Last week I taught a marathon. Sitting at my desk, I ran like the wind through four intensive days in which I taught a whole semester course. In my last post, I wrote about my dilemmas about dividing the students into groups to allow more intimate and significant learning. I was concerned that although I had offered three different time slots each day to cater to the needs of students with work and parenting responsibilities, the groups were very uneven. I had 23 students signed up for the morning sessions, eight for the afternoon and eight for the evening. After days of deliberation, I decided to encourage movement between the…
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I’m giving an inch, are they taking a mile?
2020-2021 is an unprecedented academic year. Students are dealing with serious issues which significantly influence their study. Many of my students have taken on work as teaching assistants in jobs offered by the Ministry of Education in their effort to divide classes into “capsules” and rapidly increase staff numbers in schools. Many are working in other sectors to support their families or to catch up on long periods of unemployment. Some students have been unwell or quarantined, and many are caring for family members. Other students are still finding it challenging to adapt to online learning and are discovering that every task takes them a lot longer than it should.…
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Additional space for conversation: Informal Zoom meetings
In this period of social distancing and online teaching and learning, we are all in need of communication with others. We all need to see unmasked smiles, hear laughter, and look people in the eye, even if it is through a screen. Students are studying from home, and many have no contact with other students outside the formal lessons. As a relational teacher educator, I firmly believe learning is based on relationships with students and between the students. Building relationships in this academic year is more challenging than usual and requires educators to be creative. I need to be present for my students, and they need to feel that they…
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An Opportunity for Collaborative Thinking in Online Learning
I’m reflecting on the last synchronous lesson in the ‘Teaching English to Young Learners’ course. I have quite a lot of thinking to do about the structure of the lessons. I have divided my 36 students into two groups and have allotted 45-minutes for each, in my attempt to free students from sitting continuously on Zoom. I’m happy about that decision, but 45 minutes is looking very short to me now if I want to present a practical activity, and then have a meaningful dialogic interaction activity in small groups. Yesterday we had fifteen minutes together playing two games which can be directly applied in any elementary or high school…
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A Flipgrid Week – Teaching and Learning with Video
It has been a Flipgrid week. My first-year students in the Oranim English Department made introductory videos. The students, taking their first steps in academia, presented themselves in English in ninety-second videos. Looking at their faces, hearing about their backgrounds, their hobbies, and their dreams of becoming teachers was a pleasure for me, but it was much more than that. In an a-synchronous higher education course, where I only met the students once in a large group on Zoom, this opportunity to see and hear them one by one at the beginning of the course was crucial. Through their Flipgrid videos, I ‘met’ the students as individuals, but just as…
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Cultivating learning relationships from afar
Last night I didn’t sleep well, I felt under pressure, anxious, unsettled. This morning two of my teacher-education courses opened online. As I tossed and turned in bed, I thought about the two groups of students I would meet for the first time on my screen today. I wondered how many would find the link to the Zoom session, how many would win their battles with the internet infrastructure in the regional areas of northern Israel. I wondered how many would be preoccupied with the current financial, social and health problems connected to the pandemic. I tried to imagine myself beginning a new academic year as a student in today’s…
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Relationship-Rich Education
This morning I listened to a recent podcast on the Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast called “Relationship-rich education”. Bonni Stachowiak talked with Peter Felten and Leo Lambert about their new book: Relationship-rich education: How human connections drive success in college, due to be released soon. Felten and Lambert have both worked in significant roles in which they encourage institutions of higher education to adopt practices focused on developing a sense of community and fostering mentoring as an institutional goal. I have read widely on relational education and consider myself a relational educator, but the term ‘relationship-rich’ was new to me. The way the speakers described the concept makes it clear…
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Literacy Lockdown
Yesterday in the late afternoon, I received a request from the Oranim College spokesperson, asking me to write a short response to the Ministry of Education decision to place all grade one reading instruction on hold until schools reopen. The decision followed the widespread discussion in the media on the effectiveness of online reading instruction at the beginning of grade one. A news reporter from the top Israeli newspaper asked for the response and needed it very quickly. I sat down and spent an hour crafting a paragraph stating my opinion on the topic. Unfortunately, this morning I received an apology that they shortened the article, and that they cut out my response. While…
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Attending to the needs of (first-year) students
This morning I discovered the work of Sheila MacNeill through the Teaching in Higher Ed Podcast and her blog, HOWSHEILASEESIT. Many issues were raised in the podcast entitled Time, Space, and Place and in the blog post entitled “The upside down and in-between: the uncertainity of where I am right now”. One of the topics that the two pieces share is the concern for all higher education students, and new students, first-year students in particular. In the podcast, Sheila explained: I think this whole notion of being a student and being a lecturer, actually just being at university or college just now, it’s changing… this goes back to time, I…
