Many teachers have told me that they have difficulty feeling like their students are engaged in their remote classes. They open up their synchronous Zoom sessions and see 20 black squares with the video off. They see 30% of the students completing homework. Attendance in their classes is way down.

Here are some theories about what might be happening.

  1. School is about compliance, when we remove the relational aspects of school, students stop complying.
  2. Students are uncomfortable sharing themselves on camera. After all, almost none of them have experienced remote teaching via Zoom and there is strong peer pressure to conform to what the rest of the group does — would you be the only student with your camera on?
  3. Students are unable to turn their cameras and microphone on because the conditions at their home don’t allow it. Maybe they have siblings who are also on Zoom sessions and/or they don’t have private space to attend class?
  4. Students might not know how to turn on their cameras. In the past 8 months, I’ve helped at least a dozen people learn how to use Zoom for the first time and in almost all of these cases, I spoke with the person on the phone and coached them through doing things like starting a Zoom session and turning on their cameras. It stands to reason that at least some children don’t know how to use this technology either.
  5. Students feel uncomfortable sharing their thinking and emotions during mathematics class because they feel anxious to perform. Math class is already challenging for many students, learning remotely is certain to be more difficult, so whatever emotions students feel about math class are likely to be heightened.

Which of these issues is the main issue? I don’t know! I suspect that a variety of different issues impact student engagement and participation in math class. Rather than offer a neat solution, I’ll suggest a process we can go through to find a solution.

Using the network improvement framework developed by the Carnegie foundation, We start by defining the problem as multi-faceted and potentially involving multiple different causes or drivers.

The proposed drivers of student engagement in math class.

Each of these primary drivers of student engagement/participation potentially can be broken down further into secondary drivers. For example, if our primary driver is “Home conditions” then this might be broken down into secondary drivers of “No Internet”, “No private space”, and possibly “No time”.

For each secondary driver, we propose a change. What can we do differently in order to impact this aspect of the challenge? For example, if students do not have Internet at home, then we find out if we can provide home WiFi hotspots, much like this report suggests many rural school districts have done. For some of these drivers, we may not yet have a change idea and that’s fine but as we work together to solve this problem, our collective efforts may yet yield some strategies we can try.

Ideally, instead of everyone trying to tackle this problem independently, we work together to find solutions that appear to work in our varied contexts and then report back these proposed solutions for other people to test. When faced with a common problem, we are more likely to find robust and replicable solutions if we work together on the problem.

I have some wonderings though that I think our hive mind might be able to answer?

  • Are these the right primary drivers? Are these reasons above realistic reasons why students might have trouble engaging in even the most basic sense in math class?
  • Can we break these primary drivers down into secondary drivers? Can we determine what potential issues might exist in each of these categories?
  • What change ideas do you have? If you have identified and solved a problem that relates to student engagement, please share it here! I know of many teachers who are desperate for ideas to make their classes feel a bit more normal.
Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail