The perspective of a current online grade 7-8 Algebra 1 teacher and former high school math teacher

Written by Emily Grunwald

The coronavirus has created new challenges for teachers and students. With little time and training, teachers are moving lessons online. I’ve been teaching math online for the Association of Lutheran High Schools Online (ALHSO) program for several years. Here are some things I’ve learned.

• Feedback – Students want to know how they’re doing in specific, personal, and timely ways. I give feedback on all assignments my students submit. (Yes, this is where I spend the bulk of my time these days.) Comments should focus on the student’s individual work and be Product-, Process-, or Praise-related.
  • Product – Comment on what they did.
  • Process – Comment on their methods or conceptual understanding.
  • Praise – Point out what they did correctly or how much of the learning goals they achieved.Try to stick to a small amount of feedback per assignment so that students can use your comments and not get bogged down.

• Expectations – Students need more help and time to work with technology than I expected. Lower your expectations for how much they can accomplish in a day and how much needs to be done to show mastery. Example: While math class filled a 40-minute period in high school, lesson videos for my online course are 15-20 minutes max and filled with “try it” moments, prompting students to pause the video and do an example, then view the process once they restart the video.
• Engagement – I use a mix of online quizzes and games for short practice after a lesson video and then have students use pencil/paper for their daily math practice. Changing activities helps keep them focused just like in class. Giving students opportunities to collaborate with peers and opportunities to redo or correct their own work during a unit can break up the monotony and provide them another expert to learn from.
• Schedule – Using multiple methods of sharing assignments and deadlines seems to work best for my age range. Some students (and their parents) like a shared Google calendar, and others prefer a PDF they can print off and check as they complete each unit’s work. Set up calendars by unit, not month, so it’s easy to send out with the start of each chapter.
• Try something – The worst that happens is you or your students say, “Well, that didn’t work.” Each semester I adjust the pace of lessons, modify length or type of assignments, and try different partners/work groups. Student survey responses let me know what they like, and their comments let me know how stressed they feel about the pace of lessons.
• Let go of late work – Last year I let go of adjusting grades for late work, and it has been incredibly freeing. Coming from a high school teacher perspective, I originally brought penalties for late work into my course. Letting go of penalizing late work has freed up the time I spent keeping track of how late things were and given me more time to focus on writing great feedback to students. I still hold students accountable for completing all work; I just have taken the behavior problems out of a student’s academic grade. In the crazy situation you have been dumped into, the last thing you need to worry about is late grades.
• Teaming up with parents is extremely important – I work much more closely with parents of my online students than I did with parents of my traditional high school students. Parents are my support when I can’t keep a kid in at recess to get their work done.
• Give yourself a break – It took me months of work on the back end to create an entire course online so that all materials were ready to go and I only needed to monitor for issues and give student feedback during the semester. Don’t expect to transition quickly and teach like normal.
• Feedback is time-consuming – Managing student work and communicating with students and parents take me much longer than in the classroom. Go easy on yourself and your students, and select only those assignments/activities that will really demonstrate their level of understanding on a topic. Make simple, rote, or skill-based assignments complete/incomplete or pass/fail to speed up your record keeping.
• Video chat – Google Meet is a great way to connect with students and give additional help. I have never met any student I taught online, but through video chats I have gotten to see their personalities and learn about their home lives.
• Beg, borrow, and use – Use ALL the great resources teachers have already created. Since your students are working from home, you might not have a tight of web filters to deal with.
  • YouTube – I have utilized so many great lesson videos other teachers have posted over the years. Searching for quality material can still take less time than creating from scratch. Try searching by textbook title and lesson for specific content—math especially!
  • Khan Academy – You could complicate matters and have logins so you can assign work and track it, but I just share links to the quizzes and practice problems I want students to do. When they are done, they screenshot the page to show the title and their score and submit it to me.
  • IXL – A free account only gets you 10 problems per day, but often that amount of practice is a great way to let students see if they “get it” or not after watching a lesson video. Again, a screenshot of the title and score shows you how they did.
  • Flipgrid – Since I teach math, we don’t use Flipgrid for homework-related questions often, but it’s an engaging way to have students answer questions and learn from each other. Teachers can moderate student comments before others can view them, and students can view each other’s answers later.

Emily Grunwald (MLC ’08, MS Ed-Instruction ’16) teaches for the Association of Lutheran High Schools Online (ALHSO).