Having side conversations, showing the notebook to the teacher, sitting with colleagues to do group activities, moving the body in the classroom space, experiencing the time of starting and ending school, day in and day out. There are so many meaningful experiences that take place within the physical school settings throughout the knowledge building process!
After children were forced to withdraw from the school environment and the learning process was restricted to their homes, it was crucial to come up with strategies and rituals to make sure these experiences they had in the school setting didn’t just vanish from the children’s lives.
Throughout the transition between face-to-face teaching to remote teaching, we sought to understand, for example, how we could carry out procedural activities at a distance, and how technology could favor this type of learning experience. That is what Year 2 teacher, Débora Pacheco, explains.
“Procedural activities are a big part of Year 2. We were very concerned about how this would play out in the online world. In Year 2, children learn to use the notebook, do group activities, organize their routine and their time, sort their graphic sheets, write cursive letters… They have to learn many different procedures, and it seemed imperative for us to be by their side at all times, closely following their steps, in order for this to happen. We started thinking about how we could use technology to find other ways to develop these activities. So, we thought about how we could use Zoom to have the children raise their hands and wait for their turn to speak, for example. I can use an emoji or press a button to let everyone know I want to speak up. I can form work groups in another way, with the possibility of sharing my screen, looking at images, creating a document with everyone else through this shared screen, learning how to do that without disturbing others, when we’re all editing the same document. So, we started adapting the classroom activities – raising hands, working in groups, organizing activities with cardboard or notebook. We started to adapt everything based on what technology could offer us and how it could help us continue with these activities.”
The teacher also talks about the importance of having rituals in remote teaching so that the children don’t lose their bond with the school environment. “It is important to have a set start time, a scheduled time where everyone joins the Zoom channel, and a Goodbye time, clearly indicating when we’re supposed to return, speaking about the day’s activities and about what worked and what went wrong. Organizing this time, addressing with the children the importance of having a beginning and an end, planning out the week along with them, separating the materials, having them take pictures of activities in their notebooks and sending them to the teacher for some feedback… all of these rites are important for the learning process and to strengthen this bond with the school.”
Débora points out that, because the children have been spending a lot of time sitting in front of a computer, they had to pay special attention to their bodies, making sure they interacted with other spaces and situations. “With that in mind, every Monday, before we start off the day, we always have a different activity, whether it’s dancing, massaging or some other activity involving body movement. Although everything happens through the computer screen, they have a chance to get up and move their bodies for a while. This has been a very important ritual while the children are away from the classroom, which is a physical space where they play and move around differently.”
To maintain the bond with the school and the learning possibilities it offers to the children, teachers are creating different situations that help them remember how things happen in the classroom, as Débora explains. “We’re proposing group activities and leaving them alone for a while in a virtual classroom, so they can have this important time alone, just like they do in the classroom, when the teacher is not by their side all the time and they have some space to talk amongst themselves, without our supervision. The same thing happens in the private chat: we chose to let them have this space, even if the situation is a little bit chaotic. Children have a need to break rules and have side conversations. It’s part of the learning process. With all of this technology at our fingertips, it’s easy to take away the children’s spontaneity. I can mute their microphones, block the chatroom and force them not to experience these chaotic situations of everyone talking over each other in the classroom, which is something we can’t avoid in person. I can’t force children to stop talking in the actual classroom. So, this is another point we’ve considered in remote teaching: letting them express themselves and allowing chaos in an online classroom, running the risk of everyone talking over each other or writing at the same time in the chat and making things somewhat confusing. Allowing all that to happen in order for them to truly feel the importance of having rules. Of course, we still have some reprehension, since it is also an important part of the learning process that takes place at school, but we have been careful to let the children have the most complete school experience possible in this remote context, causing situations for them to actually break the rules, since this is part of group living, forcing us to consider the need to establish rules and think about what it is like to live in society.”
