37
One of the crucial things teachers can do in their distance learning lessons is to learn how to use the breakout rooms in Zoom. The break out rooms give students a place to go to and explain how they used the particular strategy that helped them understand their particular reading. I also talked to the beginning teachers about criticism Tim Shanahan leveled at the way teachers teach strategies. Too often they model a strategy and then tell the student to use it whether they need to use it or not. They also continue to teach and model the strategy even after it is apparent that the students know how to use it and use it as needed. I explained how I react to this criticism. Some weeks I model a new strategy as I did in this lesson. However, in many other weeks I do not model new strategies. Instead, in those weeks, I provide time where I ask students to explain what strategies, if any, they used to understand that week’s reading. In order to have such discussions in distance learning it is critical that teachers learn how to use the breakout room feature in Zoom. Included in that is learning how to visit different groups to help promote discussions and scaffold students into independent thinking about the various strategies. Here is the slide I used to give teachers a place where they could go and learn about features like breakout rooms. The link sends them to the Zoom help link. There they can search for information about how to use all the various features in Zoom, including the breakout room feature.
https://support.zoom.us/hc/en-us