By John Lanier, Latin Instructor, and Meg Lamont, Assistant Head of School
In the spring of 2020, the global pandemic forced educators across the country and across the globe to adapt their classrooms to the online model. For most, the transition was sudden and largely without sufficient guidance or tools. Stanford Online High School was in a unique position to share our expertise, and so in March we began to organize a series of informal webinars and drop-ins for teachers.
While these informal events were well-attended, we felt we could do more, and from that impetus we partnered with Stanford Continuing Studies to host a larger online event called “Teaching Your Class Online - Essentials and Practice,” with a week-long webinar portion covering the essentials of online pedagogy and a second week of online teaching practicum and workshopping.
The event’s week-long webinar portion was hosted by Stanford Online High School’s Meg Lamont, Assistant Head of School and English Instructor, and John Lanier, Latin Instructor. Enrollment for this first week was free to all, and no one had a good sense of what attendance numbers might look like. A week prior to the start, in early July, it seemed that an audience of 100-200 was likely based on pre-enrollments. When Meg and John started the first webinar meeting that Monday, the 13th of July, there were 3,000 attendees virtually present, filling the Q&A pod with hundreds of questions and filling the chat pod with innumerable greetings from countries around the world!
The two-hour webinar sessions in the first week covered what Stanford OHS instructors consider the essentials of online pedagogy: the flipped classroom model; building and maintaining classroom community; student engagement and participation; and assessment design. Meg and John also offered some practical advice for overcoming common obstacles and challenges in the online teaching environment, pointed out some of the many online tools available for facilitating online education, and shared some short clips from Stanford OHS classes as examples. During the webinar, several other Stanford OHS instructors came to lend their expertise: Kalee Tock shared her experiences with online science labs; Robyn Fielder showcased mathematics instruction and writing tablet technology; Verónica Valdano talked about online foreign language pedagogy; and Kristina Zarlengo offered some sage advice on how to facilitate discussions with students, particularly around controversial topics.
In the second week, a more select group of around 80 attendees met in smaller workshop groups, each led by a Stanford OHS instructor (Elyse Banks, Robyn Fielder, Lisa Hicks, Shweta Gupta, Anne Hruska, Meg Lamont, John Lanier, Alex McKale, and Kristina Zarlengo). In these practicum sessions, teachers got the opportunity to try out some new online pedagogy ideas, to design and test out some lesson plan ideas, and to get feed - back from colleagues. The groups were roughly divided into Humanities and STEM focuses, and attendees included instructors from the elementary and middle school, high school, and college/university level.
The Teaching Your Class Online course was a big success, and the recordings of the webinars have been viewed tens of thousands of times since July. (You can access the recordings here.) Many attendees have gone on to deploy the slides Meg and John prepared in their own sessions with colleagues, and have formed groups with each for sharing tips, tools, and messages of support.