Leading From The Heart

by Tracy Rosen, teaching & consulting since 1996, blogging about it here since 2007. All views are my own and you should take them with a grain of salt, I do.

Category: Blended Learning

  • Bridging the online / offline / simultaneous teaching gap

    Bridging the online / offline / simultaneous teaching gap

    In Quebec, all students are expected to be in school under normal ratios, that means the same teacher:student ratio in effect at a given school as before Covid-19. (I still find it mind-boggling that the exact same directive goes for schools in Montreal with over 29 000 cases of the virus as schools in the Lower Saint Lawrence, with 75 cases (as of the time of publication.) But that is the case.)

    Actually, that directive doesn’t apply to all students, some secondary schools can opt to create secondary 4 & 5 (Grades 10 & 11) groups that work online so as to facilitate regrouping of students for different course options though 50% of a student’s time must be at school.

    Ok. So what does that look like?

    I don’t have all of the answers to that question. But I know of at least one high school in the Greater Montreal area that is planning for simultaneous classes for their Secondary 4 & 5 courses. One teacher describes:

    I am teaching 1/2 of the group in class, while I am teaching the other 1/2 online, all at the same time. [Then the groups switch the next time she teaches that particular class]


    I also need to take 5 minutes to let cleaning product soak on my desk and then clean anything and everything I might touch, then clean my hands, then set up, then go online and add kids from the “lobby” waiting room and then teach in whatever is left over in the 60 min class that we have. Oh and I need 5 min to put my things together to change classrooms at the end.


    I am hopeful that when teachers need the support from the parents during contract negotiations, that we will get it.

    This teacher, like many others across Quebec, teaches 8 sections of different courses at different grade levels. Four of the sections will be organized like this, the other four are entirely face to face. Each of the groups are made up of 30 – 35 students and the students all stay in their base room most of the day so the teacher needs to move from class to class.

    Pause a bit and let the logistics of all of that sink in.

    This is far from ideal. But what can we do? There aren’t enough teachers for the start of the year as it is. And even if there were more teachers available – the government has directed the same class ratios as normal so schools can only hire 1 teacher per whatever that ratio is for them. In high school the maximum number of students per class is supposed to be 32 but it can go higher (I have seen a class of 47 at Secondary 3…) and in certain cases the max is set lower.

    To be clear. Simultaneous teaching does NOT equal smaller class sizes. The teacher is still responsible for all of the students and his or her attention is now divided between multiple spaces. Have you ever done something on your phone or computer while someone in the room is talking to you? Think about teaching that way… Regardless. We know that the teacher will make it work, that is what teachers do, right?

    So how can we make this easier?

    I’d likely treat the whole class as if they were all learning online. That way I wouldn’t need to create two versions of a lesson plan for my online learners and my in class learners. I’d create learning that can be accessed from anywhere and completed in a variety of ways. That way if each of my in class students didn’t have a device of some sort, they can still do the ‘online’ activities as I project it on my whiteboard (interactive white board or not). And if we all need to jump online at one point in the school year, the material will already be there.

    So what would this look like?

    I use Google, so I’d make a site like these ones and organize the activities and instructions so that they can be completed either at home or in the classroom. The syllabus and schedule would be available on the site but I’d likely also use Google Classroom as a communication platform so students can submit and receive feedback on their assignments.

    Social Media and Me – course designed by Caroline Mueller, PhD, teacher at Place Cartier Adult Education Center, Lester B Pearson School Board.
    Site for a unit on personal identity – designed by me and used in a variety of settings with students, teachers, and student-teachers.

    Students could access this no matter where they happen to be located during the lesson. I’d probably also make sure that when the groups are with me, I’d divide them up into even smaller groups so I can teach them a mini-lesson, ask and answer questions, conference with them, assess them…whatever but in smaller groups (socially distanced) so I can have a handle on formative assessment and touch base with each of them regularly during this incredibly weird school year.

    This might look like teaching in stations, where certain stations can only happen in the classroom. Or, if you teach students who will ALWAYS be at home, certain groups have independent work while you conference with small groups, maybe using a breakout room in Zoom or Meet or a different channel in Teams.

    Accessibility & Inclusion

    Another benefit of putting everything in one online place is that it creates more accessibility in general. No need to provide digital copies of something for students who need it as per their IEP (individual learning plan) … it’s there already. No need to provide students who miss a class with your presentation or notes … it’s already there. No need to create something new each time someone may need an accommodation or need to miss class for whatever reason. And, once again, if school goes online for all, my materials will already be there.

    Relationship & Community

    And if everyone accesses their class material via the online platform, then that can help to create a class community where everyone is included in the same way no matter where they happen to be located. This can go a long way to developing the teacher/student relationship that is so needed, especially this year, yet may seem so far away when we are behind masks, in different rooms, in different buildings.

  • Revisiting Designing Webinars that Matter

    I originally wrote this back in December, on another blog.

    At the time, webinars were just a thing some of us did sometimes. Who knew just how prevalent they’d become in a few short months! So I thought, why not, I’ll republish it here at Leading from the Heart. Because a webinar can absolutely be a way of leading from the heart. But they can also be frustrating for participants and presenters alike.

    Have you been in great webinars lately? What makes them great? What makes them…less great?

    Here is the original blog post.

    Designing Webinars that Matter

    I need to make a confession. I used to hate webinars. Like, really hate them.

    Image of boring webinar

    As a participant, I found them insufferable. Iā€™d be one of a list of faceless people to whom the animator asked, on repeat, ā€œcan you hear me?ā€ In between those questions, the animator would present her or himself as a head with a microphone, reading the bullet points off of the presentation that surely accompanied them. Iā€™d think ā€“ just let me read it myself. More often than not the sound was horrible, amplified by feedback and 2-second delays via participants who left their own microphones on during the presentation. And, when it is all happening in French it becomes not just hard to understand but plain exhausting.

    And as an animator, I would be the one asking, ā€œcan you hear me?ā€ since it was often the only time Iā€™d get proof that there were actual people behind the list of names to the left or right of my screen.

    I said that I used to hate them. I am starting to like them. Like, really like them.

    Webinar on Flexible Classrooms

    Earlier this year, I listened to Martin Lahaie, pedagogical consultant from the Commission scolaire du Chemin-du-Roy, tell the story of a research project on flexible classroom environments involving two teachers: Yannick Buisson (French, CCBE) and Sylvie Gravel (Math, DBE). The project is in conjunction with Nadia Rousseau, researcher from UniversitĆ© de QuĆ©bec Ć  Trois RiviĆØres.

    What I enjoyed about that webinar is that we were a small group, so there was interaction throughout the presentation. The smaller a group is, the more people can talk. This is true in the classroom, the conference room, or via distance education. I felt that he was talking with us and not just presenting the content of his presentation.

    Social Media and ME webinar

    The following week, I co-hosted a webinar with Caroline Mueller, teacher from Place Cartier Adult Centre of the LBPSB. We wanted to do the same thing ā€“ talk with small groups of people instead of at them, but we had a larger group of close to 40 participants. So we took advantage of online breakout rooms and organized the webinar into stations. We were each at a different station and so we each spoke with all of our participants even though it was a larger group. Here is the result of that webinar, including resources and some video: Social Media & ME Webinar resources.

    Quebec Social Integration Network webinar

    Soon after that, I was involved in an Apres-cours webinar offered by the Quebec Social Integration Network. The teachers who began the network presented a website they had created via an interactive webinar. Each teacher was in a different breakout room to facilitate discussion and sharing about different parts of the website. Participants were able to access the material and presenters easily.

    Each of these webinars mattered to me as a co-presenter or participant for different reasons ā€“ mainly because in each one I was able to interact with the material and the people in different ways.

    Some things I am learning about webinars

    It is just another environment for learning soā€¦

    • Mix things up ā€“ no one really needs to hear someone read off of a slide.
    • Just like in a classroom or conference room ā€“ build relationship. We are all humans connected to each other through the webinar interface. Ask yourself, how do I bring us together?
    • Along that same idea, donā€™t expect people to interact ā€“ just like in person, you need to create meaningful reasons for interaction.

    That last bullet point is huge. So what can that look like?

    • Create small group activities: We know that the larger a group is, the fewer people speak so create small group activities and choose a webinar platform that allows people to work in breakout rooms (Via and Zoom both have this function).
    • Use online collaboration tools: Design your webinar so that participants are active in their learning. You can place different types of active learning experiences into the different breakout rooms. Here are some that I have used:
      •  Answer garden is great for generating word clouds around questions. You can also use it to question participants at the beginning or at specific points in the workshop and then bring the resulting word clouds into the picture later on for discussion. Example: Reflection questions & Resulting word clouds.
      • FlipGrid is great for video reflections. Participants can also respond to each other. You can respond to them, too.
      • Google slideshow is useful for creating collaborative visual products.
      • Google forms (or office 365 forms) is another good tool for collecting info remotely, you can also view visuals of the responses to share with your group.
    • Use a website to organize material for yourself and your participants: This helps to increase access to the learning material. When you include all of the instructions on a site, it also helps those who may have missed the initial instructions and it creates a permanent place that participants can refer back to. Here are two examples, using Google Sites:
    • Give people time to think when you ask questions. It is ok to have some silence.
    • Remember, it also takes time to write into the chat box for people who are interacting that way. Give people time and respond to what they write.
    • Participants, interact. Ask questions. Offer answers. Let the animator and the other participants know that you are there and that you care about them.

    And please donā€™t forget toā€¦

    • Turn off your microphone if you are not talking. When your microphone is on, it can send other sounds back to the webinar. More often than not, those sounds are the webinar itselfā€¦but on a 2 second delay.
    • ā€¦and remember to turn it back on when you do talk ?

    So, my hate affair with webinars is starting to end. When we think about online learning as just another way to learn then we realize that, just like when we are face to face, we want to focus on creating opportunities for connection and interaction with the learning materials and with each other.