Senior Educational Therapist & Curriculum Developer
English Language and Literacy Curriculum Team
Educators, imagine you are delivering an online lesson and you are talking, but the students are not responding.
What do you do?
Talking in the classroom, be it in a physical or online setting is important.
Emma Lind Martinez (2021) wrote in her blog article about how talking is “a critical factor in creating productive, equitable classrooms.” She also described that “by setting up goal-directed discussions about meaningful content, educators can help students transform their ideas into public resources for their classmates, advancing the whole group’s state of understanding” (Martinez, 2021). In this way, the lesson thus becomes “a collective endeavour in building knowledge and deepening skills.” (Martinez, 2021).
At DAS, other than the Main Literacy Programme (MLP), the English Language and Literacy Division (ELL) also offers the iReaCH™ programme which focuses on higher-order skills such as writing and comprehension.
In the iReaCH™ programme, where the classes are currently online, you may wonder, how do our educational therapists engage the students during the online lessons?
I interviewed iReaCH™ Educational Therapist, Zaidah, to find out more on how she encourages her secondary school learners to converse and more importantly, engage in rich discussions. Let’s find out from her experience of teaching her iReaCH™ classes online.
1: Think of any one of your iReaCH classes, describe how your students were on their very first lesson?
Zaidah: They were very quiet but compliant to my online class rules.
2: So, what did you do on their first lesson to engage them in conversations and class discussions?
Zaidah: I played an ice breaker game using Kahoot.
3: Do you have a strategy you used to get your students talking?
Zaidah: I use positive reinforcement by rewarding my students with ten minutes of online vocabulary games on Blooket towards the end of the lesson. This is a win-win situation as they have fun while learning or recapping what they have learnt.
4: When all strategies don’t work, what did/would you do?
Zaidah: I would give feedback to their parents for support as well as inform the management to check if the student is facing any other issues.
Ultimately, communication with our students, be it online or physical, is important in order to have a productive lesson. Thank you Zaidah for giving us an insight on how you communicate with your students!
For more information on the iReaCH programme and how it can help your
child, visit our website at:
www.das.org.sg/services/programmes/ireach.html
References:
Martinez, E. L. (2021). How to Empower Every Student To Talk In Class – and Why It Matters. Education Next. www.educationnext.org/how-to-empower-every-student-to-talk-in-class-why-it-matters/
iReaCH™
The primary aim of iReaCH™ is to support learners in Reading Comprehension and Writing through the deliberate use of vocabulary instruction and educational technology, allowing them to better manage these higher order tasks expected of them in school.
