[00:01] Announcer:
Welcome to Principal Center Radio, helping you build capacity for instructional leadership. Here's your host, Director of the Principal Center, Dr. Justin Bader. Welcome everyone to Principal Center Radio.
[00:13] SPEAKER_00:
I'm your host, Justin Bader, and I'm honored to be joined today by Courtney Ostaff. Courtney has been teaching online since 1999, and with a wide variety of experience as a public school special education teacher, an in-home early intervention specialist, a community college instructor, and in other roles, she has worked with students ranging from the very young to the elderly. And along the way, she's developed practices and techniques for making the most of the online classroom. Courtney is the author of the Teaching Online Handbook, which we're here to talk about today.
[00:45] Announcer:
And now, our feature presentation.
[00:47] SPEAKER_00:
Courtney, welcome to Principal Center Radio.
[00:49] SPEAKER_01:
Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
[00:51] SPEAKER_00:
So Courtney, based on your career working primarily as an online educator, what prompted you to write this book at this particular moment in history? And what did you see happening in the world of education that you wanted to speak to with this book?
[01:05] SPEAKER_01:
Well, kind of hovered on the edge of the education establishment for a long time. And I had a Twitter account to follow some of EduTwitter, which I think is a great place, a lot of fantastic people there. And of course, like everyone else, about a year ago, I saw that people were transferring to online education in a hurry. And they were doing some really interesting things and they were panicking a lot. And I said, oh, this is something I know how to do. Let me give you a hand.
[01:40]
And so I made a whole bunch of tweet threads and they got really popular. Then my friend North, who is a teacher, a private school in New York City, said, hey, you know what you're doing. You should write a book. And I said, oh, you're so funny. And he said, no, really, you should write a book here. And he pinged John Cat Publications and he said, you should get her to write a book.
[02:05]
And I said, well, all right. And so they do a thing where you send off a proposal and they're like, oh, yeah, you should write a book. And so I spent three solid months last year writing down everything that I thought could be helpful to the classroom teacher transitioning to online education.
[02:25] SPEAKER_00:
I'm interested in some of the early observations that you made of what was happening, particularly in the K-12 world, as everything moved online. And of course, colleges have been offering online courses for a long time. But for a lot of us in the K-12 world, this was the first big experience that we had trying to do what we do in anything other than a face-to-face format. What did you see as some of the big struggles that people were facing or the big pitfalls that you wanted to address right off the bat? Like the kind of the, oh boy, we need to say something about that kind of practices that were emerging.
[02:58] SPEAKER_01:
Well, I think one thing that is very difficult for the average classroom teacher is the lack of nonverbal feedback. And I think a lot of classroom teachers structure their classroom around that sort of instantaneous give and take between themselves and their students, which is good. You know, that's a good practice and you should do that. But it is very difficult, if not impossible, to do that online. And so what I found. was that a lot of people were trying to replicate that practice in an online classroom.
[03:33]
And it just doesn't work well. They get very frustrated. They're very upset. They're like, oh, online education just doesn't work. And I wanted to say, but that's, you know, what you're trying to do is not actually best practices for online teaching. There are best practices.
[03:48]
There are good and bad ways to do this.
[03:50] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, if we're so used to that verbal and nonverbal feedback or just relying on our presence in the room, being on Zoom is... just is not the same, right? Even if we're in a live kind of interactive, you know, kind of setting where we can see each other's faces, we can see students' reactions if their cameras are on, it's not really the same. What do you see as some of the fundamental differences that we need to be aware of as educators?
[04:16]
Like what's fundamentally going on in an online class, you know, just that is different? Yeah, trailing off there, but yeah.
[04:24] SPEAKER_01:
Well, I think one of the central misunderstandings is the way that you plan. Because in a face-to-face classroom, most teachers are taught to plan by the lesson plan and by the unit, right? Which is fine and good. And the lesson plan and the unit are really sort of self-directed instructions for teachers. You know, but in an online classroom, you don't want to just hand your lesson plans over because number one, that voids you the responsibility for the education. And number two, it's not really very useful.
[05:00]
So in an online classroom, you need to plan by the course module. And what I have found over the years in teaching in the K-12 environment is that the course module should really be a week. It's a week's worth of instruction at a time. Now, that may or may not correspond to a unit or a lesson plan. And so to adjust to that is very different. The other thing is that that course module really needs to be pushed out in advance.
[05:29]
I push it out two weeks in advance. I persuaded other people to do it as well. It is super helpful because when you teach online, you are not the responsible adult in the room making sure the kid gets that work done. Right. And so in order to be respectful of people's time and to make sure that that work gets done as much as possible, you need to give the caregivers a heads up, you know, like, hey, Tommy has a math test due next week and it's going to be here and it's going to be these things. And you need to allocate Internet access and time to make sure that gets done.
[06:08]
And giving them that forewarning is what really, I think, really helps make it happen, pushing it out well in advance. And I think that that's a subtle point that's often overlooked.
[06:19] SPEAKER_00:
And I definitely remember thinking in terms of content units, but they would usually be longer than a week. And then day to day, I was thinking in terms of class periods, like what can we get done this class period? I'm thinking of, you know, how do I take students through, you know, kind of the warm up and the different, you know, flow, you know, the different aspects of the flow of like a 45 to 50 minute lesson. You're saying the week is a unit of time that we really need to be thinking in terms of so that we can get, you know, get families on board, get kids. communicate what's going on to them so that they have a sense of what's coming up. What are some of the design considerations for teachers?
[06:56]
Because again, not being there in person, if I'm thinking in terms of a week instruction, what are some of the other big kind of either milestones or you might say bookends that I need to plan? Because as you said right at the beginning, we tend to rely so much on feel. A lot of our kind of formative assessment, a lot of our monitoring and adjusting is just intuitive. And in an online setting, we're missing a lot of the cues and a lot of the information that we would normally use to make those intuitive decisions. So what do we need to build in to that week of instruction in order to really stay on track?
[07:29] SPEAKER_01:
So what I like to do when I plan a week of instruction is figure out the general instructional goal for that week. And it's going to vary, you know, whether you're teaching biology or math or chemistry or, you know, what have you. It's going to vary. But that general sort of set of information that I want to cover. I typically when I teach middle school math, I typically cover four lessons per week. And each of those lessons has a specific objective, right?
[07:57]
And so what I want to make sure is that students have the chance to tackle that information from multiple perspectives throughout the week in an independent way on their own schedule. And so we'll have discussion questions. For example, we were studying geometry and I assigned them, I always give them choices in discussion questions. But they really like hands-on projects. And so one of the hands-on projects was creating hexaflexagons and sharing that with the class, which is fun. But that's looking at a different geometry concept.
[08:32]
Then they were actually assigned problem sets for using that geometrical concept. But they also had videos, short videos they could watch on their own time. So we have art, we have short videos, we have writing about the content, we have the problem sets. I get 100 minutes a week of face-to-face, well, face-to-face, live instructional time. And so I try to have them attack it from different angles because I'm not there to do that problem by problem supporting. If they can't get it from this explanation, maybe they can get it from that explanation or this other one.
[09:13]
And the other thing is that it all has to be something that they can do independently. While mom is supervising and making sure it gets done, mom may not remember how to do that, number one. It's been a while. And number two, it's not mom's job to teach them how to do it. So you have to design assignments that have a self-teaching aspect built in. And then you have to monitor and make sure those assignments are done.
[09:38]
And so that whole give and take is on a time delay. So you have to very carefully scrape that work and see, oh, everybody missed this particular kind of question. We're going to hit that hard our next live session. And I'm going to throw in a video about that. And I'm going to give some recorded feedback to Tommy and Sally and Harry because they missed it bad. So you three are getting little individual notes about it.
[10:10]
That kind of thing. So you have to be very deliberate about it. And it is on a time delay, so you don't get that immediate feedback, which is both good and bad, depending on the student.
[10:20] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah. And I appreciate the point about being deliberate about what we're going to assess for, where we're going to check for understanding, and when we might need to provide additional resources. What do you find are some of the difficulties that teachers have when they're teaching online for the first time that kind of catch them off guard as far as planning for assessment. Because again, we do a lot of this intuitively. We do it by feel. And having to design an assessment in advance often is a new experience, just depending on the type of content.
[10:50]
We have assessments that we've designed, surely in every subject, but having to design more of the formative, to be more deliberate about that informal assessment. What do you see teachers struggling with and what do you recommend that they do?
[11:03] SPEAKER_01:
What I often find is that a lot of teachers get a lot of feedback by looking over students' shoulders as they work, right? You walk around the room, you're looking at the page, who's doodling, you know, that kind of thing. And what are they doodling while you're there? However, you really can't do that online. And what I find is that teachers will attempt to replicate this with whiteboards and various, you know, I want to see everybody answer, you know, problem 16 at the same time, that kind of thing. The problem is, And keep in mind, where I work, I work with a relatively wealthy subset of students.
[11:40]
But even among that subset of students, internet access is a real issue. Like I had a sibling set of four sisters who were swapping the SIM card between devices. So being able to get everybody online on a whiteboard at the same time is a huge ask, really, and a huge strain on the internet. And it's really not reliably going to happen for 100% of kids every day. It's just not. It's just not going to happen.
[12:12]
So what you have to plan for are other ways to make that assessment clear. One of the ways that I do it, in math anyway, is with a set of problems that's available that is interleaved, interval spaced, and it has problem by problem assistance right up to and including email your teacher, which is me. So they can email me for individual help on individual problems. But it has that immediate feedback built into it. They can look for an example of how to do the problem. They can skip a problem and come back to it.
[12:46]
They can email me for help with it. And everybody has a unique problem set. So it's less worry about cheating because the problems are algorithmically generated. So I don't make a thing about it. I'm just like, I have a flat expectation that of course you're going to do your own work. I'm just not interested in work you don't do.
[13:04]
Sorry. You know, like throw it out there like that. But because everybody has a unique problem set, it cuts down on that kind of thing. And I give them, I work them hard. They do 20 to 30 problems a day, every day. And so, and I don't ask everybody to turn in their scratch work all the time.
[13:25]
Because again, that's a big ask. Not everybody knows how to do that. Not everybody has the consistent internet access for that. So it is a different kind of set of expectations, shall we say.
[13:37] SPEAKER_00:
So I'm thinking about for math, like there are built-in ways to tell if students understand or not. If they get the answer right, it's a pretty safe assumption. If they get all the problems right, there's usually a pretty safe assumption there that they understand. Guessing will only get you so far. What about for teachers of other subjects where there's not a correct answer, there are concepts that we want students to understand, there are skills we want students to build? What does the planning of assessment look like in, you know, say a language arts class or a science class where we still want to get that feedback from students on their understanding.
[14:13]
We still want to be able to reteach and help with any misconceptions. Again, if we're used to doing that intuitively, we might be at a little bit of a loss. What do you recommend that people do?
[14:23] SPEAKER_01:
And it's kind of fun because if you know what the common misconceptions are in advance, you can hit them with it right up front. Like the, of course, summer versus winter and a common misconception is that it's summer because the earth is closer to the sun. Right. And so we did that last week and I said, oh, how many of you think this is true? You know, do a show of hands. We'll take a look at it.
[14:50]
And I'm like, you are wrong. You're not even a little bit right. You are just wrong. And here's why you're wrong. So if you can catch that, that's really good. I think Carrie Fletcher would call those hinge questions, where those are the questions that show a keen lack of understanding of that underlying concept.
[15:10]
And so if you are aware of the hinge questions in a given discipline, then yeah, you can really do some elucidation there. Actually, you know what's a fun one for middle school astronomy? Ask how many of them think we have a base on Mars. The answer will shock you.
[15:24] SPEAKER_00:
Well, I love that you chose astronomy as an example there because astronomy is one of those subjects that is just loaded with passion. possible misconceptions, right? The concepts are often very counterintuitive. You know, students have a lot of prior knowledge, but a lot of it is not quite right, like as far as what creates the seasons. And even as a person who majored in earth science, you know, like that's what my bachelor's degree is in. You know, I'll come across things about, you know, the equinox and the solstice and you know, whether what that lines up with and what causes that.
[15:53]
And like even as an adult, it's very hard to keep all of that straight. So thinking through a lot of those misconceptions or students prior knowledge and preconceptions about a concept really can can feed into the design of those assessments so that you can zoom in on, you know, if I like you said, if I see that students are taking a large amount of time to answer this kind of problem or if they are consistently missing that type of problem. not only can you adjust based on this student's reactions, but from cohort to cohort of students over time, you kind of get better at that, figuring out and anticipating what those are going to be. Well, I love that idea of a hinge question. One of those things that it seems like as a teacher, if you reach the end of the class or students leave your class and move on and they don't have that, you're going to slap yourself in the bury your head in your hands and say, oh, where did I go wrong?
[16:44]
So you're saying raise those from the beginning. Be very clear. The earth is not closer to the sun in the summer. That's not what causes that. I love that. Let's talk for a moment, if we could, about how much time students are spending in a live session.
[16:59]
And you said your students typically spend about 100 minutes a week live with you, and then the rest is asynchronous. Is that right?
[17:05] SPEAKER_01:
It varies. So I teach math and science and social studies. I have certified, multi-certified. And for my math classes, we get 100 minutes a week, 250 minute sessions per week. For my middle school science and social studies, we get one 50-minute session, which means that I don't really tolerate much off-topic conversation. We don't have time to be messing around.
[17:37]
We don't have time to sort of think through or for everybody to share their conception of something. It is very much a direct instruction, a la, you know, Hollingsworth and Ibarra. You know, we are going straight for the point. We are hitting it hard. We are moving through. We are giving worked examples.
[17:59]
We are assessing with partially worked examples. And then we're going to assess some more. So, you know, I'm not messing around with that amount of time. Now, if students want to be a little more casual, they're welcome to set up additional points with me. And in fact, I do occasionally offer extra like just, hey, we're going to do problem solving on Friday at 1.30.
[18:21]
Stop in. And a lot of them do. But for those for those minutes. And the thing is, I see a lot of a lot of school systems setting up trying to replicate the school day online. And I don't think that is an effective use of anybody's time. It's just not.
[18:40]
The kids get fried by the end of the day. You're fried as an instructor by the end of the day. And I will tell you, to do effective online teaching, it requires immense amounts of planning. Just incredibly, significantly more planning than doing it in a face-to-face classroom. Because you have to plan to replicate all of that nonverbal stuff. And you have to do it in advance.
[19:05]
You have to do so much more planning. And then you have to spend more time on assessment because I'm sorry. And I've taught in face-to-face classrooms. It is so much easier to sit with a red pen at a desk and skim essays than it is to do that kind of skimming. It takes longer. It just takes longer online.
[19:24]
And so both the preparation and the post, the assessment, take longer online. So I don't have a problem with teaching a science class where we meet for 50 minutes. We are on task. We are focused. We get through the material. And if they want to stay after and we can talk about it, we can do that.
[19:44]
I stayed for a half an hour after my last one last Friday. But that is not instructional time. That is, you know, we're just talking about the material. And so I think that is a different task. I think a lot of teachers worry about how to fill that time. How are we going to work with students for that hour, especially new teachers, right?
[20:05]
They're like, oh, no, they did that so fast. What do we do next? But it's a different approach online. Again, that is a different thing. So, I mean, that's my two cents. Y'all school districts do whatever you like.
[20:20]
But I don't think it's a good way to go.
[20:22] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah, and I think that reflects a lot of the kind of early approaches that we saw where schools saw it as their goal to fill the same amount of time in the day. But yeah, you get to the end of seven hours of Zoom meetings and your hotspots are out of data and your teachers are fried and your students are fried. And it's not necessarily the best way to learn. So you do have your students do a lot of their learning asynchronously, even though you do teach these live sessions every week. What are students doing in that asynchronous time that gets back to you? How does that play into your assessment?
[20:57]
Because we've talked about the issue that there's a delay, right? Like you can't look over students' shoulders as the pencil moves across the page. How do you still make sure that there's time to adjust given that delay and kind of when you're seeing students work?
[21:09] SPEAKER_01:
okay so this is where i'm going to break with a lot of current progressive educational model so like this students can't learn what they're not taught if they don't teach it to them they can't learn it i mean you just can't and if you are constantly slowing down your class to adjust on the fly to what everyone else you know to say you know 20 of your class hasn't got that then you're not going to cover as much material and i think in the long run you do your students a disservice So I plan for the entire year in advance. And I know exactly what we're going to cover on every week. And I do not slow it down. I'm not going to do that. Now, what I do do, and this is, as far as I can tell, pretty unusual for most people, is an 80-20 mix of old and new material.
[22:04]
So on any given, say, math homework assessment, only 20% of those questions are new. 80% are review. from the last week, the last month, the last semester. And when I do that, students who didn't get full understanding the first time we covered it have a chance to swing back at it and get it again. And so it's not that we move on and students don't understand because they're going to see it again and we will tackle it again and again and again and again and again. But I'm not slowing down the coverage of the new material.
[22:41]
I give less of it. I assess it on a delay, but they're still going to have to do it. And what I find is that students feel like it's more difficult than a regular, say, you know, chapter on fractions where you do the different kind of fraction every day. You have an end of chapter test and you don't see fractions again until the next year. Right. And so it's more difficult because they're never leaving that behind.
[23:03]
If they didn't get it, then they still have to figure it out. It's such a pain in the butt, right? Like, oh my God, make me do this again. But what I tell students is I want mastery. I want them to work until they can do it and wake up at 3.30 in the morning and without even fully waking up, solve that problem and go back to sleep.
[23:22]
So it's a different set of expectations. In some ways, it's more difficult. They find it more difficult. I have students get really discouraged. But then when I do cumulative assessments and I am required by school policy to do cumulative assessments, they invariably surprise themselves with how well they do because they've really learned. So I know that that's kind of a controversial point of view, but you know, it's effective.
[23:49] SPEAKER_00:
Yeah. And one of those things that I think has gotten not enough credit in, you know, our progressive aims to, you know, to be cutting edge and to use, you know, kind of student-friendly sounding techniques is like, we just don't give enough credit to quizzes. Like we underestimate how powerful it is to assess with a quiz, not just for measurement, but for learning. When students see something on a quiz, they remember it. And if they didn't catch it the first time, they can catch it the next time. And they can continue to keep it fresh in their minds.
[24:20]
And it's been interesting to see now that there are language learning apps like Duolingo, they use that same approach where, yes, you learned this a long time ago. but we still want you to know it. You're still, you know, so we're going to keep asking you to keep it fresh in your mind. And it works just so much better than we taught it once you pass the test, we're moving on and never touching it again. So thank you for saying that.
[24:42] SPEAKER_01:
You're welcome. I actually explicitly teach my students the forgetting curve and flashcard system based on the forgetting curve.
[24:51] SPEAKER_00:
Old school.
[24:52] SPEAKER_01:
Oh, yeah. Oh, old school, man. Yeah. Oh, you teach it online. You're using all these, you know, brand new apps and stuff like no, no apps. I use no apps.
[25:02]
But here, have a flashcard, kid.
[25:04] SPEAKER_00:
Well, Courtney, if you could wave a magic wand and get schools everywhere, speaking to our audience of school administrators, if you could get schools everywhere to do something in particular to act on the insights from your book, what would that be?
[25:16] SPEAKER_01:
I would ask every school administrator to invest in a learning management system for their faculty. Not Google Classroom. That is not an LMS. And what I see on EduTwitter is people very excited about some new add-on to Google Classroom. It's already covered in any bottom basic LMS. And it doesn't have to cost money.
[25:42]
There are open source LMSs. Canvas, Brightspace, and Blackboard are the big three. They have like 80% of the market. And there's a reason for that. They are a necessary tool to do the job. You wouldn't ask a classroom teacher to do a job without copy paper, right?
[26:00]
You just wouldn't do it. Or without some sort of Blackboard-like thing, whether using whiteboards or smartboards or what have you. Online teachers need an LMS and they need it yesterday. They need one. Give it to them.
[26:16] SPEAKER_00:
And what's the difference between what's available in Google Classroom? What can they do in a good LMS that they can't do in Google Classroom?
[26:22] SPEAKER_01:
I have an entire chapter that's like 45 pages long on all the things that you can do. But my pet peeve is that Google Classroom is set up like a social media feed. It's set up like Facebook or Twitter or what have you. And so the latest thing is always the most recent, right? Whereas at an LMS, you set it up by the content module. And so if your class is a file cabinet, the content module is actual folder.
[26:53]
So students can go back, they can find material, they can reference it. And it makes such a huge difference. and the way that you can teach your class. It is basic. It is a fundamental requirement. I'm sorry, I wouldn't teach in a place where I didn't have one.
[27:09] SPEAKER_00:
I just wouldn't do it. So the book is The Teaching Online Handbook. And Courtney, if people want to learn more about your work or find you on Twitter, what are some of the best places for them to go to online?
[27:20] SPEAKER_01:
Well, I have a website, CourtneyOstaff.com. So that's C-O-U-R-T-N-E-Y-O-S-T-A-F-F. And you can track me down from there. And I'm happy, you know, if you're a random administrator or classroom teacher listening and you want to drop me a note, I'll always answer you back.
[27:36] SPEAKER_00:
Well, Courtney, it has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for joining me on Principal Center Radio. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
[27:42] Announcer:
Thanks for listening to Principal Center Radio. For more great episodes, subscribe on our website at PrincipalCenter.com slash radio.
