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Edutopia
Getting to Know the Whole Student in Distance Learning
Elementary teachers usually know how students move, their interests and
temperaments, and more. A look at how to gather those details in
distance learning.
By Cara Furman
February 1, 2021
Knowing my students holistically has always been important to me. When
I was an elementary school teacher, a process of attending to students
called the Descriptive Review of the Child helped me gain a better
perception of each child. Drawing on the review, I wrote detailed,
multipage narrative reports and ensured that my curriculum allowed for
students to participate in a range of ways.
When I shifted to teaching pre-service teachers, I brought the same
commitment to know the students in my literacy classes, and that was
not difficult pre-pandemic. But in the fall of 2020, I taught remotely
with just two in-person outdoor sessions, and when we met in-person for
the first time a month into the class, I was disturbed to find that I
could not immediately recognize my students.
It was more than just the masks. Typically by that point in the
semester, I would know students’ faces, ways of moving, and voices. I
would know who they sat with and how they sat, how they arranged their
items, and the ways they moved toward and away from their peers. I
would know whether they tended to come in smiling and if I could expect
a frown when exposed to something new. This year, I knew none of this.
I turned to the Descriptive Review of the Child to help me teach and
know my students across the five headings: Physical Presence and
Gesture, Disposition and Temperament, Connections With Others, Strong
Interests and Preferences, and Modes of Thinking and Learning. Here I’d
like to explain how elementary school teachers can use this process to
better know their students in distance and hybrid classrooms.
PHYSICAL PRESENCE AND GESTURE
How might a teacher bring movement into lessons? These successful
activities from my days in elementary schools translated smoothly to
the remote classroom:
Encouraging students to share a feeling with a word and a physical pose to express it.
Asking students to break a single word into syllables, while expressing a motion for each one.
Guiding students through character reenactment activities. Assign each
student a character and ask them to act out and participate in
read-alouds.
With more seating options than in the typical classroom, I saw
students’ preferred positions for working. Some lounged in bed or on a
couch while others kept themselves always upright and straight-backed,
and some leaned toward the screen while others pulled away. I asked
students to identify a “cozy reading spot” and document it for the
class, which provided a window into what helped each student feel
comfortable and ready to work.
DISPOSITION AND TEMPERAMENT
I’ve always provided students with long, open-ended periods to explore
materials. Transitions into class and between activities provided
spaces for me to listen and observe. In the frequently assigned small
group work, I rarely stepped in directly but instead observed.
Personalities bubbled up in these informal moments.
Creating this informal space initially proved difficult in a virtual
setting. Over time though, I began to incorporate more ways to engage.
I met with students twice for one-on-one tutorials: the first to simply
talk and the second to reflect upon the course. Elementary teachers
would likely do this more often.
Using Jamboard, Padlet, the chat function in Zoom, and Google documents
in which students could annotate items I posted, I enabled frequent
opportunities for informal written talk. I learned that some students
who were nearly silent in synchronous sessions were funny, chatty, and
inviting in writing. In tutorials, some chatty students clammed up and
seemed shy. Others who were very quiet in the group spoke nonstop in
the tutorials.
CONNECTIONS WITH OTHERS
In addition to providing clues about someone’s disposition, the
informal means of communication described above help students create a
strong classroom community. To ensure everyone’s voice was heard on a
weekly basis, I used go-arounds, in which everyone is asked to speak
following a predetermined order. Strong bonds developed as students
also worked regularly in small groups of two, three, or four people.
In the classroom, students forge friendships as they move between
discussing the activity and more informal conversations. In breakout
rooms, after I noticed that students would look sheepish when
discussing—often very animatedly—something not assigned, I emphasized
this rule-of-thumb: 90 percent of discussion time should be related to
coursework and 10 percent should be socializing. Students can and
should be allowed to get off topic. This helps them know each other and
helps me know them, and often important connections are made back to
the content.
STRONG INTERESTS AND PREFERENCES
Choice always abounds in my classes—with students choosing some of
their readings, who they work with, and where they sit. Working with
what they had at home, the choices expanded. For example, asked to free
write during class, students often wrote about pets and items in their
houses.
A popular activity with elementary students is to have them make an
alphabet book about themselves. In depicting their pets, siblings,
family members, and friends, through class books, I learned a lot about
what students liked to do, who they spent time with, and even how they
decorated their personal space.
MODES OF THINKING AND LEARNING
Teachers can learn a lot about students’ modes of thinking and learning
through activities that guide them to engage with literacy in as many
ways as possible. Some ideas that work well include having students:
Follow a yoga video with moves accompanying a familiar story to make meaning physically.
Go outside to collect notes across their senses and report back.
Create Google Slides together by collecting pictures to go with high frequency spelling patterns such as the “at” family.
Find a natural item of interest and then, in small groups, research it and write a folktale about how that item came to be.
Perform story acting, an activity in which students improvise to dramatize a story read-aloud.
After each activity, learning habits are fostered as students reflect
and share how they approached the task. Some will likely dive into
movement activities while others prefer to stay put. A few will like
writing and reading nonfiction while the majority gravitate to fairy
tales.
Toward the end of the fall semester, I went through the headings of the
review. Did I know my students well enough to describe each one’s
accomplishments? To my joy, I found that I had come to know them very
well.
Read this and other stories at Edutopia
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