Teaching Children Online

A Conversation-based Approach

Carla Meskill, Natasha Anthony

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781788922036
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Teaching Language Arts
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

What does best practice in online education look like? How can educators make use of the affordances offered by online environments to bring out the best in the children they teach? These questions are answered in this new textbook, written with experienced teachers, novice educators and teacher educators in mind. Meskill and Anthony offer a wealth of examples of what successful online teaching looks like, and provide a rich source of practical, conversation-based strategies for optimizing online learning. This book will inspire anyone teaching or planning to teach fully online, or in a blended or hybrid format, by demonstrating how well constructed online conversations constitute powerful teaching.

1

Teaching online: a conversational approach

In this chapter you will learn:

• the nature of online instructional conversations and the specifics of their functioning in a range of online environments;
• how instructional conversations work when Teaching with Voice, Teaching with Text and Teaching in Real Time;
• how each environment’s affordances can be optimized to support and amplify these conversations;
• the role of playfulness and humor in online teaching.

Introduction

Why online?

Why instructional conversations?

Perspective-taking

Identity/identification

Context and mind

Affinities

Strategies

Teaching with voice

Teaching with text

Teaching in real time

Playfulness and humor in online teaching

End-of-chapter notes

End-of-chapter activities

Further reading

References

Introduction

To truly teach, one must converse; to truly converse is to teach. (Tharp and Gallimore, 1991: 4)

This chapter introduces a conversational approach to online teaching and learning, the main focus of this text. Throughout subsequent chapters, we discuss and illustrate how and why online instructional conversations can be effective for young students and rewarding for you, the instructor. In this first chapter, the rationale behind the approach and the fundamentals of online activity design and active teaching via instructional conversations are presented as they align with the goals and processes of contemporary education. We begin the chapter with an overview of the potential pedagogical merits of online and blended learning.

Why online?

At the tremendously rapid rate at which online teaching and learning are being embraced worldwide, the question Why online? may soon be obsolete. For the moment, however, educators around the United States and worldwide are posing this question and considering carefully the rationale for offering online educational opportunities to their students.1

Why the rush to move learners online? This expanding migration makes good sense for a number of important reasons:

(1) Opportunity

Where there is no critical mass, as with

■ less commonly taught school subjects;

■ schools with small enrollments;

and for

■ students whose homes are far from bricks-and-mortar schools;

■ students who have physical or psychological challenges too great for bricks-and-mortar environments.

(2) Fit

Whereby

■ most school-age students are accustomed to and comfortable with digital literacy through informal recreational practices;

■ online instruction can be rendered developmentally appropriate, tailored and responsive to individual learners;

■ the range of at-hand materials and the ways learners can interact with them to learn is limitless online.

(3) Pedagogical affordances

Where there is growing empirical evidence of

■ convenience;

■ connectivity;

■ membership (playing field is leveled);

■ authentic audiences;

■ tailored audiences;

■ strategies to compensate for lack of non-verbal information;

■ richness of information (links, multimedia);

■ time to focus and review;

■ time to compose, resources to compose;

■ time and opportunity to reflect;

■ opportunity to witness and track learning;

■ opportunity to demonstrate learning.

In short, online teaching and learning represent both excellent opportunities and fit for many learners and, as is the emphasis throughout this text, an abundance of opportunities for educators to exploit the pedagogical affordances of multidimensional online venues. The chapters that follow intend to model and guide educators as they develop and implement online learning activities in ways that complement and amplify their professional beliefs and practices, especially as these are instantiated through instructional conversations with learners.

Why instructional conversations?

Computers, especially when they serve as they most often serve nowadays – to facilitate communication between people – are highly social machines. Our preferred uses of computers overwhelmingly involve connecting with others: to play games, to chat, to compare notes, to cooperate, to agitate, to commiserate, to antagonize – activities that are very similar to those we most enjoy offline. Our current online soc...