One advantage of online learning from an instructional coaching perspective is it’s easier to get a sense of a student’s experience. From home offices, we can visit the documents, videos, and pages designed to lead students through lessons, tasks, and projects and put ourselves in the digital shoes of a 6th, or 9th, or 11th grader, from first encounter with the task to submission of work.

One takeaway for me has been that learning management systems, all of whose designers probably use Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, rarely employ the addictive structures and rhythms of social networking applications. Not sure why that is.

Beyond that, I’m struck by the opportunities to improve the very first part of the teacher-student online interaction: the part where they engage in some sort of digital handshake regarding “why” a certain activity or task is being assigned.

On teacher-recorded videos or in written instructions on introductory slides, I’ve encountered some of the following:

• Purpose: learn how to use a digital tool to present ideas to an audience.
• Today’s activity will help you improve your annotations.
• Today’s learning target is to be able to describe Newton’s second law of motion.

These well-intentioned statements of purpose are logistical, too abstract, and, most importantly, they don’t inspire.

Packaging Matters More Online

Like it or not, educators find themselves in a battle for eyeballs, and in this competition, social platform engineers, video game designers, and Youtube creators have more experience and more significant financial incentives.

And if that weren’t difficult enough, many students, particularly the most vulnerable, are under stress and therefore have limited emotional bandwidth for something that just doesn’t interest them.

Now more than ever, the work we ask students to do must be worth doing. Part of that is the design of the work itself, of course, and I’ve posted about that recently, but my recent digital classroom visits convince me that the packaging matters too.

Online, even if they create videos of themselves delivering instructions, teachers are stripped of some of the infrastructure that supports their work. The physical layout of the school helps a student orient toward the coursework. Consider the history classroom, for example, with student polemical essays on the bulletin boards and quotations from famous historical persons on the walls. These physical reminders trigger student memories that help orient them toward the work they’re asked to do.

In the case of written instructions, some of the key sources of rhetorical power, including tone of voice, inflection, excitement, and facial expressions are absent.

Furthermore, online relationships can feel strained and different–thinner in a way. So another aspect of the challenge is that teachers can rely less on the fact that some students complete assignments, in part, because they like their teacher.

All that to say, when teachers set out to convince students that whatever they’re about to do is worth our time, each word matters.

Coaching Teachers On Purpose

How might you help teachers communicate purposes that will feel more immediate and more necessary for students, and have a better chance to engage them?

Of course, a coach’s approach should adjust according to the teacher’s experience, personality, disposition, and even their way of knowing. With that caveat, here are a few domains where it could be worth providing direction or asking catalyzing questions: the discipline itself, an appeal to the inner competitor, and the part that knows students.

The Discipline

The big questions of a discipline tend to get lost at the ground level of learning, or they are invoked so abstractly that they don’t resonate with students. There is a sweet spot that invites students into the over-arching inquiry. Here are some examples of ways to move the purpose from logistical and abstract to more concrete and inspiring:

Shift purpose from…	To..
improve annotations	investigate how humans retain and express their humanity amidst devastating circumstances
deepen understanding of the scientific method	understand the shape and size of the basic building block of everything on earth.
use a digital tool to present ideas to an audience	convince your audience that immediate, coordinated action is required to address climate change

The Inner Competitor

For some teachers, the notion that they are competing with Fortnite, TikTok, and Instagram for students’ attention has stoked the inner competitive flames.

Without resorting to click-baiting or outright deception, these teachers get aggressive and aspire for all students to complete every asynchronous lesson.

The way these teachers have been tinkering with purpose to achieve their goal include the following:

• Framing a task as an adventure or mission that appeals to the age level
• Performing A/B testing with different sections of students to see which statements of purpose most appeal to students
• Using focus students (sometimes extreme users) to co-create purpose statements that will appeal to the class

The Students

Another angle for helping teachers optimize purpose is to get them thinking specifically and concretely about one student in particular. Discussing that student’s interests and strengths, as well as the work they are most proud of, can lead quickly to optimization ideas for setting the purpose, including beginning instructions with:

• images of inspiring student work from previous assignments and projects
• references to shared memories, including significant or amusing incidents, from class before it went online
• reminders of the expertise of individual students, calling out skills in drawing, math, collaboration, verbal expression, etc.

Establishing Purpose is Ongoing

In a previous post about establishing purpose in a physical classroom setting, I noted also that this work happens both day-to-day and over the course of a project and year.

With online school, the idea of purpose presents an acute challenge. Out from under our watchful eye, students have a greater degree of freedom. And in addition to school’s competition with video games, social networks, Netflix, etc., the Wi-Fi might go out, they might be sad, they might need to care for a sibling, they might be hungry.

In a way, teaching online is like punching above your weight class. But that’s why it’s an opportunity as well, since punching above your weight makes you better.

Abstract, confusing, and uninspiring purposes deflect students before they even begin the task, the same way the atmosphere incinerates asteroids before they ever reach land.

Another approach is, both every day and over longer stretches of time, to try to invite them into something meaningful, something that matters, and something that can be accomplished together, which is perhaps (or ought to be) the purpose of school anyway.

___________________________

The Rest

Nicholas Roe’s John Keats left me unconvinced that the details of Keats’ life had much to do with the genius of his poetry. Of course, the suffering that forged his soul enabled the work’s production, but so did equal parts chance and magic. On the other hand, who knows? Maybe Roe’s right.

Here’s the central argument which, again, I find unconvincing:

Readers and critics alike have long agreed that these poems [i.e. the major Odes] are among the greatest expressions of Romantic genius, but that consensus has consistently detached them from the life in and by which they were created. We need to be more sympathetically aware of how circumstances that shaped Keats’s orphaned spirit became, in his 1819 odes, the forlorn life of all humankind.

Roe ended the book abruptly, but perhaps appropriately, just after Keats’ terrible and exceedingly sad death. Keats drowned in his own blood and an autopsy revealed his lungs were completely destroyed; he should have died months earlier. Roe should be commended for composing a last sentence that helps us reckon with Keats’ unacceptably sad life and death:

Death had delayed coming to him until late on Friday, 23 February, for this was the Roman festival of Terminalia, sacred to limits and extremities like this last darkling bridge on which John Keats paused,
steadied himself as many times before, and stepped beyond tomorrow.

Turning to more contemporary news, and regarding a phenomenon perhaps no less unhappy, William Bernstein writes:

It should be obvious who will be buying up these equity assets at distressed prices: J. P. Morgan’s “rightful owners,” who sit on large piles of Josephson’s unimpaired capital. Eventually, the bull market will resume, amnesia for the carnage will set in, and stocks’ wealthy “rightful owners” will sell some of their shares back to plan participants at higher prices. This chasm between the amount of that unimpaired capital available to the rich and to the average 401(k) participant will continue to cycle equity-derived wealth ever upward.