CULTURE, NORMS & ROUTINES
PEDAGOGY & ENGAGEMENT STRATEGIES
HYBRID TECHNOLOGY & TOOLS
Basic Hybrid Classroom Setup
Hybrid Tools Support
Hybrid Assessment & Evaluation
Assessment for Learning
Assessment as Learning
Assessment of Learning
Tips & Templates for Hybrid Planning
Resource Highlight: “The Distance Learning Playbook”
Harnessing the insights and experience of renowned educators Douglas Fisher, Nancy Frey, and John Hattie, The Distance Learning Playbook applies the wisdom and evidence of VISIBLE LEARNING® research to understand what works best with distance learning. Spanning topics from teacher-student relationships, teacher credibility and clarity, instructional design, assessments, and grading, this comprehensive playbook details the research- and evidence-based strategies teachers can mobilize to deliver high-impact learning in an online, virtual, and distributed environment.
View the whole book by logging into your OCT account and accessing the library.
Planning for Instruction (Hybrid)
Resources
5 Keys to Success in Hybrid Learning
Continuing to plan for remote learning is a good way to support students during transitions between distance and hybrid learning.
May 12, 2021
16 Hybrid Learning Tips by and for Teachers
What can we learn from teachers who are navigating hybrid learning? Focusing on making a hybrid class as interactive as possible pays off with better learning outcomes and happier students and teachers.
By Eric Hudson
Director of Learning and Design
Nov 17, 2020
Planning for Synchronous Learning
1. Remember TPACK
What is your CONTENT?
What is your PEDAGOGICAL STRATEGY?
What TOOLS facilitate that?
2. Create structures and frameworks that can be reused
Choose frameworks that are flexible and resilient to circumstantial change.
One example instructional framework for distance learning is the pinwheel from “The Distance Learning Playbook Grades K-12” (Corwin).
Like a pinwheel, instruction is always in movement and is a fluid process. Students must see their teacher demonstrating, they must collaborate, and coaching must take place, with practice opportunities given.
3. Use the same “flow” each day and each week
Provide consistency and help ensure that kids have equitable access to learning whether they are at home or school. Create a routine that you plan to keep basically the same each day. Consistency is always good for kids, but even more so with hybrid learning.
4. Use The Gradual Release Model
Modeling means the teacher assumes responsibility to demonstrate the use of and the thinking behind the strategy.
Shared practice means that the teacher provides explicit instruction and feedback as the students participate in the strategy.
Guided practice means students use the strategy as the teacher provides targeted and differentiated support.
Students can work with a single partner or in small groups. Here, you’ll ideally use chat threads or breakout rooms so students can work together at the same time.
As a second option, you might use some type of tool with asynchronous messaging capacity – a Flipgrid video or sticky notes inside the Google Jamboard app are two of many options that might come to mind. Asynchronicity is not ideal, since students are working back and forth on their own timelines, but we sometimes have to adapt to our circumstances.
Independent practice means that the students use the strategy as the teacher provides supports, as needed, and gathers assessment information.
This can happen in a variety of formats. You may want to assign this for asynchronous work periods.
5. Don’t plan for perfection!
This is new and things will go wrong - and that’s ok!
Teach live as you would in the regular classroom.
Record yourself teaching at the front of the class and post to your asynchronous platform if you’d like, but don’t redo videos until they are perfect.
Planning for Asynchronous Learning
Use the same schedule
Plan for home learners to follow the SAME schedule as the school learners with slight modifications for home learners:
Kindergarten: During outdoor learning, assign home learners the same or similar prompt and have them disconnect from the Teams meeting to complete asynchronously, then return for whole class discussion.
Grades 1-8: Assign independent work periods throughout the day when students can disconnect from the screen. This could be independent reading or a math task that students complete on their own. At home learners can use helpful apps, such as Raz-kids for this (to avoid extra planning).
Grades 9-12: Use your prep coverage as a student “work period”. Home learners can disconnect at this time for asynchronous work.
2. Create an anchor activity to support transitions
Create an anchor activity that students can do while waiting for the class to be ready. This could be a choice board, culminating activity, etc.
Students may take awhile to change going out/coming in from recess and transitioning to Phys. Ed., music, etc. In-class learners can do these as well if they have extra time.
3. Do not create separate assignments
Design tasks so that they are accessible to all of your students.
Please check back regularly, as we continue to add more resources and Support!
Are you looking for a collaborative place to ask questions about the hybrid learning model? Feel free to share your thinking and wonderings as well as what’s working for you on the “Kindergarten Hybrid Learning” Padlet. Click the button above to access.
Collaboration (Hybrid)
Supporting Whole and Small Groups Discussions
Collaboration naturally lends itself to promoting a sense of community within your classroom. Consider how you will move between groups to support the learning (virtually jumping into the breakout rooms, physically move from group to group within the classroom environment) and provide equitable support between your students learning at home and students learning in class.
If your entire class is participating in a discussion, provide extra wait time, allowing students learning at home time to hear the questions (in case of lag time), unmute their microphone or use the chat or reaction tool to participate. Co-creating norms for participation and discussion will be important for equitable balance of discussion and questioning between both students at home and in class. Students should have a clear picture of when to unmute and how to ask question or participate in discussions.
Pairing up students who are face to face with students who are online using breakout sessions or collaborative tools such as Padlet, Google Slides, Jamboard, can help to build and maintain social relationships, and deepen their communication, critical thinking and systems thinking skills.
Have your students set norms and expectations as a collaborative team:
How do we ensure all voices are heard?
What are our routines for collaboration?
Do we have clearly defined roles?
What norms do you want your students to use as they interact with one another and you in hybrid learning? When students are collaborating through breakout sessions, the students learning at home can turn on their video in order to see and interact with their peers.
As you explore the available technology, consider the following questions:
What learning function does this tool fulfill? Think about the specific learning tasks and keep that in mind before selecting which technology to use.
What technology skills do students need to learn first in order to complete this task? Do we have the time to do that?
How similar or different is this to tasks previously done? (You might want to use something similar to build on familiarity with the same tool, which is more efficient)
Does this tool have accessibility features? What are they?
Will students need to do this on their own or can I support them through it?
Can this work for small groups?
John Spencer: Improving Student Collaboration in Remote and Hybrid Learning
Dr. John Spencer shares his tips on how to make collaboration work in remote and hybrid settings. He highlights the following ideas in his work:
Ensuring individual student accountability
Empowering teams to set norms and expectations
Empowering teams to own the project management process
Empowering teams to own the communication process
Check ins to support teams
Accountable Talk Stems
Accountable talk provides students with sentence stems they can use to jump into the conversation in meaningful and effective ways. Virtual and hybrid discussions can be challenging as students adjust to not all being in the same classroom. Accountable talk stems provide students a framework to agree or disagree with others, ask questions of each other, share an opinion, and paraphrase the discussion or a specific point.
Teachers can prompt students to join the conversation by putting these sentence stems in a video meeting’s chat and/or by verbally prompting conversations using the same stems.
To help students practice accountable talk stems, hold a debate on a non-academic topic in which everyone can easily participate (e.g., pie versus cake, dogs versus cats). Have students use the stems during this debate, praise students when they use the stems, and encourage students to restate their sentences with stems if they do not use one. This will allow students to understand the structure and employ the stems with academic topics.
Using Breakout Rooms in Microsoft Teams
The breakout rooms feature in Microsoft Teams allow your students to make meaningful connections in a smaller group setting. Breakout rooms can allow your students learning at home to collaborate with peers who are in class. When using breakout rooms to support student collaboration, consider the following:
Set clear expectations and processes for your students
Assigning clear tasks
How to contribute to discussions and ask for help
Give students enough time to reflect
By encouraging students to think about their virtual collaboration experiences, educators can help make their interactions more productive and build communication and critical thinking skills
Consider a partner talk rubric that educators can model to facilitate meaningful student reflection during remote learning
Encourage the use of personalized learning strategies
Consider providing students options for joining breakout rooms that best meet their learning needs and style
Consider what digital tools will support engagement and collaboration
Decide which digital tools will allow students who are learning at home and students in class to co-create and collaborate
Learn to let go of perfection
It will take time to co-create the norms necessary for breakout rooms to run smoothly in a hybrid setting. Remote collaboration takes practice and patience. It’s ok if it doesn’t always go to plan!
Source: https://edtechmagazine.com/k12/article/2020/11/5-best-practices-managing-virtual-breakout-rooms
Just as we need to do in person, we should establish connections and develop norms before throwing students into a group with unrealistic expectations. On Twitter, Theresa Wills (@TheresaWills, theresawills.com) shared this model, suggesting a gradual release.
A good example of beginning in the low stakes stage would be to develop connections using something like this “Frayer a Friend” activity from @sarahjteacher.
Engagement Strategies
Student Engagement (Hybrid)
Consider your schedule
Schedule your day that allows students to participate using a variety of learning modalities and groupings.
Break instruction into smaller chunks, allowing students to engage in a variety of ways.
2. Provide your students with opportunities to be creative and actively participate in their learning
When planning lessons for your students, consider how you can provide them with opportunities to be creative and actively participate in their learning.
Interactive, digital tools can support your students in fostering a sense of community, to review material, and to display their creativity. They can make lessons more interactive, allow for flexibility in learning, and facilitate collaboration.
Consider exploring interactive tools such as Nearpod, Mentimetre, or Kahoot to increase student engagement for both students learning at home and in the classroom.
3. Leverage class discussions with collaborative work
Provide your students with opportunities to share their interests, to build meaningful relationships and to collaborate with peers learning both at home and in school.
Offering time, space, and the opportunity for students to collaborate with each other is instrumental to building a strong classroom culture and engagement (both with the content and with each other).
Tools to Support Student Engagement
9 Ways that Mentimeter engages students in a Hybrid Classroom
Nearpod allows students to feel engaged whether they are in the classroom or distanced through live lessons, collaborative checkpoints and games.
Engagement tools featured in Microsoft Teams can support both your students learning at home and in school in finding creative ways to engage in discussion and content.
Kahoot is an interactive learning tool that can support student engagement in the hybrid model.
Jamboard is an interactive platform that provides your students with a collaborative workspace to brainstorm ideas, share their thinking and engage in lesson content.
Padlet allows for real time engagement and interaction between your students in the hybrid model. This digital tools promotes sharing resources, predictions, feedback and ideas and allows students to engage in content in a variety of ways.
Resources
Problems of Practice:
How do I ensure students are engaged with each other and the content in a hybrid and/or remote learning environment?
Student Voice & Choice
Universal Design for Learning
The UDL Guidelines are a tool used in the implementation of Universal Design for Learning, a framework to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn.
The UDL Guidelines can be used by educators, curriculum developers, researchers, parents, and anyone else who wants to implement the UDL framework in a learning environment.
These guidelines offer a set of concrete suggestions that can be applied to any discipline or domain to ensure that all learners can access and participate in meaningful, challenging learning opportunities.
UDL-Aligned Strategies
UDL-aligned strategies are instructional methods and tools used by teachers to ensure that ALL students have an equal opportunity to learn. The UDL guidelines help you to select strategies that remove barriers in instruction so that all students can achieve their learning goals.
Accessible Workbooks (Pages)
Students have a diverse range of needs. Using tenants of universal design for learning, and the accessibility features on the iPad make it easy to meet the range of needs found in our classrooms. The content knowledge for this task focused on ecosystems and invasive species. Using Apple Pages made it easy to embed a variety of ways students could learn the content from text, audio, video and images. It also made it easy to provide students with the ability to independently share what they know using text, audio and video. Helping students access content with these modalities and expressing their learning via these modalities helps bring about success for more students.
John Spencer: 4 Ways to Craft Choice Menus in Distance Learning Classes
Dr. John Spencer explores a progression of student agency in which students can have greater choice and control over their learning. This article explores four approaches to choice menus to support student voice and choice in a hybrid or remote learning model.
Creating Your Own Choice Boards
Talk Strategies
Don’t Leave Discussions Behind in Virtual and Hybrid Teaching
Interacting with each other helps middle and high school students learn, and can uncover points they donʼt yet understand correctly. Check out this article on Edutopia.
Visible Thinking Routines
The following resources and thinking routines are from the Visible Thinking research of Ron Ritchhart and Harvard Project Zero and are available at www.visiblethinkingpz.org.
Hexagonal Thinking
Hexagonal thinking is a method for considering the connections between ideas and finding the nuances in those connections. If you’re looking for a fresh framework for discussion and critical thinking, this may be just the thing.
HOW IT WORKS
When you place an idea on a hexagon, it has six sides where connections could be made to other ideas. When you place many ideas on many hexagons, the discussion about where to connect what will be different every time.
It provides a springboard for a totally creative discussion. When you give a small group of students a deck of hexagons and ask them to connect them however they choose, every group will come up with a different web for different reasons. Along the way they’ll hopefully question each other and dig deep into the concepts on the cards, arguing about which idea connects more to an important concept and which example deserves one of those precious six sides.
Click image to learn more
Math Talk Strategies
Math talk strategies such as number talks, which one doesn’t belong, estimation 180 and would you rather, to name a few, are a powerful to engage your students in rich math conversations. Check out this page for links to rich math talk resources, math sentence starters and professional learning.
Meeting the Needs of All Learners
Provide engaging core content for the whole class
All learners need to start with the same content.
Make it as engaging as possible by including text, voice, visuals and physical gestures.
2. Know your learners & keep accessibility at the forefront
Ensure that all assignments/handouts are accessible and editable for all students.
Ensure they allow students to respond in a variety of ways.
Know your learners and ensure that all activities meet IEP accommodations.
Consider using the Universal Design for Learning guidelines to assist you in this.
3. Scaffold assignments
Arrange learning activities and worksheets in a scaffolded fashion, so that students can advance through them at their own pace.
Make the most of online resources and apps to save time.
4. Be available for help
Monitor the chat closely and answer questions as they come up.
Peers could also help other students using the same platform.
Promote a growth-oriented class culture where seeking help is normal and encouraged.
Allow for private questions for students who may be uncomfortable asking public questions.
Checking for Understanding
Check for understanding methods can be used to gather formative assessment data and monitor student progress toward skill mastery regardless of the learning environment. While virtual learning environments may offer less frequent opportunities to interact with and observe students throughout a lesson, checks for understanding can still be utilized to inform next steps for instruction. Educators can use this data to make adjustments to instruction (e.g. reteach essential skills, provide graphic organizers to scaffold learning for targeted students, increase use of technology, or review prerequisite knowledge for a concept), provide targeted small group reteaching, and measure student outcomes for goal mastery.
Checking for Understanding Strategies
ESTABLISHING CULTURE
ESTABLISHING NORMS
ESTABLISHING ROUTINES
Hybrid Learning Tips BY Teachers FOR Teachers
Alessia Albanese is a Kindergarten teacher from Woodbridge, Ontario who shares some tips, tricks and freebies from her remote and hybrid learning experiences on her website.
What can we learn from teachers who are navigating hybrid learning? Eric Hudson compiled teacher ideas and organized them into themes. Check out his article called “16 Hybrid Learning Tips by and for Teachers.”
