Less Teacher Talk and More Student Talk

    While talking to some of my colleagues last week, we all shared that we were shocked that we were still teaching remotely. For most of us in San Bernardino County, we have been teaching virtually for almost a whole school year. A year of creating and recreating content. A year of computer screens and zoom meetings. A year of teaching students how to submit an assignment on Google Classroom. And a year of how to learn from afar. I know I’m not alone in feeling frustration and sadness over this complicated year. If we could have guessed how long we would have been doing this, we would have started the year differently. 

    One thing I know I would have done differently from the beginning would have been to use structures to get my students talking more. At the beginning of each school year, I’m always exhausted from introducing my to-do classroom strategies and structures to my new students. This school, I was so busy trying to figure out how to teach this way that those strategies and structures were forgotten. Then, in November, I remember still being exhausted, and I noticed it was from doing all the talking and doing! My students were still working hard. It was fair to give them grace, but my normal high expectations were significantly lowered. I was not having students share their thoughts and ideas as I did before. Because of this, my students were disengaged and disconnected from their learning.

    To get students engaged and connected to their learning, I needed to make changes. Here are a couple of things that I started implementing in late November and continue to do to get my students talking more and me talking less:

1. Wait time with music:
   
   I’m not good with long silences in the classroom, and it makes me even more anxious in the virtual setting. Thus, it made it easy for me to talk more when my students did not answer or share their ideas. To give students thinking time, I started playing a couple of songs as informal timers. To do this, I created playlists (you can use Apple Music or Spotify) to use with my students. I give my students a task and set the expectation that they should be ready to share out after one song. This structure has increased the number of students who share and gives students time to ask me for clarification in the chat (if needed). Speaking of the chat...
2. 3-2-1-Waterfall: One fact is that most of our middle school students do not feel comfortable sharing their ideas aloud. This is true in the physical classroom and extends to the virtual one. The plus of a virtual classroom is it has the chat to share ideas and resources. One structure that I’ve been using is called 3-2-1 Waterfall. This is where students type out their response to a prompt into the chat, but they do not send their answer until I say “waterfall.” I do this to give students time to think and type and also so I can ensure that ALL students are answering. I wait to look at the chat until I have my magic
   number (the number of students in class that day). While I’m waiting, students are asked to look over their classmates’ responses and choose one that they either agree with or respectfully disagree with. Next, I cold-call (randomly using
   
   Flippity spinner) on students to share a response that they either agree or disagree with aloud with the class. This structure has helped students connect with their peers and feel safer sharing their ideas since someone else feels the same way. When we started this, I would share a couple of sentence frames to help them organize their thoughts (See picture to the right). 
   
3. Ice breaker and breakout rooms: I don’t know if it’s just my 6th graders, but I would put my students in breakout rooms to work on a shared task, and they would just stare at each other. However, I recently noticed that my students LOVED participating within breakout rooms if it was ice breakers. Therefore, I started planning to do a simple ice breaker in breakout rooms at the start of the class to get my students talking to each other and then use those groups to complete a shared task. Two that have worked great are zoom roulette and silly stories.

• Zoom roulette: The teacher gives their students a question like “Who is your favorite YouTuber?” or “What’s your favorite thing to do on the weekends?” The students are placed in random 2-3 people breakout rooms and given 1 minute to answer the question. The teacher closes the room and asks students to share out either their answer or their partners. Then you repeat for a couple of rounds with different questions and partners. Later on, when it’s time to work in pairs, you explain the task and open the same rooms. My students seem to be more talkative with the partner that they have already worked with that day. 

• Three-word stories: My students have become pros at this one! For this one, I randomly put my students in a breakout room in groups of 4-5.
  
  Their first task is to rename themselves by their breakout room number and then alphabetically (For example: if I were in room two and the 3rd person alphabetically, my name would be 2-Jenni-3). After they rename themselves, you bring them back to the main room to give them the story prompt. You can use any three words: My cat is… Once upon a… The craziness thing… One weird day… Students are instructed to all keep track of the story because they don’t know which seat number (alpha number) I will call on. Then, students are placed back in breakout rooms, and in alphabetic order, they create a story by only adding three words at a time. After 3-4 minutes, rooms are closed, and students come back to share the story (These stories are hilarious). Finally, after the lesson for the day, students are put back in the same breakout rooms to work on a shared task. 

I hope these structures give you some ideas to use in your virtual classroom and give your teacher voice a much needed rest!

Jenni Merry