Facilitating the Online Dialogue

Facilitating Online Exchange

With younger age groups, online exchanges cannot be easily student led although students can and should be involved in the preparation and co-planning. As a teacher/educator you will need to facilitate the online moments and can do this by offering activities that can help guide the conversation between two partner classrooms engaging in a virtual exchange. By keeping the content and format of an exchange relatively short and informal (approximately 2 or 3 hours, including preparation and reflection for a video interaction which should not be longer than 40 minutes) and easy to integrate into curriculum, your class will be able to participate in a meaningful online exchange.

Ideally, if your activities are co-designed to be student-led it will be your students who are the drivers of conversation, knowledge sharing, understanding, and learning. This encourages a truly meaningful virtual exchange experience. This, however, cannot always happen as the students involved maybe too young or have special needs that prevent them from being totally independent. Both sides should share personal experiences and engage in dialogue using a combination of live interactions and video/photo sharing to create lasting relationships rather than a quick transaction. As teachers/educators you know that students learn best when their curiosity has been piqued, even if the content might otherwise be considered boring or difficult to them. It is also known that contextualising and/or personalizing a topic relating it to students’ interests makes learning more fun and understandable.

There are many aspects to consider and techniques that can be used to facilitate the moment groups of learners come together online. Let’s explore them.

Participation, Energy and Motivation

Students need to be engaged throughout the online exchange and motivation is key. Having student led activities usually guarantees active participation, so activities such as those adapted from flipped classrooms, presenting, journaling, drawing on paper, embodiment activities or reflection activities can be incorporated into the session. It is, however, also important to monitor and support students at all times making sure that all and not just some are included. When planning an online learning experience, always remember to prepare students for it. Despite becoming more familiar with online learning due to Covid 19, not all students feel comfortable or easily adjust to being and learning online in school. Always spend time at the beginning of an online exchange introducing the online environment and any additional tools, resources, etc.

Learners can be engaged frequently and in varied ways. Here’s a helpful checklist:

Are your learning materials organized and presented clearly?
Can your students easily see and/or find everything they need during the online exchange?
Are you engaging the group some way every 3-5 minutes? (This is especially relevant if your students are in remote learning)
Are your participation, communication and engagement methods varied?
Do you have enough breaks built in – for you and for the participants?
Are your activities bite-sized?
Have you built in ways to give feedback, which helps students feel a sense of progress and rescues them from isolation?
Are you able to track the group and know where they are?

Another useful way to enhance students’ participation and learning is to invite them to take action on what they’ve learned. The sooner students act on the new information they’ve digested, the more likely it will stick in their long-term memory. Follow up actions could include:

Rating the online exchange through an online tool and or through a class discussion.
Solving a problem or asking a question (depending on what happened during the online exchange).
Writing a short paragraph, poem or diary log.
Having a conversation (online or offline) with another student or in small groups.
Answering a set of questions. It’s usually more stimulating if the questions are open ended ones which require a higher level of reflection and thinking. Ask students to refer back to the content in their answers.
Revisit and/or review the materials which were used during the online exchange. Discuss how students can apply what they’ve learned.

Energy levels can be kept high through different strategies and tools. It’s good, for example, to have energizers and many face-to-face ones can be adapted online. Team building activities can also keep those energy levels peaking whereas at times it may be more useful to stop and regain focus and/or energy and have quieter or more passive activities that allow students “recharge their batteries”. This can be done through a break from the screen, inviting students to stretch, breathe, meditate, do some yoga etc or by sharing a song, video, images etc which is somehow connected to the theme but doesn’t require active engagement.

Online engagement requires bite-sized, spaced learning, which does not cause students to switch off or become unmotivated. Jeff Hurt refers to the science that backs up the chunking principle:

“Neuroscience has proven that our attention span is 10 minutes. After that, our attention starts to wane. Chunking content into ten-minute segments and then allowing learners 10 minutes to digest is the best way to learn.”

Always be mindful to make time for fun! If the online dialogue is enjoyable then it’s likely that your students will remember it and talk about it with others. They will probably learn more along the way as well.

A final consideration regards how “comfortable” learners feel when participating on online dialogues. Covid 19 forced many students into isolation (from their close family, friends, peers, society) and to learn remotely, causing many to feel different and often negative emotions. The long-term effects of this unique period of time on children’s mental and social wellbeing as well as on their learning will probably be slowly harvested in future years. Being online in class time may well be associated with a negative experience students had during lockdown and preparing the class for any online dialogues becomes particularly important. This may, of course, also not be the case and you may have a group of students who are excited and willing to spend more class time online. A teacher is often a very important and stable figure in a child’s life outside their home and will know their students well enough to detect if there are small or significant problems or issues. Not all teachers feel well equipped to handle strong emotions, but it is important to be aware that they may surface online as well as in class.

An opening self-reflection question to help you as a teacher/educator to focus on students’ state of well-being is: are you opening, closing, and pacing in a way that is honouring people’s emotional state?

If possible, try to create space for students to acknowledge emotions they have;
Create a culture of checking in;
Be patient despite time constraints;
Avoid challenging questions to single students (opt for open questions for all);
Don’t work up feelings of anxiety, disappointment, etc.
Facilitate and or support activities where students feel grounded and not disorientated.

There are different methods and tools that can be used to create an enjoyable and calm atmosphere during online exchanges. They may of course need adapting to your class whether you’re together with your class or not:

Start the online session with a “fun” activity such as a dance party (throw on music and have everyone move around!), going to find an object which they can show and share with others, etc
Lead students gently into the session by playing some calm music, doing some meditation, yoga, stretches and/or mindfulness in their chairs
Ask everyone to check-in and share how they’re feeling with a scale of 1-10, or thumbs up, down, sideways of by showing, drawing or imitating an emoji, etc.
Try to avoid cramming in too many activities.
Close the session with moment of silence and reflection and/or by asking students to share a thought, word, sketch etc to say how they feel or how the session was.

See Resource Section for more ideas

Evaluating the Experience

The online dialogues, including their preparation and follow up should be evaluated not only to understand what worked and didn’t work during the online exchange but also and mainly to assess ways to improve them for the future, especially as the feedback will come from the students.

Evaluation isn’t specific to online learning as it applies to all forms of learning but as these exchanges are still quite rare in everyday classrooms and need to take into consideration many of the aspects shared in this guide, they require specific attention. New tools and new approaches to learning and exchanging online are constantly becoming available. They provide the opportunity to experiment a little to see if the results are better, and if we do that, we need to evaluate the impact of using a new tool, resource, etc. The most effective way to improve what we do is through a systematic analysis of past experience.

It will be important for both teacher co facilitators to plan their evaluation. A group of European teachers, evaluating the impact of virtual exchange on initial teacher education, were asked to evaluate their experience of virtual exchanges and suggested the following as key reasons for success:

Just as co-planning the online dialogues makes a significant difference to a meaningful exchange, so is co-planning the evaluation.

What should we evaluate?

What is evaluated is up to you as a teacher but it will be helpful for you to assess learning outcomes such as foreign language competences as well as other transversal competences, such as intercultural competences, digital competences and social and civil competences, (see CEPNET competence framework in Appendix 1). Your students’ wellbeing and enjoyment should also be captured in some way and this will mean also evaluating whether the students felt engaged and included at all times during the online exchange.

How can we evaluate?

There are many formal and informal evaluation methods and tools, which can help you, as a teacher/educator, to evaluate the online dialogue.

Some informal methods have already been mentioned above such as asking students to rate the session as it ends and/or how they are feeling. Positive emotions will usually indicate a students’ enjoyment and/or satisfaction. You can also leave time for a class discussion about how the session went, encouraging all students to voice their opinions.

Formal evaluations could be in the form of a test or questionnaire to measure students’ learning or the development of certain skills pre, during and post the online exchange. There are a number of online tools available, which allow for simple, online surveys to be created and shared. These will help you collect your results automatically.

Set up a learning/debriefing moment with your co facilitator and/or colleagues to look at and learn from the inputs provided by your students. Try to evaluate your own experience of the online facilitation.