Giving structure to your online Eco lessons

It’s late April 2020. If you’re a teacher, you’re probably teaching remotely.

This is not a post about the pros and cons of doing this. I thought it might be more valuable to discuss how I structure my senior Economics classes in teaching them online rather than face-to-face.

As a pre-service teacher, many of my uni lecturers talked about ‘chunking’ your lessons. Here, you break your whole lesson into digestible chunks, each with its own focus and set of activities. 

At the moment (April/May 2020), our school has shrunk our lessons from around an hour face-to-face to 45 minutes in the remote format. This gives the students a 15 minute break between classes. 

So. My Year 12 Eco students arrive, and I’ve got 45 minutes for the day’s work. How do I structure this? How do I chunk it?  

Chunk one: Past Higher School Certificate (HSC) question

Time taken: Around 10 minutes

This reflects the structure of my regular in-person classes too. I tend to start with a past exam question relating to the content we’re studying.

In remote teaching, I use Microsoft OneNote as my ‘whiteboard’. I find it particularly valuable because I can save this ‘whiteboard’ as a PDF and post it to Google Classroom afterwards so students can have a record of this class. I reckon it’s more valuable than having a Zoom recording or equivalent of the class. More efficient to review the content.

So I paste an exam question to the OneNote document (one or two questions) and ask students to work through them. I give them five or so minutes to do this. We then review their responses and clarify any mistakes. This task also gets students thinking about the content we’ve been discussing or will be discussing.

I can’t remember why, but Baby Shark was a massive part of this lesson.

Chunk two: Reviewing the homework

Time taken: Around 10-15 minutes (including some clarification of content)

I use a ‘flipped learning’ approach in my teaching of senior Economics. This means students go through the content for homework (via one of my YouTube videos and accompanying questions) and then we apply this content in class. 

Eco content can be complex and students will often have questions stemming from this homework. To address this, I dedicate a portion of the class to reviewing the homework. Not re-learning or redoing but clarifying by answering questions and double-checking students’ responses to the homework questions. 

Sometimes the process is very simple; sometimes it’s a little more complex and requires more time.

Chunk three: Applying the content

Time taken: around 15-20 minutes

In remote teaching, I find lecturing can add to students’ feeling of disconnection and of learning being a passive activity. So I set students specific questions to work through after we’ve reviewed the content.

I leave all students unmuted and encourage them to interact with each other, just as they would in a regular class, to develop responses. I avoid contributing. I want them to engage in the process and sit with the difficulty as much as possible.

We’ll then review the answers. I’ll either type up suggestions or again use OneNote as my whiteboard. 

Chunk four: End of lesson review

Time taken: Five-ish minutes

Students at our school may have up to six remote lessons a day. Given this, I think it’s important to finish the lessons on time and give students the maximum amount of break possible. 

At the end of the class, we do a quick review of where we started and what we covered. Typically I’ll scroll through the OneNote doc on screen which allows us to see precisely where we started and where we ended up. 

I’ll also assign the next bit of homework so students can continue the cycle of learning.

Try a little patience

Classes can be very loud and excitable places. They can be boisterous and lively. They can involve students talking on top of each other, eager to share their thoughts. Sometimes loud is good. Other times loud can preclude thinking. 

The problem here is that if students are focused on speaking and sharing, in an almost, competitive sense, it can preclude thinking. And, as Ron Ritchhart* says, “learning is a consequence of thinking” (Creating Cultures of Thinking, 2015, p. 102). 

I’ve posed questions to a class, gotten ‘engagement’ (measured by noise? Hands?) and assumed learning has taken place. But think about who contributes in class. It’s not everyone. Even if someone puts up their hand, or yells a comment, will their contribution be acknowledged, incorporated or developed? Thinking is not guaranteed.

“As a teacher, I need to create more opportunities for students to think and less for them to appear ‘engaged’. How do we do this? One way is to give students quality wait time.”

You’re probably familiar with the concept of ‘wait time’, of giving students time to think and then thoughtfully respond...rather than rushing in with their first, sometimes undeveloped thoughts. I think we should expand on this idea and give students quality wait time. 

Here’s what this could look like. First, the teacher clearly poses a series of questions. These are written down so students can see them (rather than just hear them), annotate them and engage with them. Second, the teacher asks students to work, individually, through the questions. Third, students are asked to share their responses with a classmate and add to their work. This collective work is then shared with the class.

A couple of other things to note. One, this process takes time. It’s not a case of asking “What is X?”, getting a few hands and responses, then moving on. Two, this process can be challenging. Students need to work individually and potentially struggle. This is deliberate and valuable. Let’s not rush to offer the answers here. Finally, all students have to share their thoughts, even just to a partner. They can’t duck the discussion.

Here’s a quick example. Students have had homework on tariffs, including definitions and drawing graphs. In class, I could ask questions out loud like:

-What is a tariff?

-What does a tariff look like?

-How do we calculate government revenue after the imposition of a tariff?

But not everyone will contribute. Not everyone will undertake thinking and participate in learning. Instead, pose these as written questions. Have students work individually, then pair up. Then open it up to the class. See if there’s a difference.

Be patient with the use of quality wait time.

*Ron Ritchhart is a Senior Research Associate at Harvard Project Zero and a pioneer in having students make their thinking visible. You should definitely check his work out. There’s a great chapter discussing wait time in the book linked above.

A methodical approach to multis

I think multiple choice questions are an amazing teaching opportunity in economics. 

Think about how tough it is to create a multiple choice question. You need to choose some content, link it to other content or a hypothetical example, make the students think and then include answer options that are similar but still have a clear(ish) winner.

Think also about the value in having students decode and deconstruct multis in a very methodical way to test their content knowledge. I see this as a valuable endeavour.

I’ve created a video (see below) going through all the multis in the 2019 NSW Economics HSC. Check out the exam and marking guide. The video takes you through my process, which I in turn share with my students in class. I am methodical because I want them to be methodical. I want them to take the time now, while they’re practicing, to really interrogate the questions and thoughtfully exclude options, not just identify the correct answer.

Let’s be clear: I don’t expect students to undertake all of this detailed process in their exams. But I do expect students to carry through some of these strategies, particularly some form of annotation. I continually encourage my students to do this all the time, multis, shorts, essays, whatever.

Oh. If you’ve got a better way of answering question 14, let me know in the comments. I didn’t love that one. 

Multi thoughts on improving multis

Economics exams love multiple choice questions. These multis are supposedly designed to test student knowledge and often confuse the hell out of people. How can you help your students do better on these questions?

One strategy I use with my students is to do away with the answer categories. You can physically take them off or just cover them with a piece of paper.

Here, you’re asking student to stop jumping straight to the answer categories. Instead: ask your students to think about likely answers, prime their thinking, jot a few thoughts down, then look at the answer categories.

Let’s have a look at how this could work. Here’s a multiple choice question in its entirety.

Don’t give this to your students. Instead, just give them the question:

Ask them to list their thoughts. Maybe they start talking about people out of the labour force, about people who have given up on seeking work. Maybe they talk about people who are NOT classified as unemployed. All of this process stuff is good. Really good.

Then, put the answer categories back and ask them to answer the question.

The idea is to help students put a routine in place. I want students to stop jumping into questions and start by thinking carefully about the question.

I've got five marks on it

This week a student asked me: “For a five mark question, do we need to include five marks?”

So I gave them a great answer.

“No.”

A five marker question doesn’t need five points. You may only need three points. This is because a marker is not looking for a specific number of points.

What is a marker looking for?

• They’re looking for a clear and comprehensive explanation

• They’re looking for the use of relevant examples that are fully explained

• They’re looking for responses that directly address the question and do not waffle

I suggest you show your students a typical HSC marking rubric (see below). Look closely: there’s no mention of how many points to include. In fact, if you include five points that aren’t clearly explained, you won’t be in the running for full marks.

No mention of how many points to include.

I’ve also created a video to help students understand some of the ‘secrets’ of the marking process. I think it’s really import for us as teachers to try and demystify the marking process to help students do better in high pressure exams.

The most difficult task in teaching?

My toughest challenge in teaching? This is easy to answer. It’s handing back student work.

The power of assessments or exams is that it raises the stakes for students. It makes things count, in a really visible way. They know that these numbers will go somewhere: a report card, an email home, a university admission score.

But in giving back student work two things often happen.

One, students are focused on the mark and that’s about it. Now I’m not blaming them. The focus of assessments can seem to be about marks and ranks and how you did against your peers.

As teachers, we know that students are at their most attentive just before marked work is handed back. They’re poised on the edges of chairs. So we try to take advantage of it.

• We talk about how this work is part of a process and how students should use this as an opportunity to identify and address their weaknesses.

• We encourage students to ignore the marks for a minute and focus on the comments.

• We plead with students to think about how well they actually engaged with the questions.

Some students just want their marks. And not much else. But as I said, I don’t really blame them. They’ve got used to a process and don’t expect much else.

Two, we don’t give returning the work the time it actually requires. If we want the feedback to mean something, giving the papers back in a group setting doesn’t set up the ideal environment for reflection.

If I need to give the work back and I’ve got a 50-ish minute period then that leaves very little time for individual feedback and discussion.

I’ve tried a number of different ways to give back work in more meaningful ways. My current strategy, for the senior students (Year 11 and 12), is to give back work individually. Or at least part of the task individually. For example, I might give the students their multiple choice and short answers back as a group (without their overall mark). But then I’ll bring students up individually to discuss their essays and given them their overall marks (but not ranks and that’s a topic for another day).

This is not an easy strategy and requires a double period to at least hope to get through all the individual discussions. It’s also hella draining.

It’s all a work in progress but I find this task so challenging. Check out my video on the process below.