Remote Teaching and Learning in the Elementary ELA Classroom

Instructional Strategies and Best Practices

Sean Ruday, Taylor M. Jacobson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000414608
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Teaching Languages

Teaching in remote, distance, and hybrid environments can be overwhelming and confusing and poses many challenges for novice and veteran teachers alike. In this comprehensive and practice-ready book, you'll find clear ideas for implementing the best practices of English-language instruction in remote teaching settings. Understanding that remote teaching looks different in each subject, Ruday and Jacobson identify methods specifically designed for elementary ELA classrooms.

Designed for use in remote, hybrid, and hyflex environments with synchronous or asynchronous learning, this resource gives teachers a toolbox of research-backed recommendations, ideas, examples, and practices for teaching in unpredictable and new environments. Ruday and Jacobson address essential topics, including writing, grammar, and reading instruction; assessment; differentiation; culturally relevant teaching; family engagement and communication; technology; professional self-care; and more. Teachers will come away with ready-to-implement strategies and insights for high-quality instruction that can be adapted to any kind of remote learning environment.

II

The Potential of Remote Language Arts Instruction

3

A New Format of Writing and Grammar Instruction

In this chapter, we look closely at the best ways to teach writing and grammar in the context of remote language arts instruction. While teaching writing and grammar remotely can certainly be challenging, we also feel that the remote environment provides a number of opportunities for innovative and engaging instruction in this aspect of language arts. Through the information in this chapter, we convey essential aspects of effective writing and grammar instruction and provide suggestions to consider when working with your students remotely on these instructional components. We begin by first exploring key components of remote writing and grammar instruction, identifying its major attributes and the challenges and opportunities associated with it. Next, we reflect on why it’s so important to effectively teach grammar and writing in remote contexts, which we follow with an instructional snapshot section that provides an example of Taylor’s work with her elementary school students. Then, we share key recommendations for teachers to consider when teaching writing and grammar remotely. Finally, we discuss how the ideas in this chapter can be implemented in a range of modalities.

What Are the Key Aspects of Remote Writing and Grammar Instruction?

When we reflect on effective writing and grammar instruction, we think of an active process for students and teachers. We picture strategy-focused mini-lessons, discussions of mentor texts, engaged students working on drafts, conferences between students and teachers, and other demonstrations of active learning. While the specific methods of delivery and collaboration will certainly differ, we feel that all these components of effective writing instruction can be achieved in remote learning. Through the purposeful and strategic use of technological resources, we educators can provide students with writing instruction that represents its research-based best practices. We believe remote teaching and learning can align with key components of student-centered writing instruction: remote instruction that utilizes short, focused periods of direct instruction on a platform such as Google Meet or Zoom, followed by opportunities for students to work on their own pieces of writing allows students to engage in writing instruction in active ways.

For example, in their book Writing Workshop: The Essential Guide, Fletcher and Portalupi (2001) compare strong writing instruction to an industrial arts class or to ski lessons in which the instructor models and explains a concept or strategy and then creates opportunities for the students to try it out on their own, checking in with them individually while doing so. Remote writing and grammar instruction, we believe, can provide this same student-focused context in which our students work on their writing and teachers check in with and support them as they do so. The modalities might be different than what many of us are used to, but we can still apply the principles of strong writing instruction to remote learning. When teaching grammatical concepts in the context of writing instruction, for instance, we educators can apply the same best practices of focused mini-lessons and mentor text use that we would apply in the face-to-face classroom. In this chapter, we further explore the significance of these instructional practices and ways to put them into action in the language arts classroom.

Why Is It Important?

While there are certainly challenges associated with it, we strongly believe in the importance of remote instruction that aligns with the best practices of teaching writing and grammar. By creating opportunities for our students to examine mentor texts, apply writing strategies in authentic ways, receive individualized instruction from us, and share work with real-world audiences, we can provide students with outstanding writing instruction, which is essential to students’ success in many aspects of their lives (National Writing Project & Nagin, 2006). In the book Because Writing Matters, the National Writing Project and Carl Nagin (2006) assert that effective writing instruction is so important to our students for a range of reasons: “in today’s increasingly diverse society, writing is a gateway for success in academia, the new workplace, and the global economy, as well as for our collective success as a participatory democracy” (p. 2).

Additional resources published since Because Writing Matters continue to comment and elaborate on the importance of effective writing skills in today’s society; for example, the 2016 National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) document Professional Knowledge for the Teaching of Writing explains that our students’ writing skills are essential to their successes in a number of important contexts. Among the ideas in this NCTE piece that highlight the significance of writing to our students’ lives are assertions that writing in today’s society takes a number of forms: writing is done for audiences and purposes beyond school, students’ abilities to write are important to their abilities to participate in society, writing can be used to enhance students’ personal growth, and digital environments have created new audiences and opportunities for writing. Now, in today’s world, we can put the research-based insights in Because Writing Matters and NCTE’s Professional Knowledge for the Teaching of Writing into action by connecting them with the features and attributes of remote learning. By providing our students with strong remote writing instruction that applies the best practices of teaching writing to distance learning, we can help them develop essential skills for their personal, academic, and career success.

Now, let’s take a look at an example of Taylor’s work with the students in her class as she engages them in remote writing instruction.

Instructional Snapshot: An Example From Taylor’s Work

Every year we are asked to complete a performance task straight from our school’s preferred writing program. Of the 13 teachers I have directly worked with in the last two years, not a single one of them actually liked the performance tasks, making it difficult to make the instruction meaningful for our students. When we were slapped in the face with the pandemic and the virtual instruction that came with it, we expected that the school district would take away its expectations for the performance task—we were wrong. And thus, we had to make the instruction not only meaningful for our students but something we could do virtually as well.

The performance task consists of five parts: notes on one source, notes on another source, research questions, rough draft, and final draft. Usually, we model the first performance task of the year, we do the second one together, and then the last one they do individually—the classic “I do, we do, you do” method. In order to do this, we had to digitize everything, which took some time, but since we were able to stick them right into Schoology, the students were able to easily access everything. We uploaded each part of the performance task to a Google Slides presentation—which we shared with each of the students—and put “stop sign” clip art between each day’s work.

We got through the notes process and the research questions in four days, rather than the three days we had originally allotted. First rule of remote learning: don’t stress about pacing. Ultimately, your students will get what they need. After that, it was time for them to begin their rough draft. In order to thoroughly prepare the students for their rough draft, we discussed what each paragraph should look like as I recorded on a Google Doc while sharing my screen. This allowed the students to have accountability over their rough drafts, rather than just giving them an outline. Most students finished their rough drafts within the day since they had an hour of uninterrupted writing time, and the notes and research questions acted as a brainstorm. Because of this, I was able to dip into their own Google Docs and add comments to their rough drafts. This allowed me to “confer” with each of my students without having to spend valuable teaching time with each student. Instead, I was able to add comments to all their writing and then instruct the students to either move on to their final draft, revise/edit and resubmit, or set up a time for a writing conference in Zoom breakout rooms with me. My students are pretty good writers, so most did not have to meet with me “personally,” but those who did found value in the meeting.

My students ended up producing amazing final drafts. The prompt was asking them to describe a trip to Washington, D.C., by choosing three memorials to talk about and describe. I always tell my students to be as creative as possible when it comes to these because the monotonous and repetitive writings get quite hard to grade, especially with 22 student papers to flip through. One student wrote the whole paper like a news report. Another one wrote about how the Demogorgon attacked when he got to the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial. After dreading the performance task, I ended up having a blast reading and grading their final drafts, and a lot of the students had a good time writing their stories as well.

Key Recommendations

In this section, we provide and describe key recommendations to keep in mind regarding remote writing and grammar instruction. Following these suggestions will help you put the best practices of teaching writing and grammar into action in remote contexts, providing your students with the instruction, insights, and support that will help them write effectively:

• Conduct short, focused mini-lessons on the features of specific writing strategies and grammatical concepts.
• Use mentor texts to illustrate how published authors use these strategies and concepts authentically.
• Help students analyze the importance of writing strategies and grammatical concepts to effective writing.
• Use technological collaboration tools to confer with students as they apply writing strategies and grammatical concepts to their own works.
• Ask students to reflect on how specific strategies and concepts enhance the effectiveness of their writings.

By utilizing these ideas, you’ll provide your students with strategic writing instruction that presents key strategies and concepts as tools for effective writing, purposefully utilizes mentor texts, creates opportunities for students to apply writing strategies and concepts to their own works, and helps students reflect on the impact these writing tools have on their own works. Now, we describe these recommendations in more detail, discussing their applications to remote teaching and learning.

Recommendation One: Conduct Short, Focused Mini-Lessons on the Features of Specific Writing Strategies and Grammatical Concepts

We recommend beginning the process of effective remote grammar and writing instruction with short, focused mini-lessons on specific strategies and concepts. Whether we deliver these mini-lessons synchronously through live instruction on a platform like Google Meet or Zoom or asynchronously through a recorded video that we create and make available for our students (or a combination of both, such as a live lesson on Zoom that we record for students to have access to later), we can use these brief and informative explanations to introduce students to important components of effective writing and describe for them the key features of those strategies. Regardless of the specific modality used to remotely present these mini-lessons, we suggest using the mini-lessons to describe to students what a particular writing strategy or grammatical concept is and why it is important to effective writing. This instructional approach will help students see these strategies and concepts as tools of strong writing, thereby preparing them for the subsequent steps of the instructional process in which students ultimately apply the strategies they learn to their own works and reflect on those strategies’ impacts.

As you prepare the mini-lessons you’ll present to your students, we recommend structuring the content of each lesson in three sections: (1) What is the writing strategy or grammatical concept being discussed? (2) What are its key features? and (3) Why is it important to effective writing? The first question is not only the most fundamental, as it focuses on what the mini-lesson is describing, but also very important: by clearly identifying the topic of a mini-lesson while planning it, we can ensure that we’re giving students clear and focused instruction that addresses a specific aspect of writing. For example, a strong mini-lesson on sensory detail would clearly identify its focal topic and convey that topic to students early in the lesson. The second question calls for us as teachers to explain to students the essential aspects of the lesson’s topic to students. Continuing with the example of sensory detail, a lesson on this topic would describe for students in clear and concise ways what sensory detail is, providing information on the ways authors use language to appeal to readers’ senses. Finally, the third question helps build students’ understanding of the significance of the focal concept by sharing reasons authors might use the topic to maximize the effectiveness of their works. When describing sensory language, for example, we can share with students some reasons why authors choose to use that concept, focusing on ideas such as the ways it allows readers to deeply understand a particular scene or event in ways that stand out to them.

Recommendation Two: Use Mentor Texts to Illustrate How Published Authors Use These Strategies and Concepts Authentically

Once you’ve shared with students a brief mini-lesson that focuses on the key aspects of a particular writing strategy or grammatical concept, we recommend building on that information by sharing with students one or more published mentor texts in which the focal strategy is effectively used. Sharing published examples of key writing strategies and grammatical concepts provides students with a number of important benefits: (1) it provides them with concrete examples of what specific writing strategies and grammatical concepts look like in authentic situations; (2) it can increase students’ “buy-in” to the concept or strategy by showing them that it is used in real-world contexts, not just in classroom activities or on worksheets; and (3) it can further engage students in the material, especially when they examine examples from texts that are of high interest to them.

When selecting examples to share with your students, we encourage you to ask yourself three questions: (1) Is it a clear example of the focal writing strategy or grammatical concept? (2) Is the example from a text aligned with the students’ general reading level? and (3) Is the example from a text that students in the class may find interesting, relevant, or engaging? If you can answer yes to these three questions, then that text would be a great mentor text to use with your students! For example, you might select the following example from R. J. Palacio’s (2012) novel Wonder—in which the book’s protagonist, Auggie, describes an administrator’s office in his new school—as an example of sensory detail if you feel the text is aligned with your students’ general reading level and potentially engaging to them:

I was looking around at all the things on his desk. Cool stuff, like a globe that floated in the air and a Rubik’s-type cube made with little mirrors. I like his office a lot. I liked that there were all these neat little drawings and paintings by students on the walls, framed like they were important.

(p. 19)

The sensory details in this passage provide a clear model of what this writing strategy looks like in the context of a published text, which can help convey to students the role the strategy plays in authentic writing done by published authors.

Oftentimes, students will pull things from stories they have read and will point them out to you! Taylor often has students come up to her and share they are writing something (whether for fun or to fulfill an assignment) where they came up with whatever motif they picked up from the author. Because of this, Taylor always left out the books they had recently read for students to get their hands on in the classroom. Virtually, I stick YouTube videos of the books in a folder on Schoology so that the students can go back and watch the book again if they want to look back at the books we have read.

There are a variety of ways to use the features of remote learning to share mentor texts with students....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Meet the Authors
• Acknowledgments
• Support Material
• Introduction: Visions and Decisions in a New Educational Environment
• Section I: The New “Classroom”
• Section II: The Potential of Remote Language Arts Instruction
• Section III: Teacher Roles in a New World
• Section IV: Resources
• References
• Section V: Appendices