Learning Circles - Extending Study Skills

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Students in this learning circle are practising screen sharing. They have started learning to create and schedule their own Zoom get-togethers for the purpose of doing collaborative work. They are also practising their spoken English both inside and outside scheduled class times. 

In face to face classes we are used to dividing students into various groupings to practice drills, work together on exercises and the like and yet in ZOOM it is easy to fall back into a much more traditional and narrow model (teacher front and centre stage orchestrating all of the interactions) in a situation that is hard to effectively manage.  Of course in Zoom and its video conferencing counterparts, there are break out rooms, a chat window, sometimes a whiteboard and these can be used for the purpose of facilitating small group discussion and collaboration. This is, however, not the case for all versions of these synchronous conferencing programs across operating systems and devices. The tools mentioned (breakout rooms, chat, whiteboard) are variously located across different interfaces or totally lacking, so planning and using them is problematical.

So there is a problem related to the narrowness of interactions possible with virtual "real time" meetings in which the whole class is present. What about the engagement we might like students to have with one another outside of the main group or scheduled class? 

One of the strengths of online learning is supposedly its flexibility but I wonder if this is in fact the case when it comes to employing synchronous environments? At best, they serve a purpose alongside asynchronous, planned activities that come before them and after. They are an opportunity to "meet" and for participants to bond, but I wonder if we are over-estimating their actual pedagogical value?

As I mentioned, it is hard for the teacher to manage large numbers of learners in a single, virtual space. Over the last year, I have been considering how to take better advantage of environments like ZOOM by thinking outside the box of its use as a total substitute for a face-to-face class - something it can never effectively be.

In this Learning Circle, these students work with the teacher on an activity that was more difficult for them. I started by creating a ZOOM meeting for them to meet and send the link via email or text. As their skills develop the plan is for them to learn to meet independently. In the first instance, they learn to work together through a simple exercise and to share their screens. Soon they will do this alone. Learning Circles can fulfil a number of purposes to suit the range of language levels and digital proficiency that may exist in the same class. 

The skills developed in Learning Circles are recycled back into the whole class meeting online. R. shares her screen with the whole class at a session in which work book exercises (completed in pairs) are being reviewed. She learned to do this in the previous week during her scheduled Learning Circle session with a limited number of classmates. What is interesting about this small grouping of students who meet socially, discuss or share homework, etc. is that it broadens learning possibilities for the whole class (17 in total). A greater range of activities can be done -- before, during and after scheduled Zoom sessions -- as students gain confidence, develop their skills and ability to work within the environment more efficiently and creatively. 

The Learning Circles concept came out of an earlier experiment aimed at improving the way student and teacher worked with Individual Learning Plans. I believe the virtual space provides much better opportunities for a student to work with a teacher one-on-one. 

See my article, Bringing Individual Learning Plans to Life Online. 

These sessions led to setting learning goals and I found that some students had very similar goals and interests - why not pair them up? 

Why not have them working together - sometimes with me, at others times together or alone? 

So there has been a natural kind of evolution happening that had its roots in this one-on-one work I was doing with students earlier last year. I'm very pleased with the progress made so far.

It will be interesting to see where this leads as students become more confident and proficient with the platform (ZOOM) as they assume the driver's seat and use it differently from the way it was presented to them as a "classroom" managed by the teacher.

There is some way to go getting all students involved and up to speed with the skills required to do this, but so far, students who started out studying online last March because of COVID are now up to the challenge.