With the new school year breathing down everyone’s neck, many educators face teaching online using software like Zoom, and they’re not happy about it. Perhaps teachers don’t know how to maximize what Zoom offers, especially if they try to teach online by transferring knowledge from inside the teacher’s head to inside the students’, which is how teachers might work in a live classroom.
I just taught two graduate education courses on Zoom as part of a joint master’s program between my charter school and SUNY Albany. I see great potential for teaching and learning on Zoom, as long as you create the right conditions for the students to figure things out on their own.
Case in point: My first class was a writing-and-reading course intended to mirror the kinds of reading and writing skills that students in New York State public schools need to learn. For the writing portion, the participants had to produce three kinds of documents:
- Writing to Explain
- Writing to Persuade
- Writing to Convey Experience (through fiction or personal narrative)
Let’s look at what happened in one lesson from the middle of the course that focused on Writing to Persuade. I told the participants that they needed to write something that would persuade the reader to take some kind of action. It wasn’t enough to write, “I think teachers need a longer summer vacation because we work so hard during the school year” – that’s more of an opinion piece. Instead, they had to identify a specific audience and persuade them to take some kind of action. In the case above, they’d have to write directly to the officials at the New York State Education Department and convince them to lengthen summer vacation.
At this point, I’d like to say that in my writing classes I tend to not look at the students’ writing or comment on it until the paper is in its final draft. Also, I don’t teach how to write a persuasive piece until the students have already chosen a topic and penned their first draft.
So let’s look at what happened in the middle of the course. The participants had all picked their topics and written first drafts. I took the opening paragraphs of one student’s writing; I’ll call her Ms. D.
I showed her opening paragraphs to the entire class on the Zoom share screen and asked her to read them aloud. Here they are:
Restructuring Community Funding
Why do I believe that funding to law enforcement should be re-channeled to communities?
I am aware that numerous articles, podcasts, debates, blogs, etc. about restructuring community funding have been discussed ad nauseam, and some may think that it is like flogging a dead horse having been here and done that before.
However, my take on this uproar and tension surrounding the rechanneling of funds to underserved, impoverished communities is a positive one, and I believe that the various emerging movements will be efficacious in their protests and demonstrations and that this will not only be historical, but will evolve into or should I say has been universally embraced and accepted as a ‘thing’ that needs to be addressed, and addressed now.
She read the paragraphs aloud, then the group talked about what they liked about her writing, and she spoke more about what she wanted to do next with it.
I removed her paper from the share screen and said, “Let’s look at some other persuasive pieces and see what you can glean from them. I’m going to show you real, original pieces of writing from courses I taught in the financial services industry. We’ll talk about how successful each one is, and then I’ll show you how the writer revised it during my workshop.”
We looked at three original-and-revised emails; I’ll show just one here. A tech assistant in an investment bank wrote to an assistant in the bank’s bookkeeping department about a special kind of computer service called a “Bloomberg Terminal.” Here’s her original email; I posted it on the Zoom share screen and read it aloud while my course participants followed.
Hi Jerry,
Yesterday I did the Traveler Bloomberg for the guest PC. Samson requested we move the main Bloomberg back from the shared PC to his own PC and Helen agreed. I called Bloomberg to reactivate the Bloomberg terminal here. Gloria from Bloomberg told me there would usually be a charge of $40 but this time she will do it for free. As this terminal was moved from Samson’s PC to the shared PC in August, you may want to monitor the bill.
Best,
Carla
The group in my graduate class looked at this as I read it, then admitted they didn’t understand it completely. Some had to go back and reread it; others stopped following my voice in the middle of my reading and went back to the beginning of the email to try to understand it better. The consensus was that this email was a headscratcher.
I said, “See if you understand the revised version better. As I read it aloud, does your mind stay with my voice, or does it stray?”
Here’s the revised:
Jerry,
Please ensure that next month’s Bloomberg invoice does not charge $40 to switch the main terminal from the shared PC to Samson’s.
Samson requested the switch and Helen agreed. Bloomberg said they would waive the fee.
- Carla
As I looked at everyone’s faces in the Zoom screen, I saw many nodding heads and smiles. Everyone agreed that this was much easier to understand, and it was straight to the point.
We looked at two more before-and-after examples like these. Then I put the participants into breakout groups and told them to examine each set of emails and jot down a list of things the writers did to make their revised versions so clear. I said to write these things down in bulleted lists, beginning each bullet with an action verb, so that they could keep the list to use when they wrote themselves.
The participants worked in groups of three and four; I bounced from group to group to see how they were doing.
Eventually, we returned to the full group and made a master list. Here is some of what they found:
- Use strong verbs.
- State what you want the reader to do in the first sentence.
- Summarize essential points.
- Be assertive in a friendly and/or professional tone.
- Eliminate unrelated information.
- Don’t waste time explaining past history unless it’s truly relevant.
- Anticipate what questions your readers will have as they open your document and start to read. Answer those questions right away.
- Focus on the future action you want the reader to take.
Indeed, if you look at the original version of the Bloomberg terminal email, it’s written almost entirely about the past, and the request for the desired action is buried at the end of the message. The revised version states what Carla wants Jerry to do in the first sentence, and most of the text focuses on the future.
So back to Ms. D. I put her opening paragraphs on the shared screen again and had her read them aloud. When she finished, she immediately said, “I want to change this.” The same thing happened when I displayed other participants’ writing.
I gave them time to rework their drafts, first alone, then by getting feedback from their group members. And, as I often find with this exercise, the results showed dramatic improvement. Here’s Ms. D’s original opening again:
Restructuring Community Funding
Why do I believe that funding to law enforcement should be re-channeled to communities?
I am aware that numerous articles, podcasts, debates, blogs, etc. about restructuring community funding have been discussed ad nauseam, and some may think that it is like flogging a dead horse having been here and done that before.
However, my take on this uproar and tension surrounding the rechanneling of funds to underserved, impoverished communities is a positive one, and I believe that the various emerging movements will be efficacious in their protests and demonstrations and that this will not only be historical, but will evolve into or should I say has been universally embraced and accepted as a ‘thing’ that needs to be addressed, and addressed now.
And here’s her revised:
Restructuring Community Funding
To ensure New York City remains a safe place for all, I am calling for the City Council to take immediate action and re-channel funds from the NYPD budget (the largest in the country with $6 billion) to community social services, especially in poor marginalized areas where much of the policing occurs. The refund would be allocated to programs such as education; health care, including substance abuse treatment services; mental health services; food security; affordable housing; employment; re-entry of released inmates; and other human services.
The re-allocation would achieve the following:
- We’d see a 23% boost in the economy by bringing in more jobs.
- Marginalized communities would see an increase in high school graduates.
- Crime rate would drop by 9%.
- The community would receive much-needed expertise – social workers, mediators, counselors, etc.
My lens as an educator with an elementary school in the Bronx has given me a different perspective and sensitivity about the lack of basic amenities as they relate to children and parents in underserved communities. This impacts children’s ability to learn and develop at the same rate as their peers in more privileged environments.
To my mind, this is a remarkable change. I had very little to do with it other than ask Ms. D. and her classmates to examine some before-and-after drafts of real-life emails from my previous courses, and extract guidance from them to drive how they revised their writing. In essence, I did nothing. And I’d like to note that this was one of those moments in my professional career when my Parkinson’s disease dissipates.
Note: You may be wondering why I didn’t work with Ms. D. on the body of her persuasive piece. What I did do was say to her and her teammates, “After your readers in the New York City Council see this revised introduction, what questions will pop up in their minds?”
Ms. D. and her teammates made a list of questions that they thought the readers would ask. For example:
- How does she know the economy will improve by 23%?
- How does she know that the crime rate will fall by 9%?
- Which social service agencies would receive this extra financial support from the city?
- What part of the present police budget would she trim?
Once she had this list, she just needed to answer the questions in the body of her persuasive piece, and she’d be done.
Much of the course was structured the same way: I’d give the participants something to work on in breakout groups. Then we’d return to the full group to compile everyone’s findings, which they’d then apply to their writing. I didn’t see most of the participants’ writing until the penultimate day, when I sat in a private breakout room with each participant, and went over her/his documents to make final edits in grammar and punctuation.
My two Zoom courses ran as well as the brick-and-mortar versions that I taught in previous years. We met for two-and-a-half hours each morning and two-and-a-half hours each afternoon, for nine days. The one downside to teaching on Zoom was that I felt exhausted at the end of each day, and for two days after each course ended, I was a zombie. Also, it was bad for my back to stay seated in a chair five hours each day (actually longer, as I had to prepare materials for the next day’s session).
Yet I maintain that Zoom and similar online platforms can allow the students to learn a lot, as long as the teachers set up the right situations for them.
Here, for example, are some materials for 2nd and 3rd Graders that we created at my school, using a graphic story that one of our students wrote years ago.
I was astonished at the transformation in Ms D’s second round of her writing. Bruce is an amazing teacher, of course…