‘Ratio’ in the Online Classroom
Making our online classrooms at least feel like our physical classrooms is an area of practice that i’m keen to pursue with our remote teaching. Albeit, it is difficult to assess student engagement with cameras off (and even with them on) there are a few strategies that we can employ that allows us to ensure that the students are doing most of the cognitive work, opposed to you, as the teacher, doing the heavy lifting.
Building Ratio
In Teach Like a Champion 2.0, Doug Lemov describe a lesson with ratio:
The workout belongs to the students: they are constantly on their toes answering questions, drawing on their knowledge base, reflecting, and refining their ideas.
And we would want to achieve this feeling of the students being constantly on their toes in our online classroom. I offered a few strategies for doing this in my previous post.
Lemov describes two components of ratio: participation ratio and thinking ratio.
Participation Ratio is considering how many of your students are actively participating and how often are they actively participating in your lesson and Thinking Ratio is asking when they are participating, how hard are they thinking? Prof. Rob Coe ascertains that ‘learning happens when you have to think hard’ therefore we should be seeking to have all students participating in our questioning, for example, and for our questions to be sufficiently challenging to make them have to think hard.
Ratio & Remote Teaching
So what strategies can we employ that makes sure that all students are participating and also thinking? Some of them i’ve mentioned before and some i've only recently learned and I hope the prove useful.
Cold Call is one of my favourite questioning strategies in my classroom. A common mistake when questioning is saying the students name first. This only serves one student, only one will be participating and only one will be thinking. So it is key that when you ask a question you pause for a few seconds (I know some teachers who count under their breath) then ask the students name. This demands that all students have to think.
Transferring cold call to the online classroom can be done by posing your question, allowing thinking time and then calling upon a student to unmute but next time you do this why not try doing this: ask your question, ask that all students type their response but do not press enter and when you are ready call on one, two or maybe three to hit enter. A spin on Cold Call but it ensures that all students are writing their response so they will be actively participating but only one or a few will press enter to help the teacher gather data on the students learning.
Now & Wait Questions are great strategies that i’ve learned to use in my remote teaching. Now questions work best when the answer is short and quick (think of the questions you would use for choral response) such as complete this sentence or a quick mental sum or repeated retrieval of knowledge. The teacher would simply say ‘and submit your answer now’ and hopefully you will see a flurry of comments in your chat function. Wait Questions are when the teacher controls when the students press enter for example the teacher would ask a question.
Forms are a great formative assessment tool, especially because they can give students real time feedback on whether they are correct during multiple choice questions (MCQ) and they are a great tool for the students to practice deliberately with the option of short or long form responses. Why not employ them during your remote teaching so that all students are completing a form quiz and are cognitively active at the same time.
There are also a number of great online tools that can support building ratio in the online classroom such as Mentimeter, Quizlet, Qizizz, Socrative and many more but whatever you use I urge you to keep it consistent and not chop and change.
Consistency is great for the students, it limits overloading their working memory and supports them in their learning knowing that they will be taught really well using just a few tools consistently. So pick which online tool will support your classroom and use it regularly to build ratio.
