Teaching online – Teaching techniques
As you transition into online teaching, there are some new techniques which you’ll need to incorporate into your lessons. Most of these can be used in real life classes too, but may be more valuable with online teaching where it’s much more difficult to form a connection with your students.
TPR
TPR is an acronym for Total Physical Response. It’s a teaching method that incorporates movement, actions, and gestures to help students bind vocabulary to memory. When you combine physical actions with vocabulary it really helps students to recall it at a later date, as they’ll have a stronger memory of making these repeated physical movements. Unlike simply hearing/reading a word, using TPR creates deeper mental pathways behind the words.
Some examples of TPR could include:
“Eat” – pretending to chomp down on an apple.
“Drink” – pretending to hold a bottle and drink from it.
“See” – raising your hand to your brow and looking around.
With these examples, we’ve made an effort to choose physical actions which relate directly to the meaning on the vocab. This is to make it much easier for the students to understand and starts using.
However, TPR doesn’t always have to mimic the exact words being said. Some approaches to TPR use unrelated movements – such as tapping your head when reciting a sentence/grammar point, or tapping your arm when saying another point. Interestingly, this can have the same effects as with the previous examples, as the physical action (though unrelated) has helped to form the mental pathway back to the vocab in question – although we don’t recommend following this approach with online teaching, as the actions are too abstract to communicate during a short lesson.
Gestures
Hand gestures are another valuable technique which you can use during your class. Many people confuse hand gestures with TPR, but there’s a distinct difference between the two. Rather than binding vocabulary to memory, hand gestures will help you to direct the students during your class. To put it simply – TPR is for vocab, hand gestures are for directions and feedback.
Some examples can include:
Cupping your ear to let the students know that you’re listening for their response.
Pointing/gesturing towards the student to let them know that it’s their turn to speak.
Raising your open palms while asking questions such as “What is it?” to help add context.
Giving students a thumbs-up to encourage or reward their efforts.
Many teachers will naturally use hand gestures without realizing. They’re part of our body language that we’ve developed over our lives, and should be quite easy to incorporate into lessons.
It’s just important to make sure that with teaching online you exaggerate your hand gestures so that they’re really clear and obvious.
Facial expressions
Facial expressions can be used in a similar way to hand gestures.
You can use them to give feedback to your students, such as with smiling when you’re pleased with their efforts, nodding your head to encourage a correct answer, or squinting to show that their answer might not be entirely correct.
They’re also great for communicating emotions and adding context to your activities.
As your students will likely have a very limited vocabulary, they’ll need every helping hand to understand your lessons, and facial expressions are a great tool which you can use.
An example of this can be while reading a passage from a story, you can use facial expressions to show how the subjects might be scared, angry, or excited.
At first, it might be difficult to really push yourself to be so animated, but over time you’ll soon grow used to overacting these emotions during your lessons.
Modeling
Modeling is a valuable skill which incorporates all 3 of the previously mentioned techniques – TPR, hand gestures, and facial expressions. Here’s how it works:
Show the students what you want them to do.
Perform the exercise again together.
Let the students try on their own.
As your students may have limited English skills, it’s very important to actually show them what you want them to do, rather than just tell them.
For example, imagine a lesson where your students are shown several pictures of fruit on their computer screen – an apple, a banana, and an orange – and it’s your task to check that they know the names of each one.
If you just ask the students to circle the apple, there’s a good chance that they might struggle to understand the directions. So as an online teacher, we would use modeling to first show what we expect the students to do, and then challenge them to do it afterward. By following this process, your students will be able to clearly see what they need to do, and then try themselves.
Engaging students
One of the main challenges which online teachers face is keeping the attention of students throughout the class. As you’re interacting through a webcam, there can be a whole world of distractions surrounding the students.
With a few simple tricks, you can make your lessons more engaging, and will stand a higher chance of maintaining their focus on the lesson activities.
Movement – If you’re showing props to your students and you can see them start to lose attention, you can use simple wiggling movements to catch their interest again. Similarly, you can move the object closer to the camera to make it easier to observe (or harder to miss).
Animation – If wiggling the prop and moving it closer doesn’t work, you can also animate it. For example, when showing students a frog prop, you could start to make it hop around and even make noises. It’s very simple, but can help students to enjoy the lesson and keep watching.
Puppets – It’s unlikely that you’ll have a puppet in your house, but if you’re serious about teaching online it could be a good idea to purchase or create one. It can be quite mentally draining for a young student to hold a conversation with a single teacher for a whole lesson, but if you can invite a brightly-colored puppet friend to join you with some of the more difficult activities, you’ll soon have your students’ attention back again. You can use puppets to stage dialogues, to do modeling, or to encourage shy students to engage with the activities.
Having a range of small tricks up your sleeve can help your students have more fun and pay attention when things start to get dull or repetitive. It will also make your job much easier, and if the students are happy, you’ll likely start to benefit from higher ratings after each class.
Conclusion
By combining TPR, hand gestures, facial express, and modeling, you’ll be able to bind vocabulary to memory, direct your students, add context, and keep their attention for longer. Many of these techniques can be applied to both online and in-class lessons, but with online teaching you’ll always need to make an effort to really exaggerate your actions in order to keep your students focused on their screens.
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