Giving structure to your online Eco lessons

in ,

It’s late April 2020. If you’re a teacher, you’re probably teaching remotely.

This is not a post about the pros and cons of doing this. I thought it might be more valuable to discuss how I structure my senior Economics classes in teaching them online rather than face-to-face.

As a pre-service teacher, many of my uni lecturers talked about ‘chunking’ your lessons. Here, you break your whole lesson into digestible chunks, each with its own focus and set of activities. 

At the moment (April/May 2020), our school has shrunk our lessons from around an hour face-to-face to 45 minutes in the remote format. This gives the students a 15 minute break between classes. 

So. My Year 12 Eco students arrive, and I’ve got 45 minutes for the day’s work. How do I structure this? How do I chunk it?  

Chunk one: Past Higher School Certificate (HSC) question

Time taken: Around 10 minutes

This reflects the structure of my regular in-person classes too. I tend to start with a past exam question relating to the content we’re studying.

In remote teaching, I use Microsoft OneNote as my ‘whiteboard’. I find it particularly valuable because I can save this ‘whiteboard’ as a PDF and post it to Google Classroom afterwards so students can have a record of this class. I reckon it’s more valuable than having a Zoom recording or equivalent of the class. More efficient to review the content.

So I paste an exam question to the OneNote document (one or two questions) and ask students to work through them. I give them five or so minutes to do this. We then review their responses and clarify any mistakes. This task also gets students thinking about the content we’ve been discussing or will be discussing.

I can’t remember why, but Baby Shark was a massive part of this lesson.

I can’t remember why, but Baby Shark was a massive part of this lesson.

Chunk two: Reviewing the homework

Time taken: Around 10-15 minutes (including some clarification of content)

I use a ‘flipped learning’ approach in my teaching of senior Economics. This means students go through the content for homework (via one of my YouTube videos and accompanying questions) and then we apply this content in class. 

Eco content can be complex and students will often have questions stemming from this homework. To address this, I dedicate a portion of the class to reviewing the homework. Not re-learning or redoing but clarifying by answering questions and double-checking students’ responses to the homework questions. 

Sometimes the process is very simple; sometimes it’s a little more complex and requires more time.

Chunk three: Applying the content

Time taken: around 15-20 minutes

In remote teaching, I find lecturing can add to students’ feeling of disconnection and of learning being a passive activity. So I set students specific questions to work through after we’ve reviewed the content.

I leave all students unmuted and encourage them to interact with each other, just as they would in a regular class, to develop responses. I avoid contributing. I want them to engage in the process and sit with the difficulty as much as possible.

We’ll then review the answers. I’ll either type up suggestions or again use OneNote as my whiteboard. 

Chunk four: End of lesson review

Time taken: Five-ish minutes

Students at our school may have up to six remote lessons a day. Given this, I think it’s important to finish the lessons on time and give students the maximum amount of break possible. 

At the end of the class, we do a quick review of where we started and what we covered. Typically I’ll scroll through the OneNote doc on screen which allows us to see precisely where we started and where we ended up. 

I’ll also assign the next bit of homework so students can continue the cycle of learning.