Teaching Effectively with Zoom

 Dan Levy's book, Teaching Effectively with Zoom: A Practical Guide to Engage your Students and Help Them Learn, presents a variety of lessons about teaching with Zoom. First, the reader should know that he is writing as the director of the Public Leadership Credential, a Harvard Kennedy School offering focusing on public policy and educational administration. His examples all stem from online graduate school classes. That being said, much of his book applies to other levels, especially on Zoom basics.  

A couple of really important points that hit me including the idea that conversations take longer on in a virtual classroom. As a consequence, teachers need to plan more time for the same amount of discussion. He suggests an online format can cover approximately 80% of the material that an in person class can cover (p. 30). This has huge ramifications in our current educational set up. Think about the idea that 20% of a year's information cannot be covered. That means our curriculum needs to be pared down. 

College Board just released confirmation that this year's AP exams will cover the traditional full year course. Some programs are highly concerned because the students have not covered the entire curriculum. Their rationale is that colleges expect certain things to be covered in their coursework and to be respectful of that the exams must do so. A recent Ed Week opinion piece suggested that end of course grades be used instead to grant credit. There is a reason AP exams are sometimes given credit when dual course work is not. In high school grades are often padded. I once interviewed a student for a scholarship. Her transcript revealed she had received over a ninety in an AP class, but that she only received a 2 on her test. That is why APs cannot allow course grades to count. 

Another element that appealed to me was polling. Formal polling is not allowed on basic Zoom. In some of the paid models, access to yes/no/faster/slower buttons on the participant panel allow for polling in an informal model. As a teacher who is only using the free version, this aspect is not available to me. 

Overall the book suggests good teaching is good teaching. Long lectures without time to process are not good for anyone. Providing time for questions to answered and information to coalesce is critical. Students can input messages into chat, have note pages (like Cornell notes) where they need to summarize the material, and be asked to solve a problem and report back.  Some of this could be in breakout rooms. Working with graduate students, Levy does not worry about inappropriate behavior, where in the K-12 program that would be more of a concern. A 20 minute breakout room could be a great time to disengage or cyberbully if not well monitored.