Written by An age-old question perhaps. How do you create great learning opportunities for your students when you are not in the room, not knowing which teacher with which experience will be covering your classes. It’s a particularly difficult question for me this Friday as I just found out I won’t be in class on Monday, but my major assessment for the unit was today with a carryover on Monday. They are presentations.
I don’t like leaving work periods, but sometimes this is awesome for the kids if there are major assignments coming up. There are not. I don’t love leaving worksheets as they seem like such a hollow experience compared to what I know we would be doing in class.
Sometimes I leave a video/comprehension questions. Sometimes I leave a tic-tac-toe board they need to fill out and basically do three in a row based on their own learning styles (videos vs articles vs games).
How do you create authentic learning experiences for your classes when you are not present to read the learning, change the pace or redirect students who are confused and lost in the material?
Hi Mary-Ellen, the answer depends upon the lead time, for sure, and it sounds like you haven’t received much of that this time around. In some cases you probably just don’t create an authentic, adaptive learning experience, and then you have to be okay with that reality. Life does go on, even after a worksheet sub plan. In other cases, and with plenty of lead up time, you might create an EdPuzzle using another educator’s Youtube video on a given topic. You could also try Nearpod with a previously prepared slide deck with selected response questions riddled throughout for some formative data on what your students know and understand about the topic. GoFormative lets you use many different types of media and question types to support learning and feedback simultaneously. You might even go one step further, as I did when I knew I was going on maternity leave, and create some Youtube videos of your own with the content your students need. Of course, if you do not have 1:1 devices or a BYOD program this might not be possible. I hope you manage to create something that you are happy with and even if you don’t, trust that it will be okay. Good luck!
@mwolcox, I’m sorry I’m seeing this so late, but luckily you’ve been given a range of powerful resources from @lfarooq. Here’s another idea… Whoever is in the room while you’re not there is also a resource! Ask them to affect your class! It’s easy to slip into a culture where we apologize to our peers for burdening them with a substitution while we’re away for entirely unavoidable reasons. It’s also easy to feel that we should ask very little of them while they’re there. But what’s our priority? Surely the students right? Having an adult other than us in the classroom is filled with opportunity, let’s take advantage of it!
It is a very tough situation. Luckily for me with Math, we have resources like the Khan Academy and I can leave a video to watch and some follow up questions. Like every period we plan, there is only so much we can do! Perhaps an opportunity to engage the students in an activity that you have pre-arranged for those “off subject” moments. I have been playing around with an idea of keeping a Math Journal – and one of the sections has a part where they write a “what is working well” journal. This was an idea presented to us at UCC as part of our push to include more wellness into the day to day experience at school. Dr Matthew White (https://www.mathewwhite.org/) spoke about the power of positive psychology.