Engaging Students in a Physically Distanced Classroom
Engaging students in activities requires thoughtful and systematic planning of various aspects - planning and introducing the activity, implementing and monitoring it, debriefing on its outcomes, and troubleshooting as required. A large body of literature exists on the benefits of creating a community of learners in the classroom and getting students to actively engage with the course concepts, their peers, and you. These benefits are still meaningful but you may need to creatively restructure or plan your activities for the physically distanced classroom.
Your physically distanced classroom could be one or a combination of the following scenarios:
- Your students are in the classroom wearing masks and sitting 6 ft. apart.
- You are in the classroom wearing a mask and close to the podium.
- You are online on Zoom or Google Meet and have a mask-wearing learning assistant to help facilitate interactions.
- Your students are joining remotely via Zoom or Google Meet.
This guide is designed to help you consider these scenarios and plan an activity that you think would be best conducted in the in-person or the hybrid class setting and prepare your students in meeting a course learning objective/outcome. The activity planner provided here can be used to plan additional activities for all the courses that you are teaching and also used as an artifact when documenting your teaching.
What to do
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Develop one activity that you can use in your upcoming course
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Download the Engaging your Students in the Physically Distanced Classroom Activity Planner.
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Complete the following sections of the activity planner by recording your responses in the Word document directly.
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Planning and introducing the activity
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Implementing and monitoring the activity
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Debriefing activity outcomes
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Reflection and troubleshooting
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Review a sample of a completed activity planner for an intro-level engineering course to get ideas of common challenges and potential solutions.
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Self-assess your activity planner
Your completed activity planner should include thoughtful and complete responses to the questions in all four sections: planning and introducing the activity, implementing and monitoring the activity, debriefing activity outcomes, reflection and troubleshooting