In this week’s episode, I teamed up with Aidan Sammons, Head of Psychology and Professional Coach at King Edward VI Handsworth School for Girls.
Now that we think we might have mastered the technological challenges of teaching remotely, there are many questions that arise about the successful delivery of learning and how teachers might give (and receive) feedback from pupils in order to accurately and efficiently assess students’ grasp of the intended learning.
Whilst many of the ‘soft’ means of gathering feedback from our pupils in a classroom have now gone (the casual glance over their shoulder, their telling facial expressions, the freedom to ask questions and gather responses quickly), there are a variety of methods that can be used to test the temperature of the classroom.
What’s imperative is that any mode of feedback that is selected by teachers is appropriate, timely and gives us the information we need to tailor the next learning episodes to students’ needs. Any decision made in the online classroom needs to have sound pedagogical reasoning, just as it would if you were teaching face-to-face.
In this video, Aidan and I discuss some of the challenges of feedback when teaching remotely and Aidan shares a strategy for how he is using multiple choice questions in Psychology to test students’ conceptual understanding of a topic. Aidan discusses how assessment can be used to punctuate and dictate the direction of the teaching in the virtual classroom.