Look at what students are doing. Even when you can't see them.

This is a story about looking at the wrong thing.  

In a recent coaching cycle with a teacher, we set out to examine- and improve- student engagement in a high school math class.  Hybrid and remote instruction had supplanted the usual back-and-forth energy of learning math together, with a grid of silent black boxes.  The fatigue of trying to keep up the energy of class, when all that energy seemed to go one way, was a stark contrast to this teacher’s typically strong rapport with students. 

Like so many secondary teachers teaching remotely, we had to ask ourselves if students were logged in, but checked out. 

Fans of Diane Sweeney’s excellent body of work around student-centered coaching will know that I was breaking a cardinal rule of coaching.  Committing to behavioral goals with students is generally frowned upon in instructional coaching literature.  “We worry that if we isolate and coach into behavior, then we may end up looking at things like time-on-task rather than the learning that occurred,” writes Sweeney in her 2017 book, Student-Centered Coaching: The Moves. A focus on what students are learning should take precedence over behavior or compliance.  The argument here is sound, and one that I normally adhere to.  But this is not a normal school year.  

When a teacher cannot see or hear his students, suggesting a focus on a standards-based learning target instead of engagement feels out of touch with an honest and immediate need.  Our question of engagement stemmed equally from a desire to move students’ learning forward, and exhaustion from being a one-person show.

Without students putting forth something during class, how do you know they’re with you?  In a hybrid or remote learning environment, it is difficult to know where students truly are in their learning. 

Apps like PhotoMath, and the ease with which students can copy and paste their friends’ work into their own homework assignments, cast doubt on the authenticity of student work.  And that’s if they are turning in assignments.  How students engage during class is pivotal to getting insight into their learning.   Hence our work on improving student engagement. 

One practice I adhere to when I’m coaching is to hone in on what the students are doing, not the teacher.  If our goals are to be student-centered, then evidence we begin with must always come from the students.  Exit tickets, think-pair-shares, checks for understanding, and micro-assessments during class, are sharp ways to identify misconceptions and gather evidence of students’ progress toward learning goals (Sweeney, 2021).  It also takes pressure off the teacher to feel like they need to “perform” a perfect lesson while the class grows accustomed to having another adult in the room.  As teachers, when there is a second set of eyes to inspect what students are doing during class, we often catch things we couldn't notice while we were writing notes on the whiteboard or cuing up our next discussion question.

Spoiler alert: my lofty intent to watch only what students were doing in a virtual math class was hilarious.  The first class I attended, there was literally nothing to see.  Every camera was off.

Students’ willingness to speak up improved over time- but it wasn’t the only story to be told.

Determined to fulfill my duty as baseline data collector, I took copious notes on what I could observe.  Every time a student said something or used Zoom’s chat function during class, I recorded it.  After our first few class sessions, the teacher and I discussed the data.  The results put numbers behind what he already felt: the same 2-3 students were likely to be the only ones to speak up during a 48-minute class.  Occasionally a few others would send him a private message, so that they could answer or ask a question without being seen by their peers.  

No wonder this talented, veteran teacher insisted we focus on engagement as our problem of practice.  If we measured engagement by students’ willingness to speak or use chat during class, then we had nowhere to go but up.  

This is probably a good time to remind you, I was looking at the wrong thing.

Hatching a plan

To explain why participation was so important, we included a mini-lesson about how the brain works.

We began our work with students by making our interests crystal clear to them.  Hattie’s visible learning research confirms that clarity has a .75 effect size on student learning- in other words, it can double a student’s learning over the course of a year.  Additionally, the NCBI has published fascinating brain imaging that reveals how much more of a learner’s brain is activated when she is stopped to ask & answer questions periodically during a lesson (2009).  

When students stop to ask and answer questions, more parts of the brain are activated. Images adapted from NCBI.

We wanted students to know that the more they actively engage during class, the more likely they are to learn.  Fortunately, the students in this math class were used to seeing clear learning intentions and success criteria for each unit in their learning.  Adding an additional set of success criteria, to clearly define engagement, helped us to be up-front with students about what we were going for in each class session.

Measuring success

Every class I attended, I marked how many times each student spoke or used the chat function during class.  As frequently as we could, the teacher and I reminded students of our goal and let them know how they were doing as a class. 

“Four of you spoke up today, keep it going!” and similar cheers let the students know that participation was, yes, still a thing.

We also tried different ways to solicit student input.  We noticed that calling on students by name worked 90% of the time, while asking for volunteers rarely yielded anything significant.  Calling on students by name might seem like a “well-duh” approach, but we didn’t give that technique a concerted effort until we read Jennifer Gonzalez’s aptly titled blog post, “When you get nothing but crickets”.  Asking for volunteers was a testament to the teacher’s admirable capacity for wait time.  Calling on students by name, however, made them far more likely to make their voices heard. 

We also noticed that, the lower the stakes, the more likely students were to answer a question.  

When I say low stakes, I mean really, really low. A student who was reluctant to answer a question like, “Will this integer be a negative or a positive?”, was very likely to answer a question like, “Hey Johnnie, what number on our assignment are you working on right now?”

Those kinds of ultra low-stakes questions worked, but they didn’t feel great. 

They let us know that students could hear us, something we knew not to take for granted when we can’t see or hear them.  But they did little to strengthen relationships or give us feedback into the students’ learning.  Little by little, however, we saw the numbers of students who were willing to say something during class go up.

A quiet narrative develops

While we documented the progress of students growing incrementally more comfortable with talking in class, I also kept a space for notes at the bottom of our data log.  The space was reserved to jot down those “other” student actions that were interesting or noteworthy, but that didn’t necessarily fit our criteria for engagement.  Over the course of two months, a quiet pattern started to emerge.  Though they were reluctant to speak up in class, students were engaging with the material during class.  A lot.

Remember when I said I was looking at the wrong thing? 

On their best days, nearly half of the class said something- even if it was just to confirm they had a pulse.  But how many of them were trying, failing, and trying again on virtual platforms?  Close to 85%.  

The quiet pattern that was unfolding while we were looking- begging- for students to speak out, is that they were engaging in deliberate practice, responding to teacher feedback, and correcting mistakes during class. 

They were doing what it takes to learn.  They were just doing it very quietly.

The “other” notes during our coaching cycle revealed that students were engaging with online platforms, even when they were afraid to speak up in class.

 The teacher I worked with employed a variety of virtual platforms for his instruction.  Students used Desmos, Pear Deck, and Kahoot! as commonly as they used pencil and paper.  Unlike pencil and paper, however, we could immediately see how all students were interacting with math problems.  Not only that, students immediately saw how their peers were answering questions- usually anonymized- when the teacher shared his screen with the class. 

The myth of “I’m the only one not getting this” is easily toppled when the eager students, who’ve already mastered the content, are not the only ones in class showing their work.

The social element of learning, a shared give-and-take of ideas between participants, was alive and well, if you knew where to look for it.  Often, when using Desmos or Pear Deck, the teacher would pull a student example, and show the class a successful or error-driven problem.  Immediately we’d see other students correcting their own work within the activity.  They were not only with us, they were responding to in-the-moment feedback.

Psychological Safety

Humans read one another naturally, by reacting to the subtle cues of facial expressions and body language, by hearing not only what we say but how we say it.  It feels good.  It feels normal.  We were so hungry to drag reluctant students into that dynamic, that it nearly robbed us of pleasant surprises.

But if we are truly committed to analyzing our impact on learning, we know that student behavior can be misleading.  Students are very good at acting like they are learning- they will write notes when we ask them to write notes, put a book in front of their faces when we ask them to read.   Sometimes these are reliable indicators that real learning is occurring, sometimes they are not.  Graham Nuthall, in his book The Hidden Lives of Learners, describes this as the reciprocal game: 

Students “are excellent at knowing what signs the teacher is looking for, and making sure the teacher sees those signs”  (Nuthall, 2007). 

Many of our students will smile and nod when they understand a concept, and when they don’t.  

When reflecting on our coaching cycle, I couldn’t help but consider the concept of psychological safety.  One of the most significant challenges a teacher can face is creating a culture where open dialogue, and even failure, is embraced as a key element of learning.  I’d argue that this is particularly difficult with teenagers, since their sense of self is so keenly shaped by peer status and perception.  Coupled with an abrupt shift to students learning from their bedrooms, it is no wonder students don’t want to risk speaking up.  

In her book The Fearless Organization, Harvard researcher Amy Edmondson points out that successful, innovative teams owe much of their success to a sense of psychological safety.  It turns out, even adults will remain quiet to avoid rocking the boat.  Those organizations who create psychologically safe spaces to tip that balance, are the ones that outperform their peers. Professionals in the workplace often silence over voice, just like our students. However, high-achieving organizations embrace strategies that normalize- even celebrate- critical discourse.  Mistakes are welcome, and even celebrated, as a way to improve.  Teams at Google, Pixar, and the most successful NICU teams, strategically use systems that make open and honest communication feel safe. Isn’t that what we want for our classrooms?

This feeling of safety might be why our students were so ready to engage in online platforms.  They could try and make mistakes without fear of being wrong, or being labeled a “try-hard” by their classmates.  Better yet, as they worked, their teacher received valuable feedback regarding where students were in their learning.  When calling on students to help solve problems in a traditional manner, he could gauge the learning of one student at a time- if she was willing to answer.  But by using the quieter, broader scale of virtual tools, we quickly saw where many students were struggling or succeeding at once. They might not have opened their mouths, but they were saying plenty.  

This kind of engagement is not what we set out to measure or improve.  We wanted class-wide banter, dialogue, and a feeling of reciprocated energy.  That’s the kind of engagement that feels good to us as humans.  For the course of our coaching cycle, however, that’s not where our students were. 

We spent months trying to coax out signs of traditional engagement, and all the while students were engaging on their own terms. 

We saw evidence that they were with us, not just acting like they were with us, in ways we might have missed during in-person school.  What we saw clearly from our students, is that learning may be happening even if we don’t feel like it’s happening, and vice versa.  We can only know when we take pause to dig in to what students are doing while we’re busy teaching.  It’s a question of looking at the right thing. 

For Further Reading:

Edmondson, Amy.  The fearless organization.  Wiley, 2020.

Gonzalez, Jennifer. “When You Get Nothing But Crickets.” Cult of Pedagogy, 18 Aug. 2019, www.cultofpedagogy.com/crickets/. 

Nuthall, Graham.  The Hidden Lives of Learners.  NZCER Press, 2007.

Sweeney, Diane.  Student-Centered Coaching From A Distance.  Corwin, 2021.

Vannest, Jennifer J et al. “Comparison of fMRI data from passive listening and active-response story processing tasks in children.” Journal of magnetic resonance imaging : JMRI vol. 29,4 (2009): 971-6. doi:10.1002/jmri.21694