Science teaching virtually

As the pandemic continues to force lockdowns in parts of Europe and the Americas, online learning continues to be in effect for many schools. As a science teacher, this has proved a challenge as science is a practical and hands-on subject. Not being able to allow students to experiment, test, and explore firsthand, however, has encouraged me to develop and build upon my teaching practice. 

One lesson, I learned early, was when preparing to teach science online, I needed to be reflective and understand that I could not take my face-to-face classroom and simply replicate that online.

I had to ask myself what had changed? This was then followed by, What did I need to do to adapt to that change? For me, this involved considering what the big ideas of the lesson are and what the students need to do to obtain those big ideas and show that they have learned and understood them before moving on. I utilized Catlin Tucker's 5E lesson design model to assist me in this adaption.

One way I evaluated student's recall and understanding of the topics we were covering is by encouraging them to explain and elaborate on the scientific ideas to their families and peers. If students can teach it, that's a great assessment tool and a way to improve their understanding of what they are learning in class. This process also means they are recalling, exploring, and investigating the science in order to explain it.

Another way of doing this was pushing more exploration of scientific ideas and increasing the amount of time in the lesson for engaging students in discussion, either with me, the teacher, or with their fellow peers in the classroom. One major aspect of this exploration and discussion model was that ideally, students would use equipment at home to perform experiments. This was done by creating Wakelets of small home experiments like THIS in which students could first predict the result, attempt the experiment and then explain what was observed using scientific principles. 

Through experimenting at home, students are going to have different outcomes, the observations of which will be very powerful for students to discuss. If this was not possible, due to safety or lack of availability of equipment, I provided a video (see below) or a Phet simulation of an experiment and encouraged students to ask questions, investigate, and use data sets to make sense of what they’re seeing.

In an online environment, asynchronous learning time can be used for investigations, and synchronous learning sessions can focus on discussing the results and the science. As with face-to-face learning, it was critical I continued to guide students to wonder why something happened, and encourage those discussions online. To facilitate increasing the time for discussion and exploration, I provided students with small 3 -5 min videos before the lesson to watch to engage them in the focus of the lesson through my Youtube channel. This reduced the time in lessons teaching content. This became more critical as I moved from completely online lessons to concurrent teaching.

Some Useful Tools

For teaching science online, I recommend a number of educational technology tools, which I used to support the pedagogy I had developed.

Flipgrid - I found having students verbalize their understanding was more effective than writing it out, especially for EAL learners. It also allowed me to determine misconceptions that I could then focus on during the online class time.

Whiteboard.chat - This allowed me to create one whiteboard document which I can present during online lessons and then give each student their own version to manipulate and then offers to share for discussion. The advantage also is that involves an immersive reader which allows my EAL learners to translate text to their own language.

Wakelet- This allowed me to share resources in an organized way, but also allow my students to organize their own resources for easy access for revision.

It is important to note that teachers need to figure which tools are best for them, and then allow their students to become comfortable using each one. It would be advisable that teachers collaborate in schools to focus on two to three key applications to provide consistency. 

Summary

From my own experience, some best practices to consider when teaching science remotely are:

Discussion is critical and needs to be the focus of synchronous classes. Students needed to be involved as this will help them connect their own ideas to the content and develop understanding.

Keep online lessons simple. Learning online is a heavier cognitive load, so focusing on the key points you want to get across and will develop student thinking, reasoning, and discussion.

Online learning is not a learning loss. While online, the teacher develops the content and sequence but make sure you allow students to develop skills such as time management and task completion.