week 10: summary of Connecting Students in a Disconnected World

All teachers know strong relationships between students and teacher and among students are essential for high engagement and participation within a classroom. Virtual learning makes relationship building feel very different. Is it still possible? Most certainly. It takes a deliberate effort to give kids the opportunity to interact and learn from one another. Which is why utilizing breakout rooms is an impactful and fairly simple to use strategy. Kids learn so much through processing content out loud with a peer.  

Upgrades to google meets have allowed for easily set up breakout rooms which was a game changer mid year. The second half of this article discusses best practices for making breakout rooms effective and purposeful. Some suggestions are: assigning roles, having a time limit and finished product, including an icebreaker, having a technological means for students to use to collaborate, and modeling what you want to see in the breakout room ahead of time.

I use breakout rooms occasionally with my two accelerated classes and they are more effective in my 6th hour than my 2nd hour due to having more kids take leadership and be willing to talk/dialogue in the group. I’ve realized that when I’m writing my lesson plans, I need to think specifically about how/when during the week could I use a breakout room. It’s not going to be an effective strategy for just any assignment. I do much of the structure/setting expectations that is described above already and have noticed the more we do breakout groups (and I know my teammates use them too) the better the kids have gotten at participating.

I haven’t used breakout groups for my two regular classes yet (except when there is an other adult leading the group). I’m scared to use them with my regular classes. I think kids would get distracted. I think there would be misconceptions over the math content. I think many of the kids would not unmute or turn on their cameras. Part of me feels terrible stating that I'll use breakout rooms in accelerated, but not in regular as I know it’s essential to use good strategies for ALL kids not just the “smarter” kids. But the other part of me is making a pedagogical choice based on knowing my students and knowing my curriculum.