Teaching and learning are best done using the traditional face-to-face method in a given classroom or another appropriate learning environment, but the Coronavirus, which brought about the much suffered COVID-19 pandemic, has taught us that teaching from home and learning from home are also useful.
What tips can help teachers or instructors to teach from home successfully? Well, I’ve initially written on tips to guide learners (students) to study online from the comfort of their homes, and it is no surprise to write the same for teachers. Why?
The Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) brought about drastic changes to our normal way of life, the worst of it all included city, regional and even nationwide lockdowns sometime from the end of last year, 2019. This affected the delivery of teachers and the activities of learners as well.
Fast forward to the end of the year 2019 when everything was moving on smoothly, we enjoyed every bit of what this life had offered us, though we had our own ups and downs, and of course, that is “normal” in this age. However, little did we know the Coronavirus disease (COVID-19 pandemic) will pose a threat to our very own lives and knock us all down from the normal way of life.
Teaching and learning were not ruled out of the case and teachers and learners had to succumb to modern means of education; teaching from home and e-learning (online teaching and learning from home). What tips will guide teachers, instructors and facilitators to teach successfully from the comfort of their homes?
Prepare Well in Advance
The first step in the journey of teaching successfully depends on the teacher’s ability to prepare well in advance, absorb the content (material) to be taught and plan on how to deliver the contents of the lesson at hand to the target learners. This holds for the traditional classroom teaching activities and even more important for the e-teaching process, as I’ll put it.
Incidentally, if you are teaching or even expect to teach remotely in the near future, study the curriculum in advance and prepare lessons for the days or weeks ahead. Always consider opting for content that’s easily accessible online, in a variety of teachable mediums.
Schedule Student Check-in Time
Just as you would for the classroom teaching sessions, make sure to schedule appropriate time, well in advance when you and your students can achieve an encounter for the teaching and learning activities. Always plan with your students in mind. Make it possible for them to connect with you, taking into consideration your students’ individual abilities and other learning circumstances.
Create a possibility for your learners to prepare questions they may have during the instructional activities and other academic exercises. Make use of video conference tools that allow for multiple people to dial in at any point in time. Zoom and Google Classroom are better options.
Set Up an Appropriate Teaching Environment
While looking for space in your home, school or office location, try as much as possible to set up a comfortable, well-lit area and designate it for your teaching activities online. Avoid the temptation to organize and teach from the couch nearer to gaming or entertainment gadgets, or even your bed. Why?
Teaching from such environments at home will make it difficult to devote all your attention to the teaching process. Yes, your concentration will never be complete. Furthermore, when it is time to relax, your brain might find it hard to shut off work thoughts and that’s another setback when you have breaks between a few series of teaching or instructional activities.
Create an Online Quiz
You will agree with me on the fact that pumping too much air into an inflatable with little or no feedback at all can be very catastrophic, not to the device alone, but also to you. It’s the same with teaching and learning, as you ‘pump’ knowledge in the students’ brain, so must you assess their understanding and overall learning progress.
Do well, to the best of your ability, to check in on your students’ learning progress through online methods of collecting feedback. Use a tool like Google Forms to create an online quiz that any student can fill out with their device; desktop and laptop computers as well as other mobile smart devices such; as phones and tablets.
Give Helpful Feedbacks
Just as in the case of face-to-face classroom teaching and learning activities, online teaching institutes a supportive learning process and feedbacks are very necessary for your entire students’ academic progress. When you create and collect results from online quizzes, exercises and assignments; this is what you should do.
Make sure to mark the work and let students know exactly where they made progress and where they need to improve. Doing so patiently by taking individual differences and abilities into consideration can help in the overall process in assisting them to make corrections and tracking their progress.
Use Effective Communication Strategies
Expectations can be frustrating if not communicated in the right sense. To some students, online learning can even be more frustrating than anything else in their academic journey. Adopting effective communication strategies will relieve them of some of the burden imposed by this new method of learning and, subsequently, lessen your burden as well.
Set out your expectations clearly in all relevant communication channels. Make sure students know exactly when and where to receive their assignments, submit their work, or ask questions. Yes, clearly help them to know what you expect from them and why they should act accordingly. This, in effect, will make your teaching activities online the best to write home about.
Be Flexible
As a teacher, a facilitator or an instructor, you know that all students are not the same in terms of abilities, capabilities, skill or even possession of some resources. Environmental backgrounds bring about other differences in students’ academic entry-level in the overall learning process. Even more so, there are also factors that make learners differ in terms of general non-academic personal behaviours.
Therefore, as a teacher, be more empathetic of the home situation of students as some may not have available parental monitoring or adult supervision as well as reliable smart devices or even internet connections. If students need special support, be open to their unique needs.
To sum it all up; effective teaching from home can to achieved by preparing well in advance for the teaching encounter, scheduling effective students check-in time, setting up an appropriate teaching environment, taking and giving helpful feedbacks, adopting effective communication strategies and being flexible.
Interestingly, these are not the only means to ensure effective online teaching. They, however, when coupled with other teaching and learning strategies, provide solid grounds for learners to get the most out of their e-learning experience.
“Sharing is caring”, as the adage goes. Why not consider sharing this insightful and well-written article with the teachers, instructors and facilitators that you know? Take my word for it, they’ll surely appreciate your kind gesture.
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