It’s hard enough communicating with students under “normal” conditions, but with remote learning in progress, internet outages and distractions in the home environment have made communication between teacher and student even more difficult.
The reality is that students find it very difficult to articulate what they need help with (“Everything” is not an easy difficulty to address!). We need to scaffold students to be more specific when they ask for help, so that they can tell us the particular learning element they are having a problem with.
To do this, you could use a table like the one below that asks students specific questions about their learning (download it as a Word document you can email to students here:Learning Reflection):
| Difficulty | Yes | No | |
| Getting started with the task | |||
| Can find the necessary learning material in email or on school website | |||
| Know what I should have completed by the end of class | |||
| Can divide the work up into achievable sections | |||
| Know how much time each part of the task should take | |||
| Completing the task | |||
| Part of the task is taking longer/harder than I expected | |||
| I thought I understood all of the task, but now I am unclear about ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. | |||
| I know when I have to hand in each part of this task | |||
| Asking for help | |||
| This is the part I feel most confident about: | |||
| This is the part I think I can text a friend about or ask my mum/dad/sister/brother/aunt/uncle/dog for help with: | |||
| This is the part I would like to have a different explanation about: | |||
| I think I’ve made a mistake here, can you show me how I went wrong? | |||
