Introduction and Learning Outcomes
The “How to Adapt My Teaching Style in Remote and Blended Training Activities” module is designed to enhance your ability to modify your teaching approach for remote and blended environments. This guide offers practical strategies to maintain engagement and effectiveness, regardless of location or format, helping you tailor your interactions to better connect with and inspire your learners.
Upon completion of this module you will be able to:
- Seamlessly adjust your teaching approach to fit remote and blended learning formats.
- Foster an inclusive classroom environment that actively encourages all students to participate in learning activities.
- Continuously refine your teaching methods by collaboratively evaluating them with your students.
- Successfully create a learning environment and structure that promotes participation from students.
Key Steps to Adapting Your Teaching Style for Remote and Blended Training
Reflect on your strengths and weaknesses as a face-to-face teacher to understand what works well and what needs improvement. This will help you effectively transfer your strengths to a digital platform and address any weaknesses.
Use your knowledge of your teaching style to adapt it for a digital platform. Incorporate interactive elements, use multimedia resources, and establish clear communication channels to maintain engagement and effectiveness.
Foster an inclusive learning environment by actively encouraging student participation in online learning activities and social platforms. Ensure all students have equal access to resources and support, addressing any barriers to participation.
Continuously evaluate your teaching style and its effectiveness in the digital environment. Use feedback from students and colleagues to identify areas for improvement. Experiment with different digital tools and techniques to enhance your teaching.
BENEFITS
As part of the digitisation process, collegial learning is essential for teachers to educate themselves and experiment with new digital tools. Collegial learning, where colleagues are viewed as valuable resources, is an effective way to enhance skills within organisations.
Utilise Existing Skills:
Identify and collect the skills present among colleagues.
Use these skills as learning opportunities to improve overall competence.
Plan and Evaluate Learning Opportunities:
Ensure that learning opportunities are well-planned and evaluated to meet the organisation’s needs.
Schedule time for colleagues to present plans for collegial learning based on their skills.
Practical Application and Evaluation:
Engage in collegial practical learning where teachers try new tools and collaboratively determine how best to apply them within the organisation.
Evaluate the effectiveness of the new skills together. Assess if they were relevant and added value to the teaching and learning processes.
Educational Resource 2. Inclusion in the digital classroom
To promote inclusion and participation among students in the digital classroom, here are some tools that can help teachers.
- Let students keep their cameras on and actively participate in discussions.
- Create breakout rooms often to keep students interested and involved.
- Make time for smaller groups (2 students + 1 teacher) to help students feel seen and heard.
- Assign tasks that require student involvement, such as discussions, research projects, or presentations.
Educational Resource 3. Evaluation with Students
Students, as the receivers of the education teachers create, are important as an evaluation tool. What teachers teach must be relevant and possible for students to understand and learn from.
Regular evaluations with students create a classroom where students feel part of the education on a democratic level. It helps teachers develop new teaching styles that work within the digital classroom.
- Make an anonymous quiz once a week with Microsoft Forms.
- Every second week, take 15 minutes to review the quiz results and invite students to discuss how teaching can improve or change.
- Try out new changes to your teaching style and use student evaluations to see how the new style works.
Educational Resource 4
Assuring practical skills in an online environment
When students acquire practical skills through their education, teachers may need to assess those skills. While practical skills can depend on the environment, students can sometimes demonstrate them through roleplay. Evaluating these skills can be time-consuming, so we’ve compiled some suggestions for teachers:
Have students roleplay practical skills in a specific environment and record it. If recording isn’t feasible, students can write a script to demonstrate their understanding of the skills in that situation.
Allow students to watch and evaluate each other using a matrix that outlines the required skills.
Encourage students to lead the class and teach a practical skill they have researched, sharing their knowledge with their peers.
Educational Resource 5
Structure for the digital classroom
Some students rely on the structured schedule of school days to stay focused on their learning. In distance learning, they may miss out on the school environment and struggle to maintain the same structure at home.
- At the beginning of the semester, have students discuss their experiences with learning environments and what works best for them. This helps them support each other in creating a suitable environment at home.
- Ensure all students know how to access and upload documents online, providing guides if needed.
- Inform students in advance about the day’s class, including the topics, break times, and discussion sessions.
- Start each class with a thematic phrase or word, and allow students 10 minutes in breakout rooms to discuss it, simulating the “corridor talk” they would have at school.
- End each class with a round where every student shares one sentence about the day’s lesson.
Take this quiz to evaluate how much you've learned!
References
Fredrik Rusk & Wenche Rønning (2020): Group work as an arena for learning in
STEM education: negotiations of epistemic relationships, Full article: Group
work as an arena for learning in STEM education: negotiations of
epistemic relationships (tandfonline.com)
Digitalization and school leadership: on the complexity of leading for digitalization in school EMERALD_IJILT_IJILT624144 218..230 (diva-portal.org)
Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them. Project number: 2022-1-SE01-KA220-VET-000087462
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