage in peer learning and to ask authentic questions during class. By using note cards or student response systems allowing for paragraph answers, instructors can collect Comment and Connect responses, for review, reviewing for levels of understanding as part of planning a next presentation, an upcoming review session, follow up homework, and/or a general report to students,	Prep: Medium In class: High Analysis: High

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Discussion Learning – Ideas from Stephen Brookfield / Workshop Packet, available at www.stephenbrookfield.com

Learning Audit

Might be linked to a reading activities across a period of time, to a lab/experiment, to internships/
field placements/community projects, and so on:

• What do you know now that you didn’t know this time last week?
• What can you do now that you couldn’t do this time last week?
• What can you teach someone else to know or do now that you couldn’t teach them this time last week?

Discussion Audit

When moving from small to large class discussions one way to make the transition is to use a discussion inventory. Here each member of the small groups writes a brief response to one of the following questions:

• What was the most important point made in the small group discussion you’ve just had?
• What was the most confusing or puzzling point made in the small group discussion you’ve just been part of?
• What new learning happened in the small group discussion you’ve just had?
• Based on your small group discussion, what idea do you think it would be good explore more deeply in the next part of class?

Discussion Inventory

One approach we have found useful is to tell students at the start of a particular class that you will be saving five to ten minutes towards the end of that day’s discussion period to give some of your own reflections on the discussion. We view this as keeping a ‘Discussion Inventory’ that will be unpacked just before students leave. The inventory is essentially a list of the things we want to make sure students are exposed to before they exit the room that day. It is blank at the start of the discussion but fills up as we jot down errors we hear, perspectives that we feel are glossed over or ignored, and important oppositional views that we think are too easily rushed past. A good time to unpack this inventory is immediately prior to inviting anyone in the group to have the last word that day (itself an idea picked up from Ira Shor (1996)).
In the five-minute inventory time we provide information about perspectives that were missed during the discussion and we offer alternative interpretations that students did not wish to consider. This is also an excellent time for us to draw students’ attention to what we consider to be major errors of understanding we have noticed being expressed during the conversation. Sometimes in the middle of a discussion that is going well someone makes a statement that we know shows a complete misunderstanding of a concept, or is clearly factually wrong, but we feel uncomfortable interrupting the flow of talk at that particular time and singling that contributor out as somehow lacking. When that erroneous statement is made we jot down a note on our inventory pad to make sure we address it in the time we’ve reserved for ourselves towards the end of the class that day. So the discussion inventory allows us to correct mistakes and to tackle repressive tolerance by making sure participants do not leave the room without being exposed to a perspective we feel it is necessary for them to encounter.

Minute-Paper Prompts – Changing Up the Questions You Ask

from p. 1 OnCourse Minute Paper resource – http://oncourseworkshop.com/self-awareness/one-minute-paper/
Over the years, I have used a wide range of questions as prompts for minute papers. Below, I have listed some of my most frequently used minute-paper questions and attempted to categorize them in terms of what cognitive or affective dimension of the student’s learning experience they are designed to prompt.

Interest:

• Without looking at your notes, what was most memorable or stands out in your mind about today’s class?
• What was the most surprising and/or unexpected idea expressed in today’s discussion?
• Looking back at your notes, what would you say was the most stimulating idea discussed in today’s class?
• For you, what interesting questions remain unanswered about today’s topic?

Relevance:

• In your opinion, what was the most useful idea discussed in today’s class?
• During today’s class, what idea(s) struck you as things you could or should put into practice?
• What example or illustration cited in today’s class could you relate to the most?

Attitudes/Opinions:

• Would you agree or disagree with this statement: . . .? Why?
• What was the most persuasive or convincing argument (or counterargument) that you heard expressed in today’s discussion?
• Was there a position taken in today’s class that you strongly disagreed with, or found to be disturbing and unsettling?
• What idea expressed in today’s class strongly affected or influenced your personal opinions, viewpoints, or values?

Analysis:

• What did you perceive to be the major purpose or objective of today’s class?
• What do you think was the most important point or central concept communicated during today’s presentation?

Conceptual Connections:

• What relationship did you see between today’s topic and other topics previously covered in this course?
• What was discussed in class today that seemed to connect with what you are learning or have learned in other course(s)?

Course/Assignment Closure – Practices Used by CEI staff
3-2-1 Have your students write down

• three key concepts they’ll remember,
• two ways they can apply what they’ve learned, and
• one burning question they still have.

If you do this during this penultimate week of the semester, you’ll have opportunities for working with students to address those burning questions ahead of finals. And, you will learn not only what students consider the most salient aspects of your course, but also gain a sense of how they might use them.

Headline

The “ask” is for students to write a headline using just six to eight words to summarise what they’ll remember most from this course. Whether the course meets online or in person, you can collect these – on index cards, via ChimeIn or a GoogleDoc or the white board, see what themes emerge, and frame a closing discussion about alignments and divergences among the responses. The headlines can also help instructors verify whether intended messages have resonated with students.

Letter to future students

One person responding to a Chronicle invitation to share “closure” activities recommended having students write a letter to future students, giving them advice on how they can do well in your course. This can give your students a chance to reflect on what they’ve learned and you a chance to see what they think is important. With permission, you could share these letters with future students. You could also consider, as Stephen Brookfield does, asking current students if they would be willing to tape responses through FlipGrid or come to campus at the beginning of the next semester to share these thoughts with your new class. Brookfield notes that former students, especially those who were initially resistant, often have more credibility with their peers and that current students will buy into what they have to say with much greater ease.

Class closure cards

The questions teachers create for this card deck could include:

• What was the big picture of this course?
• What information was most surprising?
• What areas need further research for your to fully understand the complexity of this topic?
• How did your view of the subject change over the course of the class?
• Have you changed your opinion of the course topic as a result of this course? If so, how? If not, why?

Students work in small groups or teams that have worked together across a term – each group draws a card, then prepares a response to share with the class; 10 minutes for groups to prepare, each getting 5 minutes to share.

Acknowledge peer support

Provide a few moments in class for students to stand up and approach a few classmates to thank them for any help or insight they may have provided for their progress and learning in the class. Students might share some generalisations from this on the whiteboard as part of moving from the individual interactions to a fuller class discussion.

Page 1 text drawn from George Washington University’s Teaching and Learning Center webpage on CATs.

Pages 2-4 developed by Anita Gonzalez and Ilene Alexander for the UMTC Preparing Future Faculty Program.

Nine suggestions to help you provide online learners with class norms and expectations and a sense of community.

By Heather Wolpert-Gawron

MANAGING ONLINE LEARNING

If you are facilitating an online learning environment, here are nine suggestions for successfully managing your group.

1. Build an engaging online environment. Elementary teachers create a habitat that has multiple areas—for example, a library/reading area, work areas, and areas for discussion. Create virtual spaces in your blended classroom that serve different purposes. Perhaps there’s a “lounge” or chat room for side conversations?
   There’s the area for your agenda, syllabus, assignments, and deadlines. Have a “parking lot” area for questions that can be answered by fellow participants (and regularly checked by the instructor as well). You should also have an office time and space. Some teachers use Google Hangout or Skype, but you can also go a step further and use Minecraft or Second Life.
2. Build community. Students won’t treat each other well if they don’t know each other. Think of this step as proactive classroom management. By building community right from the get-go and encouraging it throughout the course of the class, you’ll save yourself from some issues later on.
   Present norms and expectations, and build some together. Have small groups create contracts about how to work together. There’s nothing more frustrating to an online student than feeling isolated during group work. And frustration leads to missed deadlines, growly posts, and rude interactions. Find ways for participants to learn about each other, to learn about you, and to find commonalities in their experiences. Humanize the voices behind the writing.
3. Curate answers in an organized way. Students can get ornery when they’re confused. Find ways to curate resources and responses to questions so that participants can find them easily. There’s productive struggle and there’s disorganization of resources. Manage the latter and students will be more likely to work through the former. Don’t just make organization practical—make it user-friendly.
4. Be present. Don’t leave the learning for the students to do independently without your help. Make sure you and they are participating in discussion threads. When a discussion is dying down, inject your thoughts into it to give it a boost. Many teachers avoid actively teaching how to be independent and assume that because the student is online, they must know how already. False. So be sure to give scaffolds and strategies to help students become more independent.
5. Establish norms for office hours and video conferencing. My norms include a dress code when meeting with me on Google Hangout (no pajamas). I also teach my middle schooler’s how to ask questions without interrupting the current speaker. For instance, when on camera with a group of talking heads, I ask students to hold up the index finger to indicate a response to what’s being discussed and two fingers to indicate they want to bring up something new.
6. Don’t group randomly. Use criteria to group participants. (Don’t know your online learners well? Here are some strategies to change that.)
7. Teach about plagiarism. Check with your institution and use simple strategies for ensuring work is original or cited. It’s easier to cheat online, but it’s also easier to catch improprieties. Be proactive and teach what plagiarism is and how to avoid it.
8. Don’t shy away from difficult conversations. Sometimes online teachers avoid going down the rabbit hole when issues occur. Stay on top of issues as they arise. Immediately.
9. Use various means to contact participants. Contact small groups of students and also the whole class routinely, but know when it’s time to do a behind-the-scenes intervention and email a participant directly (or even call). Use this sparingly and it will have impact.
   Online learning can be an amazing experience for both the educator and the student. But the teacher must model awareness that there are humans at every keyboard. Set up a recognizable environment that is structured and engaging. Make sure it honors the learners in it, and you’ll have fewer issues to manage in your online class.

Reference: https://www.edutopia.org/article/extending-classroom-management-online

Welcome. My name is Charity Dacey. I’m an assistant professor and the associate dean in the School of Education here at Felician. We’d like to welcome you today to our session about making the most of virtual learning. Now I’d like to have my co-presenters introduce themselves.

Good afternoon. I’m Andrea Flower. And I’m an associate professor here in the School of Education at Felician University.
Hello. My name is Annette Rycharski. And I’m an assistant professor in the School of Education.

So what we’re going to be talking about today is how we’re preparing teachers here at the university, preservice and practicing teachers, as well as the ways in which family can support students virtually. We’re going to do this by exploring math and English language arts. And that really gets to the heart of the collaboration that happens each and every day between educators and parents.

Obviously students go to school. It’s been about six months so far of virtual schooling. We’ve had many models– high flex, hybrid, face to face, and virtual. But regardless of modality, there is no doubt that both parents and teachers affect student learning each and every day, which means we together have the power to influence students’ upbringing, development, and learning.

A little bit about math just to get started. One of the things that we wanted to discuss in the virtual environment, math anxiety can be more pronounced than even in face-to-face learning settings. It is very real. In fact, 93% of adult Americans experience anxiety in math. Of that 93%, 17% really suffer from high levels of math anxiety.

What is math anxiety? I think we all have a general understanding. But I really like Richardson’s definition because this feeling of tension and anxiety is at the level in math that actually interferes with the manipulation of numbers and the solving of mathematical problems. This is something that takes the level of anxiety to a new kind of severe.

Ordinary life in academic situations then become one in which if you look at the graphic on the right, students are experiencing stomachaches, rapid heart rates, rapid breathing. And one of the things that we need to do a better job of as educators and parents is recognizing when this has really gotten to the level of math anxiety.

So one of the things that we can all do in terms of recognizing it is looking at these physical symptoms, as well as some of the symptoms that can be exhibited in the form of negative self-talk,

low math achievement, and really a generalized avoidance of math. If you hear your child saying, “I can’t do math, I don’t like it, it’s too hard, I never use it in the real world,” that can be an indicator.

This disdain for math is exhibited even in some of our preservice teachers. In the United States, we have a culture in which we tend to avoid math in general anyway. And we want to overcome that math phobia.

One of the ways in which we can do that– we’re going to shift gears at this point. Now that we’ve talked about the problem, we want to talk a little bit about the strategies that we can utilize to overcome it. So in the classroom, teachers obviously really focus on trying to reduce the pressure associated with time tests.

We try to focus on the process of learning and emphasizing that over memorization. But there are things that we can do collectively. And this happens in a virtual setting at home, in the classroom. All of them really stem from this idea of the growth mindset.
And so if you look at the visual on the left, and you see where students often exhibit some of the markers where they’ll say, this is too hard. We want to constantly work to reframe that and focus in on this may take some time and some effort. But that’s a good thing. We’re looking at the process here, not the end result.

If you hear students say, I just can’t do math, if it’s your child at home, we want to start reshaping that conversation and saying more things like, I’m going to train my brain in math. Is this good enough? How about is it really my best work?

All of these markers or language that we use for not only our feedback but the ways in which we encourage students really do help provide that positive reinforcement, that growth mindset that we want to foster, where eventually we’ll have students move from an external reward type of place for doing the work, a grade, to a more intrinsic motivation– enjoying the actual learning in the process.

So we can make math more fun focusing in on games at home after the virtual instruction for the day is done. There’s so many applications out there. Prodigy is just one of them. There is math in every single area– content area from first grade through eighth grade.

One of the other things that we want to try to do is get students to actually read more math books. There’s a great app called Bedtime Math. This really also helps reinforce and encourage this idea that math is a process. And it’s a learning opportunity. It’s not about just getting the right answer or

memorizing.

And then finally, really tutoring can help. That we try to tend to avoid right out of the gate. But one-on-one tutoring sessions really can help remedy high math anxious situations and get kids into a mindset where they have the space and the time to answer those questions that really mean unpacking their thinking behind an assignment or a problem.

So to wrap up, in terms of math anxiety, the few things to really remember in terms of working with your child in math– always strive for meaning-making. The best way of doing this is really getting out the manipulatives– LEGO blocks, small snack items, Cheerios. At home, it’s OK to touch these things.

In the classroom setting, we really can’t share objects as much these days. But you can reinforce what is going on in the lesson by drawing pictures even and worrying less about the numbers and the actual answers but more about the sense-making, the problem-solving, that critical thinking.

So that should be the focus of talk, of conversation. How did you get that answer? Can you tell me a little bit more about your thinking there? And all of these things will really put a dent into math anxiety. Putting on some nice music in the background doesn’t hurt either. Giving students a nice, well-lit area to work, giving them time, making sure they’ve had a good snack and a break after school before you dive into the math all really help combat the effects of math anxiety.

Now I’m going to turn it over to Dr. Flower, who’s going to provide to you a model of math instruction so you can really see what this means.

So one of the models of math instruction that we use here at Felician with our preservice teachers is concrete representational and abstract– a model for math instruction. And we can use this model when we work with children at home as well. And the concrete representational abstract model is not in Masonic curriculum. It’s a framework for how we present math concepts to children.

So in the concrete level, you can see that students manipulate hands-on materials. So as Dr. Dacey was saying a minute ago, you get out the manipulatives. It can be things as simple as small snack items like goldfish or pretzels or nonsnack items like coins or LEGOs or any kind of math chips or blocks that you have at home. Doesn’t even have to be math chips– LEGOs, unifix cubes, wooden blocks, anything that they can manipulate to practice a concept.

And it’s called concrete because they’re actually touching the materials. And as Dr. Dacey also said, in school, we can’t do this as much right now with concrete materials and share them. Students can still practice with their own materials even at school that have come out of a bag for themselves. But

at home, it becomes even that much easier.

One of the things that research has noticed is that we don’t spend enough time in the concrete phase of instruction. We don’t spend enough time working with children through manipulating objects to really understand what’s happening mathematically before we move on to the representational or even to the abstract. Oftentimes, what happens is we move too quickly straight to the abstract. But for a moment, let’s talk about representational.

So after concrete, we work with the representational phase. And this is very similar to the concrete phase, except we have put the manipulatives to the side. We have started drawing pictures, creating diagrams, even watching the teacher now or the parent moving or manipulating the hands-on materials but still working with objects and 10 frames, maybe using a number grid, maybe writing on a part-part-whole model as we do with say in second grade for addition and subtraction instruction. Representational is all about that drawing and the diagramming.

From there, we move to the abstract. And this is where we get back to the numbers and mathematical symbols. So notice in concrete and representational, we didn’t really work with the numbers or symbols as much as we were working with the concept.
Those two phases may help to reduce anxiety for some of our students because they have the opportunity to make meaning. They’re making sense. They’re having conversations before they’re being asked to do anything with numbers, which is that anxiety-producing element for a lot of children.

So the abstract, the numbers, the mathematical symbols, now working on minus and equals and plus. And even on as you go through K12 into algebra and into later math, we can work across this model of math instruction.

So this is just a quick example of let’s take, for example, if we were working with end of second grade-early third grade, and we were working on beginning multiplication. So in the classroom, our teachers– and we do this here at the university– we would train them to help the students make arrays.

An array is just a collection of rows and columns. And the students would actually go through the process of using blocks, some kind of math manipulatives, counters, something like that, to make an array, for example, in this one, to make an array with two rows and four columns.

In a virtual environment, though, we might need to do something where we actually have the students drag and drop on a slide like this. So if I was doing this in a virtual environment, I might have all of these squares piled up into a pile in the corner. And I would ask the students to drag and drop the squares to make an array with two rows and four columns.

After they do that, they go through the process. In the concrete phase, they would go through and actually touch the concrete counters on their table. In the virtual environment, in the concrete phase, not as easy to do. But at home, you can do that with your child. Here it’s more representational because it’s on a slide. But they would go through. And they would actually look and count how many squares are there in this array. In this case, there are 8.

To get towards the abstract phase, we would have them then write– and remember this is beginning multiplication. So we’re trying to make connections between multiplication and addition, which is a concept they already know. They write the repeated addition problem. So in this case, 4 plus 4, or we could even have some flexible thinking here where it doesn’t have to just be 4 plus 4.

But they could write the repeated addition problem of 2 plus 2 plus 2 plus 2, which is also 8. And that way they can connect those two repeated addition problems is either 4 plus 4 or adding 2 four different times. That helps with flexible thinking when they get into multiplication, and they write the multiplication number sentence. So in this case– 4 two times, 4 times 2, or 2 four times, 2 times 4.

So just to make a quick case for using arrays for conceptual understanding, it’s not always obvious to children that 3 times 7, for example, and 7 times 3 are the same thing. And we use the equal sign equal, meaning the same as. So 3 times 7 is the same as 7 times 3. They don’t always just understand that straight out of the gate.

And likewise a picture with 3 sets of 7 objects will not be seen necessarily as 7 piles of 3 objects right away. And on a number line if we were using that tool, 7 hops of 3, while it does land at 21, it’s not always clear that 3 hops of 7 will also land at 21.
So making those connections for children is sometimes a little bit difficult. But an array, on the other hand, as illustrated here, can be quite powerful in illustrating it. So you can see that we can have 3 rows each containing 7, or we can look at it as we have 7 columns each containing 3. And students can see this and move back and forth between these two ideas.

Thank you so much, Dr. Flower. Now we’re going to shift to Professor Rycharski, who’s going to talk about making the most of a virtual learning environment and how read-alouds can accent as a

strategy.

Thank you, Dr. Dacey. The read-aloud strategy is something that we teach our teacher candidates to use in classrooms. And it really focuses on emergent readers. Those are our young learners who are three and four-year-old and all the way up through third grade.
So the read-aloud is a connecting bridge from what’s taught in the classroom that can be then reinforced at home. And it’s the single most important activity for success in reading as research tells us. And what we’re going to look at today for a springboard into the modeling of the read-aloud strategy is using the book The Mitten by Jan Brett.

And it’s about a little boy who lost his mitten and the animals that make the mitten their home. And if you want to know how the story ends, you’re going to have to share that story and read it aloud to your child to find out.

What are the benefits of reading aloud to your child? We know that children love to be read to. And as parents, we enjoy reading to them. But it’s an activity that has a lot of benefits to the future success of your child as a good listener and a strong reader.
So when we read aloud to our children, we’re modeling fluent reading for them. We’re helping to increase their oral language development and strengthening their listening and comprehension skills. So while we’ll use the story The Mitten, I’d just like you to keep in mind that any of these activities can be used with most narrative stories.

Prereading questions, during reading questions, and postreading questions are key to the read-aloud strategy. So it’s based upon questioning of your child. And the prereading questions help stimulate your child’s thinking about what the story will be about and who the characters and what will happen to the characters.

So the prereading questions focus on your child making predictions about what the story will be about. And these types of questions throughout the read-aloud will help stimulate your child’s thinking at a higher level so developing critical thinking skills within the young reader.

Questions while you read the story helps your child focus on the action and the activities in the story and also guides their understanding of the story. And after the read-aloud, the questions help the child retell the story, recall the story elements, and gives you an opportunity to go back and check your child’s predictions. You can ask the child what did they like best about the story. And let’s go and look at your predictions. Did what you think would happen in the story actually happen?

So again, you can change The Mitten to any other story that you’d like to do a read-aloud and use this similar questions that are in this presentation for prereading, during the reading read-aloud, and then at the end of the story.

One of the activities that is beneficial to your child are retelling activities. And these activities prompt engagement with the child, summarize the story, and strengthen his or her comprehension by using manipulatives to retell or recall what happened to the story. So these are manipulatives like story props, stick puppets, masks, picture cards.

Sequencing what happens first, what happened next, can all be encouraged through the retelling activities. And it’s this part of the read-aloud where you can use manipulatives with your child. And one of the sites that I used for this presentation is by the author Jan Brett. Her website shares free coloring, video, and activity pages that go along with each of her books.

The extension activities are opportunities for you and your child to be involved in the read-aloud together. So you can make one of the easiest ones to make are character trait questions, the “who am I” question cards. And so you would take one of the characters and just come up with three simple questions as I have here. Who has strong legs? Who is full of energy? Who likes to hop and jump?

And then the child can either tell you or can select a picture card that’s the answer. And likewise, you can have your child create the “who am I” cards or questions that then you have to answer. So it’s a nice way for parent and child to enjoy the story and the read-aloud together.

And more activities that you can do with your child is just to take like a simple cut-out of a mitten. And because the story is about the mitten, you use that template to have your child come up with a different ending to the story, illustrate a favorite animal, any types of activities that extend the understanding and the enjoyment of the story. And these add to the– these types of activities add to the quality of family time.

And these days now where children are learning online, they’re spending much time in the virtual environment, it’s nice to step away from that environment and do something that is rather simple but beneficial to strengthening the reading skills and the listening skills and a time for you to have more family time together and being involved in activities that are meaningful and fun. And so your child is becoming a better reader and a better listener all the while having fun with you and with the story and the characters in the story.

And this is a page that has some resources for the read-aloud activities. If you’ve never read a Jan Brett book, now’s the time. Go to her site. You’ll see there are numerous activities, songs, videos. You can make cards, any type of downloadable material that goes along with each of her stories. And then there’s also a website that our students like to use that all teachers use– Teachers Pay Teachers. There’s also activities for read-aloud strategies and extended engagement right on that website.

So I would encourage you to continue reading aloud to your child and enjoy. Enjoy being a teacher at one point. And enjoy being the student when your child asks you questions about what’s going on in the story.

So with that, I want to thank Professor Rycharski for going through one of the many ways in which we can use virtual learning as an opportunity to grow and to collaborate. I want to thank Dr. Flower for really diving into a model of math instruction that can help reduce math anxiety.

We here in the School of Education are always available to answer any questions that you have. So you can reach out and email us anything about these two topics in language arts and math but also anything that you might want to inquire about. We are all about bringing together theory and practice.

And the pedagogical skills that teachers need, they need them in person. But they’re also very utilized online. And so we know that by accentuating what they’re doing in their lessons virtually at home, we have many opportunities to make what is an unusual situation one of opportunity. So please reach out, and thank you so much for your time.

Just about every task and activity you carry out in the classroom on a daily basis has a digital equivalent. It’s important to understand that the learning itself doesn’t change, but the delivery method does. The chart below shows specific ways that teaching and learning can transfer to an online environment. Use it to help pick the most effective tools for your course.

Face-to-face classroom	Online classroom
Lectures	Pre-recorded presentations with screen recording software and/or webcam Live sessions using video software like Zoom, Cisco WebEx®, CollaborateVideo, etc. Web pages, shared documents & other media
Learning resources & handouts	YouTube™, Vimeo®, Khan Academy & other third-party links Files uploaded and shared via LMS, email, or shared drive
Teacher-to-student communication	Email or chat Instructor announcements Discussion, assignment & quiz feedback
Student-to-student communication	Email or chat Online discussion boards Discussions using chat or video software
Group work	Offline group projects using collaborative documents Online discussion boards Group work using chat or video software
Office hours	Open office hours using chat or video software One-on-one student meetings using chat or video software
Assignments & assessments	Assignment submissions via email or LMS Online asynchronous discussions LMS or document-based quizzes Graded and non-graded online activities

Explore the complete guide for moving your course online at go.pearson.com/OnlineCourseToolkit
For more tips and resources for working and learning online, visit pearson.com

While social media may sometimes feel like Enemy #1 in the classroom, there are many advantages to using it in your course. When you meet students where they already are, it increases the relevance of the lesson you’re delivering and fosters engagement. Social media is also flexible, allowing users to interact at a level that feels most comfortable to them. And finally, social media gives you the option (depending on the age of your students) of expanding classroom discussions to a larger community that includes subject matter experts.

Twitter	Facebook	Instagram	YouTube	TikTok	Snapchat	Periscope	WhatsApp
Live streaming
Lessons, instructions, feedback & questions (Recorded video)
Instructions, feedback & questions (Text)
Micro-content
Open educational resource sharing
Group work
Topic-based communications
Community building for institutions

Live streaming

Facebook | Instagram | Periscope

While synchronous video chat software is great for small or large group discussions, there are times when you’ll want to deliver a lesson with the full focus on you. (If you have a class with both in-person and virtual students in attendance, live streaming is a great way to reach both groups simultaneously.) Tools such as Facebook Live, Instagram Live, and Periscope allow you to deliver lessons and explain difficult concepts in real time. All have interactive capabilities, so students can ask questions via chat thread and post reactions.
Instagram and Periscope versions are ephemeral, meaning you can continue to share them after broadcast, but they’ll disappear in 24 hours. There are additional workarounds you’ll find to save the videos longer, though you may lose the chat thread. With Facebook, you can post a recording of the video to your timeline for students to rewatch until you decide to delete it.

Lessons, instructions, feedback & questions (Recorded video)

Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube | TikTok | Snapchat | WhatsApp

Pre-recording your videos has the advantage of letting you do multiple takes or make edits, and it allows you to keep the videos available to your students long-term (with the exception of Snapchat). The platform you choose depends on the length and type of content you’re sharing.

Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat each have run-time limitations and are best for quick lessons (think: under a minute) or for brief instructions, feedback, or Q&As. The other platforms support both short- and long-form content.

If you want your video to be available to a larger community, Twitter is a great choice, along with public Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube™ accounts. All have options for privacy settings if that’s your preference.

Consider your chosen platform when you compose a video. Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, and WhatsApp are designed to be viewed on mobile devices, so portrait orientation is best. You can go either way on the other platforms, but landscape is most traditional.

Instructions, feedback, questions & reminders (Text)

Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | TikTok | Snapchat | WhatsApp

Just about every platform has a direct message feature. If you and your class have established a practice of using a particular tool, you can communicate directly through text chat there — at a group level or one-to-one.

On Twitter, you can also send notes or instructions to your students by including an established class hashtag with your post. A private Facebook Group will let you post on the Group wall, which has the advantage of keeping it in context with other content you’ve shared.

For reminders, make sure you’re using a platform’s direct messaging feature or require your students to set up alerts for new posts (in a Facebook Group or for a Twitter hashtag). Creating a standard post that your students have to discover on their own introduces the risk that they may not see it at all.

Micro-content

Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | YouTube | TikTok

In the context of learning, micro-content consists of bite-sized chunks of information — in a variety of media formats — that can both stand alone and fit within a larger lesson. With videos, each chunk is typically under 5 minutes and covers a single, discreet topic. Micro-content is the cornerstone of mobile learning, and if you’re conducting any part of your class via social media, you should assume all or most of your students are accessing via mobile devices.

The application of micro-content on YouTube is pretty straightforward — you can create short, focused videos and share them directly on your YouTube channel or include links or embedded videos on another platform, such as Twitter or Facebook.

Instagram and TikTok are also great for video sharing, and their inherent run-time limitations will help make sure your micro-content stays micro!

Open educational resource sharing

Twitter | Facebook

The internet is a near-endless source of quality educational content if you know where to look. Sharing links via social media can turn that simple URL into an interactive and collaborative experience for your class.

Twitter and Facebook both allow you to share content with your students and have threaded discussions directly in response to it. Facebook shares and discussions will stay private if you conduct them within an invite-only class Group. You can share via Twitter and monitor your students’ tweets by having them use a designated class hashtag. These tweets will be either public or visible to all students’ followers, depending on their settings, but with proper oversight this can be a perfect opportunity to engage experts within the larger community and practice appropriate digital citizenship.

Group work

Facebook | WhatsApp

When students can’t be in the same place or need to work asynchronously, Facebook and WhatsApp are great. With Facebook, it’s easy to set up small, private Groups where students can have discussions, share resources, and post their work. WhatsApp is also a simple way to keep a group chat going and share media.

Topic-based communities

Twitter | Facebook

While direct interaction with the experts isn’t guaranteed, social media lets students occupy the same spaces and closely follow ongoing discussions on specific topics.
Twitter’s biggest benefit for education is the ability to follow the thoughts and activities of subject-matter experts and to keep up with particular topics via relevant hashtags. Facebook communities are established through Groups, which may be open to the public or require you to request access.

Community building for institutions

Twitter | Facebook | Instagram | Snapchat

Many educational institutions have active social accounts to keep their communities informed and connected. For schools with students who attend virtually, this social media-based connection may be as valuable as assemblies, rallies, and other events are to
brick-and-mortar schools.

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat are all common platforms for institution-level accounts that students are likely to seek out and follow. Explore other schools’ social media accounts to see different examples of how they share content to foster community. Depending on the age of the students, these may need to be private accounts, and rules around parental-consent should always be closely examined.

Implementation tips

• Create a test account to get acquainted with a platform
• Have an idea of what you want to accomplish with your social posts and develop clear objectives beforehand
• Depending on the age and experience of your students, consider a preliminary lesson on netiquette and digital citizenship
• Be confident — let your expertise in the subject matter take front stage and don’t get overwhelmed by the bells and whistles
• Be flexible and adaptable, and constantly be on the ball to turn emerging platforms into opportunities for new communication channels

For more tips and strategies from educators, explore the ebook Dare to teach with social media>>