In the traditional classroom, conversation is a critical piece to your reading and writing instruction. But how do we create conversation in a remote setting while building the sense of interaction and community? Here are a few tips shared by the authors of Patterns of Power Plus, Jeff Anderson and Whitney La Rocca during a recent webinar on remote learning.
Creating Virtual Groups
The breakout-room function in tools such as Zoom provide opportunities for teachers to mirror small-group discussion around each day’s lesson. As students work in their breakout rooms, teachers can drop in and listen to the conversations in real time.
Encouraging Online Collaboration
Google Docs, Google Slides, and Pear Deck
Creating a shared document through tools such as Google Docs and Google Slides provides a central location for the whole class to share their thinking about the day’s lesson. This could be done live or, if you have recorded lessons or aren’t able to meet live with your students, you can use the shared document to capture everyone’s response to the lesson prompts such as “What do you notice?”
In addition, some teachers are using Google add-ons such as Pear Deck, which offers additional features and templates to add formative assessments, polls, and interactive activities.
Flipgrid
Another tool that Patterns of Power teachers have shared that allows students to record their thinking online and share ideas and comments is Flipgrid, a website that helps facilitate video discussions among students. Similar to a message board, teachers can pose topics or questions that students can respond to through video responses that appear in a tiled grid display. Students can not only post their own video responses, but they can comment on each other’s responses as well. This is a great option for students who have a hard time sharing their ideas in writing and are better at communicating their ideas out loud.
Padlet
A popular tool among the PoP teachers in the Facebook Community is Padlet. Similar to a large sticky note, Padlet is another online tool that can be used live or asynchronously for students to share and display their responses to each lesson. It’s flexible enough to accommodate student’s written responses and photos of their responses if they’d prefer to handwrite and then post them. They also have the option of recording and posting a video response in Padlet.
Seesaw
The built-in annotation features in Seesaw as well as the ability to record and upload videos, photos, and audio provides a variety of tools to show what students are thinking and learning throughout the Patterns of Power Invitational Process.
Implementing Patterns of Power Lessons for Remote Learning
Fitting Patterns of Power Plus into Your Schedule
Patterns of Power Plus lessons can be adapted to fit any lesson schedule. Although it’s intended to be taught for 10 minutes a day each day, your schedule may not allow you to gather your students for a live session each day. You can pre-record the lesson videos and have the students respond asynchronously to the lesson content and then use your live time to discuss their noticings. Alternatively, if you have 30 minutes once a week to cover grammar, you can combine several of the lessons together. For instance, the Invitation to Notice and Invitation to Compare and Contrast can be covered in one session. Invitation to Imitate could be done independently then Invitation to Share and Celebrate could be done again as a group.
Pre-recording Lesson Videos for Asynchronous Learning
Teachers have been using a variety of tools to record their Patterns of Power Plus videos for students. For instance, Trish Gallery, a Literacy Coach from New York who joined Jeff and Whitney recently for the Patterns of Power Plus remote learning webinar, used Screencastify to pre-record her Patterns of Power Plus Lesson Videos for students to watch and model. From there they would annotate their noticings on their slide and get feedback on their responses.
For more ideas on implementing Patterns of Power Plus in your classroom—remote or otherwise—join the Patterns of Power Facebook Community.
