STEM Zone Side Car: STEM Remote Teaching

One practice I implemented was “Concept Exploration”. In a lesson on “Engaging Students Online” I used a think/small group/share strategy to collect prior knowledge from 60 STEM faculty on remote teaching. The prompt was:

Think about your Spring 2020 remote/online teaching experience and describe:

- - One thing that effectively engaged students with you, each other, or the course content
  - One thing you tried that you thought would engage students, but didn’t

Collaborative documents were used to collect individual and small group answers to identify similarities and differences among the participant answers. The concept exploration step was for the purpose of identifying faculty’s prior experience with online instruction and and designing subsequent sessions within their zone of proximal development.

The “Concept Exploration” enabled the 60 participants to find similarities and differences in their prior experience with remote instruction. The STEM faculty overwhelmingly found synchronous sessions to be most engaging and found zoom breakout rooms to be both “what worked” – 50% and “what didn’t work” - 50%. These prior experiences guided the structure of subsequent class sessions on backward design and planning online discussions.

The ACUE activity that made the most impact on my classroom practice was the “Observe and Analyze Videos” where the instructor implements some techniques effectively, while other techniques needed adjustment. These videos were of significant impact because they reminded me that despite best intentions to be clear and accurate with content, and engaging and effective with my choices of teaching strategies, student learning requires constant assessment and reflection on my teaching and student learning.

zoom photo of 40 people

STEM Zone Side Car participants

Student work Concept Exploration

6 ACUE badges

Badges for ACUE Microcredential

Practice and Reflect on: The Learning Cycle (upload one of your reflection guides here)

Faculty Biography

I’m dedicated to meeting my faculty colleagues where they are in their career and disciplinary context in teaching and learning. I aspire to support course design, effective teaching and the creation of equitable learning environments with creativity, evidence based best practice, and a relentless pursuit of excellence.

This work was supported by the CSU Office of the Chancellor and Sacramento State Division of Academic Affairs.