Hey Coach,

Holy guacamole! My students are really struggling with getting their work done in my virtual classes. This is not how I ever thought I would be teaching students. I don’t know how to focus them and keep them on-task in a virtual environment. It’s nearly impossible to teach them content because they don’t do any of the offline assignments. How do I get my students to do their homework in a virtual classroom?

Sincerely,
Virtually Vexed

Dear Vexed,

I don’t think you have an engagement issue here - I think you have an executive function issue. Executive function is the mechanism in our brains that help us make good decisions, set goals and work towards them, prioritize what’s important, persevere through rough patches, and a lot more! (If you want a quick overview of executive function check out this short video from Edutopia, and don’t miss our guide to the dimensions of executive function.) So my advice is to explicitly teach executive function strategies to your students that will help them in an online environment.

Now more than ever it is critical to build executive function capacity in students. It’s crucial to their success in this school year, and the repercussions of at-home schooling that will impact the remainder of their academic careers.

The most powerful way to explicitly teach an executive function strategy is to incorporate it into your daily routine. For example, the last 3 or 4 minutes of your virtual classroom you could have students write down on a piece of paper, sticky note, or agenda what they need to do offline. Help them break down assignments into component parts. This serves 2 purposes. First, it helps students understand exactly what they need to do to complete their assignment, and second, it creates a checklist students can use. If students get distracted when working on their assignment they can quickly look at the checklist and know where they left off. Have students hold up their checklist in front of the camera to show you they did it.

Some students may have very specific needs that you will need to address in a student conference. For example, if you have a student who repeatedly blurts out questions or answers to questions you might want to work with that student 1:1 to develop a self-monitoring strategy.

Remember, any strategy you teach them will take explicit instruction, be apart of a regular routine, and may take a very long time before students to apply the strategy automatically. 

All the best,
Coach