Designing for Interaction Part 1: Student-to-Teacher Interaction in Your Digital Lessons

 This is Part 1 in a three-part series of blog posts on how to design for interaction in your digital lessons. 

Three Types of Interaction 

Online learning does not have to be an isolating experience. As a matter of fact, the online environment can be leveraged to create opportunities for meaningful, personalized, and frequent collaboration and connection. In every digital lesson that I design, I try to incorporate three types of interaction.

• Student-to-Teacher
• Student-to-Student
• Student-to-Content

Let's dive into designing for student-to-teacher interaction!

During Synchronous Instruction

When we think about our live instruction online (or in a socially distanced classroom environment), student-to-teacher interaction is fairly inherent. The thing to remember, especially when delivering instruction through video-conferencing, is to be sure that the interaction is both ways and not simply content delivery from the teacher. 

Prioritize Small Groups

One of the most difficult tasks online is to provide whole group instruction in a synchronous format (it's why I prefer that type of online teaching for individualized or small group instruction). If we are not intentional about ensuring that students are interacting with us as much as we are interacting with them, it is likely that we will lose the attention of many of our students. 

Prioritizing small group live instruction and leveraging asynchronous learning for whole group instruction can help with naturally increasing the amount of two-way teacher and student interaction. It is easy to fall into a lecture style format with 30 muted participants in a Google Meet or Zoom, but a small group will naturally feel more conversational and encourage participation from all students. 

Every Student Responds Techniques

Another strategy is to be intentional about creating opportunities for all students to respond to you during live instruction instead of simply calling on individual students. 

Incorporating these "Every Student Responds" techniques into direct instruction is not a new idea. Many of you facilitate these types of activities in your face-to-face classrooms daily. For example, you may have students participate in a Four Corners routine where they answer questions by moving to one of four corners of the room to indicate their response. However, when we move online (or are forced to stay seated because of social distancing protocols), activities like the Four Corners routine are impossible. 

That is, they are impossible unless you rethink those activities in a digital format! My colleague Amanda Moore has shared a Google Slides template with various Every Student Responds techniques that students can participate in from a distance. Check out the video below for information about this template and access the slides by clicking on the image below the video. 

Slides for Synchronous Interaction - Select the Use Template button at the top right to make your own copy. 

During Asynchronous Instruction

Interaction between the students and the teacher during on-demand or independent online learning is paramount to the success of your asynchronous instruction. High quality student-to-teacher interaction in this space will involve your presence in the content and learning environment and your timely feedback. 

Your Presence

Your presence in the digital learning environment impacts student engagement and motivation, academic achievement, and even has a direct impact on academic integrity. When I refer to your presence, I mean everything from your face in the videos you share, efficient feedback, audio, participation in online discussions, messages, announcements, and more. The research tells us that the closer you are to the learning, the more motivated, engaged, and academically honest your students will be. 

One study from 2015 (Belcher, Hall, Kelley, and Pressey) found that simply interacting with students online more than once per week resulted in higher levels of critical thinking present in their interactions with their classmates.

Some quick tips for increasing your presence online:

• Use a screen recording tool like Loom or Screencastify to record quick instructional videos or videos that do a tour or overview of the lesson. 
• When using videos from YouTube that others have created, leveraging an interactive video tool like EdPuzzle not only allows you to ask students questions and collect data on what they understand from the video, it also allows you to interject audio recordings with your own thoughts. Supplementing the instructional video with your own audio directly connects you to the instruction. 
• Use the announcements and messaging tool within your learning management system, if applicable. Where you can, record video messages instead of relying only on text. 
• Participate in all learning activities in the same way that you would in-person. You would never initiate a discussion in class and then walk out of the room to let the students facilitate it without you. In the same way, your role online is just as critical. 

Feedback

Timely and actionable feedback is a critical component of high quality student-to-teacher interaction. Regular feedback can come in multiple forms:

• Audio and video feedback
• Interaction in online discussion spaces (discussion boards, Flipgrid, Padlet walls, etc.)
• Dialogue with students in collaborative documents
• Feedback on assessments
• Whole class announcements with feedback on collective understanding and performance
• Live conferencing based on asynchronous work
• and more!

As a matter of fact, in the near future, look for a blog post on ideas for scaling up and providing efficient feedback. Stay tuned! 

In the comments or on Twitter using the hashtag #PerfectBlendBook, share additional ideas for increasing or improving student-to-teacher interaction in your online or blended classroom.

Stay tuned for Parts 2 and 3 where we will take a look at student-to-student and student-to-content interaction in both synchronous and asynchronous online instruction.