For both English learners and world language students, getting out of the classroom can make learning new words more engaging.

Task-based language teaching, the practice of learning through student-centred meaningful tasks, makes a target language come alive for students both in and outside the classroom. Using audio and visuals in any literacy classroom is important, particularly when working with English language learners, and research from the National Reading Technical Assistance Center shows that students learn target language vocabulary more effectively when they engage with it in a variety of ways.

There’s a lot of uncertainty about the 2020–21 school year, but planning for a mix of remote and in-person instruction will help educators be ready.

Covid-19 has made the 2019–20 school year one we will never forget. With no notice or preparation, teachers were forced to pivot to online teaching. They have performed heroically. This isn’t just my assessment—it’s the consensus of the many students who have shared with me their experience learning from home via technology.

These students—and their teachers whom I’ve also interviewed over the last six weeks—are far less sanguine about online learning, however, with real concerns about its quality and effectiveness.

As a graduate student a decade ago, I completed a yearlong project on the impacts of the digital divide in schools. Back then, I was struck by the complexities and nuances of the problem, realizing quickly that the divide wasn’t only about connecting to the internet—as it had been when the term was coined in the mid-1990s—but also about how it’s accessed and used.

With remote learning at the top of educators’ minds during the Covid-19 pandemic, the topic of digital equity is centre stage again, and I’m sad to see that not enough has changed in 10 years. According to a recent report from Common Sense Media, nearly 12 million students don’t have the technology they need to learn from home during the current crisis, and in some states, like Oklahoma and Mississippi, more than a third of students have no access to the internet at all. 

Incorporating the coronavirus crisis in course content can leverage students’ curiosity while showing them the real-world applicability of what they’re learning.

Educators frequently hear from their students, “How am I going to use this stuff in the real world?” Now is the perfect time to answer that question. The coronavirus pandemic presents a unique opportunity for educators looking to underscore the relevancy of their subject matter.

Your emotional state influences how well students learn. Here are tips to incorporate a restorative approach to your online teaching.

Given the amount of time we’re spending teaching online—and thinking about the upcoming school year—any small steps we can take to make our virtual classrooms more relational, engaging, and supportive are important. While teachers and students benefit from restorative practices as an alternative to exclusionary discipline practices, they thrive when restorative principles are applied holistically to everything we do in schools—from how we deliver our lessons to the everyday connections we make with our students. In fact, lasting whole-school change requires that we shift from doing restorative to actually being restorative. But what does this look like and sound like in an online class?