Three years ago if I were to say I had just taught a maths lesson to a group of students you would likely, rightly have assumed that I had taught the lesson in a physical classroom with students sat at desks in front of me. Today though, you may have to ask some further questions: was it online or face-to-face; did you have any hybrid students; did they turn their microphones on; was it being recorded?
The other day I experienced a situation that vividly illustrates this new complexity. As I was walking to teach a regular face-to-face maths lesson at the university department where I work, one of my students emailed me to say he was ill and to ask if he could access the lesson online. After a few technical difficulties and an hour of me never quite working out who I was talking to and where to look, we finished the hybrid lesson in which most of the students were in the physical classroom (albeit on their laptops) and the ill student had managed to contribute to the lesson with occasional messages in the chat box.
To add to this picture, there was a group of three students sat at a table outside the window of the classroom accessing an English lesson that had been moved online because their teacher was at home self-isolating with Covid. Though, if I were to give my honest opinion, they weren’t really accessing the lesson. They had logged into the online lesson on their individual laptops, but what they were actually doing was scrolling through their social media feeds on their phones and enjoying a funny conversation with each other.
[DfE] have recently highlighted, as an example of good practice, a multi academy trust that teaches some smaller subjects in a single online lesson with children accessing it simultaneously from multiple sites (Morgan, 2022).
Any teacher or student who was part of an online classroom during the Covid-19 pandemic will almost certainly have stories and experiences similar to mine. As we now learn from this experience and incorporate more technology into classroom activity it will be good for us, both teachers and students, to pause and consider what we actually want this to look like. This is particularly important to ask now as the Department for Education (DfE) are keen to promote technology in schools. For instance, they have recently highlighted, as an example of good practice, a multi academy trust that teaches some smaller subjects in a single online lesson with children accessing it simultaneously from multiple sites (Morgan, 2022). Moreover, companies such as Zoom are keen to sell their education products to us as the solution to our classroom needs, and cash wary school and university managers may see them as a financially beneficial option. Below I will describe some research from my recent MA in Education into synchronous online maths lessons and then use this to ask how we might want to incorporate new technologies into our teaching.
The Research
All research about synchronous online teaching and learning during the Covid lockdowns that I have been able to find primarily uses interview and questionnaire data to evaluate what works and what doesn’t (see for example the literature review by Mseleki (2020)). Both these methods generate proxy data to actual teaching activity in an online synchronous lesson. Between September 2020 and May 2021, I therefore observed 18 hours of synchronous online foundation degree maths teaching in order to better understand what actually happens in an online lesson and how the participant teachers and students were adapting to it. In addition to the observations, each participant teacher also filled in a questionnaire and took part in an interview.
‘Towards the end I stopped trying to get the students to talk.’
The questionnaire was the starting point, where I asked the teachers how their synchronous online teaching was different to their previous face-to-face teaching. In the questionnaire I suggested categories of change and asked the teachers to say the extent to which they felt they did more or less of each category. The categories were based on an exploratory-acquisition continuum initially developed by Heyd-Metzuyanim and Shabtay (2019, section 2.2). In an acquisition lesson the teacher is in control and essentially lectures to the students. In an exploratory lesson the students are central and explore mathematical ideas and problems with the teacher taking a less prominent role. These categories however, useful as they were in the questionnaire, were not able to properly explain what was happening in the observations. I therefore developed a bottom up coding approach that started with the question, ‘what is happening here?’ I then interviewed the teachers, reflecting with them on their experiences of teaching online and exploring their questionnaire responses and observation lessons. Some of the interpretive findings of the research are shown below, each introduced by a quote from the interviews.
Findings
‘Towards the end I stopped trying to get the students to talk.’
As part of the observation coding I recorded the ways the students communicated and the amount of each type of communication. Students were able to use their mics and videos, write on the shared screen, write in the chat box, and respond to various forms of online polling. Over the term and a half of the observations, and in every class, the students’ use of the microphone dropped to zero and their use of the chat function to infrequent, mainly single word comments. In the interviews, the teachers shared how they tried to encourage student verbal communication, but also how they had had little success. One way the teachers were able to gain interaction was through the use of polls such as MS Forms and those built into the online classroom. Over the term and a half, poll responses from students more than doubled.
‘I became like a video modelling the questions…I would answer my own questions.’
Alongside the decreasing student verbal communication, I also observed an increasing amount of time the teachers were lecturing without seeking student engagement. As part of coding the teacher actions, I marked every 30 second interval as being either ‘lecturing without seeking student response’ or ‘teaching in a way that required students to take part.’ At the start, the teachers would re-ask their questions if they got no response, but by the end they were answering their own questions before students would have had time to respond. It appeared that the student silence was exerting power over the teachers’ actions. Overall then the one-way lecturing time increased and the time given to a more dialogic teaching approach reduced. In the interviews teachers described how they felt, ‘what else could I do?…there’s no point asking questions.’
‘I don’t really know them…I miss seeing their learning…you don’t see how they are doing.’
One of the strongest themes that came out of the interviews was the sadness the teachers felt about the loss of relationship with their students. In the 18 hours of lessons I observed, not a single student turned their camera on and virtually none used their microphones. It appeared that there was almost an absence of normal teacher-student relationship.
As well as this change in relationship, the inability to see students also meant an inability to see their work. The teachers in this research did not know how their students were progressing. By not being able to walk around the classroom, see the students’ work and discuss the maths with the students, the teachers had lost a large part of their assessment of the students’ understanding. MS Forms and polls helped this a bit towards the end but nowhere near the extent the teachers were used to.
Concluding Question
This brief summary of the research can help us consider where online learning technology can help and where it is limited.
Online classrooms are more like a radio show with the teacher as a DJ controlling the message and the students as listeners texting in their comments.
In the case of this research, online teaching involved less student interaction, more teacher talk time, a loss of knowledge about the students and their work, and a change in the classroom power relationships. Although this could be interpreted in a largely negative way to conclude that online teaching is worse, it is more useful to conclude that online teaching is different to face-to-face teaching. In online classrooms both teachers and students embody a fundamentally different way of relating and acting, an embodiment that takes time to learn. Online classrooms are more like a radio show with the teacher as a DJ controlling the message and the students as listeners texting in their comments.
One question that follows from this is, ‘how do the advantages of online teaching, as promoted by the likes of the DfE and Zoom, sit alongside the findings of this research that shows how different online and face-to-face classrooms can be?’ I would suggest my attempt at hybrid teaching described at the beginning is not one of them. When I was discussing the maths with my face-to-face students I forgot the online student was even there, and when I started to lecture in front of the laptop screen to the online student I alienated the face-to-face students. Online and face-to-face classrooms require us to be different kinds of teachers, and in my experience they don’t mix well. Moreover, it also requires students to be different kinds of learners, and an important related question is therefore to ask what changes students need to make themselves to help the online environment work for them as learners.
Perhaps online teaching methods are best suited to situations where the main aim is to transmit information with little need for group interaction. Online teaching therefore should be seen not as a partial or full replacement for face-to-face teaching, but rather, either an addition to existing face-to-face activities or an explicitly planned totally different learning experience.
For those who want to find out more:
Good articles to read next …
Comas-Quinn, A. (2011) ‘Learning to teach online or learning to become an online teacher: an exploration of teachers’ experiences in a blended learning course’. ReCALL, 23 (3),pp. 218-232.
[An article that helpfully distinguishes between teachers learning new skills to teach online and actually becoming a different kind of teacher.]
Hodges, C., Moore, S., Lockee, B., Trust, T. & Bond, A. (2020) ‘The Difference Between Emergency Remote Teaching and Online Learning’, Educause Review, 27 March. Available at: https://er.educause.edu/articles/2020/3/the-difference-between-emergency-remote-teaching-and-online-learning (Accessed: 23 November 2021).
[A reminder that lockdown online teaching during covid is not the same as a carefully planned online course.]
Teaching and Learning Mathematics Online (TALMO) website
[Practical ideas for teaching maths online.]
References
Heyd-Metzuyanim, E. & Shabtay, G. (2019) ‘Narratives of ‘good’ instruction: teachers’ identities as drawing on exploration vs. acquisition pedagogical discourses’. ZDM : Mathematics Education, 51 (3),pp. 541-554.
Morgan, S. (2022) ‘What the adoption of EdTech has taught us’, The Department for Education Teaching Blog, 25 March. Available at: https://teaching.blog.gov.uk/2022/03/25/what-the-adoption-of-edtech-has-taught-us/ (Accessed: 18 April 2022).
Mseleki, Z. (2020) ‘A Literature Review of E-Learning and E-Teaching in the Era of Covid-19 Pandemic’. International Journal of Innovative Science and Research Technology, 5 (10),pp. 588-597.
Thinking Education 