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There is the maxim of 80/20 stating that 20 percent of your effort goes to
achieving 80 of the results and vice versa. Besides being a translator, I am an
English lecturer, with more than 25 years of experience teaching English to
engineering students at the Braude College of Engineering in Israel. We strive
to teach all first year students the four basic language skills, specifically reading,
writing, speaking and listening. In teaching, given a
heterogeneous class, the challenge is not reaching the vast majority of active
and/or knowledgeable students but instead the minority suffering from passive
behavior and weak backgrounds. The forced use of Zoom as the means of teaching
has only made it more difficult to reach these students, forcing all teachers
to reconsider how to impact those students.
To define the problem, every class has a certain percentage of students
that suffers from both passive learning habits and a deficient background
knowledge, creating the conditions for failure in terms of grades and, more
importantly, a damaging lack of knowledge in the future. Passive students fundamentally
accept their lack of understanding regardless of the psychological cost. In
terms of behavior, they sit in class and seemingly pay attention but in fact
understand very little of the lesson. They avoid asking questions in front of
their peers, whether as a result of personality, culture or both, thus hiding
their lack of comprehension. At home, on their own, they make an attempt to
apply the taught material, generally with poor results as they did not
understand it in class, but do not seek additional help. They often consult
with students in the same boat because of a shared culture or to avoid
appearing stupid to socially distant peers. This same behavior would not be
academically disastrous if the students retained sufficient knowledge of the
material from previous courses. However, in too many cases, poor schools
combined with ineffective work habits have created a serious knowledge
deficiency that requires extraordinary effort to overcome. Thus, these
challenged but silent students either fail the course or continue on without
the knowledge they require in the following courses and their future careers.
In normal times, i.e., physical classrooms, teachers can identify these
students through observation and quiet interaction. Experienced educators
quickly notice those students that tend to avoid participation and asking
questions. A discrete assessment of student comprehension during class
exercises by looking over the student’s shoulder or asking questions makes it
clear that the student’s silence is not golden. In other words, the student
neither understands nor is taking action to rectify that situation. Repeated occurrence
should turn on a red light signaling that this student needs extra help. In
this case, the most effective technique is a quiet conversation before or after
the lesson in order to identify the specific problem and suggest solutions or
provide additional opportunities for further explanation. In practice, the
success of this method, granted partial, is premised on transmitting the
feeling of “I care” to that student, which, in turn, creates the motivation to
make a greater effort to work through the difficulty and fight fatalism. The
teacher generally must mentor these students on an ongoing basis to
fundamentally change the situation but any progress is important to the future
of that student.
Zoom removes many of the diagnostic tools and limits the ability of the
teacher to communicate empathy and assess understanding. A lecturer using Zoom
sees at most some 20 faces regardless of the size of the class. Even that
amount depends on the issue of forcing students to keep their cameras on, not a
simple matter. Furthermore, only one student can talk at a time, with a short
but annoying gap between the transfer of speech right to another student. Any dialogue is public, limiting private conversation to a written from
on the chat, far from an ideal manner to communicate. Even worse, it is
impossible to glance at a student’s answers during an assignment, leaving the
teacher completely in the dark in regards to the level of actual understanding.
Break rooms of various sizes allow more personal communication. However, there
is an interplay between the size and number of groups, i.e, the smaller the
groups are, the more jumping from group to group is required, which eats up time.
So, breakout rooms alleviate the communication issues to a certain degree but
are far from being equivalent to being there physically. Even quizzes,
considered a practical even if flawed method of knowledge assessment, often
express nothing since the students can share knowledge or copy at ease sitting
in front of their own computer. In short, in Zoom, teachers often throw the
knowledge into the cloud and hope for rain.
I, like most teachers, have tried to learn from the successes and
failures of last semester’s Zoom teaching. I have two groups of 30 students
this semester. Already some six weeks into the semester, I have identified
several students that are “out of it” and merely attend class. In several
cases, I have asked them to talk to me on Zoom at the end of the lesson when
everybody has “left”. The results in terms of communication and establishing a
bond have been far from acceptable. I do not feel that these conversations have
created any momentum in terms of changing the learning approach of the student.
More successfully, I have been much less tolerant, on the verge of brutal, on
early assignments regardless of their actual weight in the final grade. From
the start, I have been returning compositions and assignments back to the
students to redo, providing specific instructions on what to fix in a private
email message. In a few cases, I have warned students that they are in danger
of failing the course if they do not make more effort, again specifying what is
required in the email. When they have applied the constructive criticism, I
have quickly praised their effort, of course. This honest but less emotionally
communicative approach, forced upon me by the requirement to teach in Zoom,
will hopefully lead to better results at the end of this semester as compared
to last semester.
Viewing my efforts this semester, I have been spending almost 80% of
time on these passive students, which represent more than 20% as a result of
the difficulties of Zoom learning. Strong students almost always survive but the
goal of education should be to reach all those with the potential to learn, not
only those with the current ability. It is distressing to know that intelligent
people will have their ambitions stalled because they were unable to overcome
the block of an ineffective learning strategy on their own. As the ad on UK
television says, teachers can make a difference if we only can figure just how
to do so.
*Captions are vital for the blind.
Image: Image by <a href="https://pixabay.com/users/alexandra_koch-621802/?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=5231389">Alexandra_Koch</a> from <a href="https://pixabay.com/?utm_source=link-attribution&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=image&utm_content=5231389">Pixabay</a>
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