Create These Five Types Of Interactions To Engage Students In Online Teaching.

This article is part of a series on the pedagogy of effective online teaching and learning to engage students in active learning tasks.

Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash

The general notions about students’ online learning experiences this year being meaningless and boring are not far off center. Social media are filled with memes of parents and students sitting through long sedating Zoom calls, which in majority of cases most clearly were meant only to putter through the required seat time to get paid somehow. The end result seemed a net loss of learning in this transition from in-school learning to online learning, by most anecdotal accounts. The following graph from the Collaborative on Student Growth at NWEA confirms these apprehensions of a probable net loss in Reading and Math scores over the summer this year. If we do not train teachers on the pedagogy of effective online teaching, it’s like paying them to un-educate our children.

In this teach-from-home phase, parents were unhappy. Neighbors were unhappy. Kids loved the absence of any accountable engagement in this environment and the teachers ducked behind the lack of any pedagogical training on how to teach online effectively. Topping it all was the usual wailing for the lack of resources in technology.

Yet, in spite of the hurried and involuntary nature of this transition from in-class teaching to online teaching, a quick PD primer for teachers on the pedagogy of effective and authentic student engagement early on in this phase could have resulted in more engaging Zoom calls and more meaningful student assignments. Nonetheless, since online teaching is here to stay for a foreseeable future, we can still catch up to what we might have missed so far.

Five Teaching and Learning Interactions That We Must Replicate Online

Following are the five ubiquitous knowledge transactions that happen during any effective teaching and learning whether online or in-person.

1. Student-Teacher Interactions: This is the direct instruction part of a lesson. Teachers asking questions of students to check for their understanding; student questioning of teachers asking for clarifications fall under these kind of interactions. These interactions provide foundations for introducing new topics or explaining complex subjects through direct teacher demonstrations or engaging students in one-to-one or one-to-whole group discussions. For any online lesson to be highly effective, the strategies and the technology used must provide for adequate opportunities to promote student-teacher interactions.
2. Student-Student Interactions: Interactions at this level yield the dual objectives of social and collaborative skills These interactions take place when students are working in small groups or engaged with each other in online learning communities created on social media. Student interactions with each other whether in the spirit of academic competition or of interdependent collaborative tasks or assignments allow for achieving social as well as curricular objectives at this level. Effective online lessons demonstrate conscious attempts in making spaces for such student-to-student interactions.
3. Student-Technology Interactions: This is the medium through which most of the learning is beamed through. In the absence of any physical tools of in-class learning, teachers must ensure students not only have adequate access to the required technology tools of learning, they also have training and facility to use such tools. If learning is hampering because of students’ inability to use technology efficiently, teachers must be able to step in to provide quick training and troubleshooting if needed.
4. Student-Content Interactions: In an earlier article I had recommended students spend at least 70–80% of their time engaged with the content. This is where the teachers’ time spent on researching and creating engaging content comes into play. The content must pique student curiosity. Such content shall not only be culturally responsive, it’s also academically challenging enough to satisfy the basic element of sparking human curiosity — the element of ‘joyful exploration.’ Such content must provide a path to joyful exploration when students are treading on it.
5. Teacher-Technology Interactions: Whether revealed or concealed, resistance to learning and adopting new technology for online learning is like running a marathon limping with Achilles heel. You can still putter though a 40-minute Zoom call with droning monologues or gesture teaching, but student learning outcomes will only serve as weight plates on the learning limbs in the above learning graph. In these interactions, teacher training comes in contact with the pedagogy of effective online teaching. It’s not only a teacher’s facility in using hardware technology, it’s also the selection of software and appropriate features of technology that fulfill the needs of aforementioned teaching and learning transactions. And this is where the educational leadership mostly dropped the ball. This is where the pedagogy of online teaching meets the pedagogy of online learning. Whether it is through self learning or the districts provide teacher training on the principles, the tools, and the strategies for effective online teaching and learning pedagogy, such knowledge is imperative to creating engaging interactive online lessons and to stem the loss of learning while we teach from home.

The next article in this series will detail the strategies teachers can use to create and promote these five knowledge transactions in their online teaching.

Note: This article is part of a series of collections that makes the basis for Dr. H. M. Saleem’s LIVE Interactive Online Workshop series: The Best Practices For Effective Online Teaching and Learning. To know more about this workshop series and to register for the upcoming schedule, please visit www.keynote180.com.