Ghostbusters! - Dealing with ghosting students in lockdown (and the classroom).

We are back in lockdown thanks to COVID and the delta variant. As the days pass while teaching remotely, it becomes increasingly apparent that some students struggle to engage in lockdown more than others. And some of them try their best to ghost you. As always, it is often these disengaged students that are the most vulnerable and at risk. So how do we get them engaged again? 

What became overwhelmingly clear as I sifted through the research, teacher, and student feedback is that good practice is good practice - regardless of whether you are teaching in person or remotely. All of the recommended practices, strategies, tools, etc. reflect the key messages from the OECD's The Nature of Learning report. (If you haven't read this yet, do so urgently. It provides a really great summary of research to inspire good teaching practice.)

Of particular relevance are the 8 basics of student motivation that this report summarises:

This post is a list of ideas, recommendations, and best practices compiled from teacher feedback on Twitter, reports from ERO (New Zealand Education Review Office), the Education Hub, as well as a student survey done at Hobsonville Point Secondary School. 

How do you know if you have a ghost?

The Responding to the Covid-19 crisis: Supporting Auckland NCEA students report clearly identifies that the longer a student is disengaged, the harder it is to reengage them. Hence, it is important to reach out to disengaged students as early as possible. Additionally, focussing on the relationship first appears to be a key aspect of getting our ghosts engaged, and keeping them engaged

• Setting up tasks that 'self mark' so that it is easy to track disengagement with minimal effort eg. Google Quiz through Google Classroom, Quizizz, Playposit, Education Perfect, Pear Deck. 
• Using the assignment function through Google Classroom to make it easy to see when students have turned in work or turned work in late. 
• Using the grade book function in learning management systems (eg. Google Classroom) to track overall engagement. 
• Doing a roll in synchronous video calls. 

How do you stop them from being ghosts in the first place?

As with so many other things in education, relationships are at the heart of the matter. Hence, we need to think about how we might maintain our focus on relationships, with students and between students. This is also great for helping students to manage their well-being in lockdown as the absence of their peers can have a detrimental effect on their mental health.  Some ways to do this include:

• Smaller group asynchronous video calls rather than large group calls.
• Personal emails to check in with students. 
• Collaborative tasks that require students to reach out to their peers. 
• Pastoral group meetups for fun. eg. quiz, pictionary, etc. 
• Private comments through Google Classroom as reminders.
• Email telling them I am thinking about them and miss them in class will often do the trick, especially with higher year levels. 
• Email whanau. Call whanau if still nothing. 
• Organising a one on one video call to check in and help problem solve any issues acting as obstacles in proceeding with learning. 
• Organising small group synchronous video calls specifically for students who are struggling. 
• Connecting students who need extra support with a counsellor, teacher aide to help as appropriate.
• Support students with building self-regulating skills. Eg. helping them to fill in a daily planner, teaching them productivity tools eg. single-tasking, quick writes, kanban, etc. 
• Don't give up. Keep emailing and calling, keep getting in touch to check how the student is doing. 

How do you set ghost busting tasks?

During a lockdown, it is much easier for students to opt-out of tasks that are boring, busy work, too hard, etc. Hence, the quality of the work tends to have a much bigger impact on student engagement than when we are in their faces at school actively nagging them. The research and student voice is really clear about the kinds of tasks that help to keep students engaged and as a result, motivated. As a result, we should focus on designing tasks that are:

• Set tasks that are clearly linked and matched to the intended learning outcomes that students know and value - aka. moving beyond low-level tasks and “busy work” to tasks that students feel are important and meaningful. 
• Scaffold. Scaffold. Scaffold. Students don't have access to the teacher or peers in the same way as at school so making sure that the tasks is broken down in a way that is easy for them to make sense of is key. 
• Shorter instructions, which broke tasks into chunks, tended to be more effective in scaffolding students through the learning.
• Ramping up the difficulty level in tasks as you go along to ensure that all students feel a measure of success when completing tasks. (SOLO works really well for this - see example)
• Using Universal Design for Learning practices eg. 
• Supplementing written instructions for tasks with short video explanations.
• Offering personal 60 second video lessons for question messaged in the private chats.
• Mixing up the type of tasks eg. hands-on.
• Reduce the fear of failure such as by using gamification eg. Kahoot.
• Providing students with a degree of choice over how they completed a task typically led to greater engagement in the learning and a higher probability of the task being completed. 

How do you help the students manage themselves in order to avoid ghosting?

Despite 'managing self' being one of the key competencies of our New Zealand curriculum, lockdown really highlights our short fall in helping students develop self-regulation skills. There are a number of ways that we can help students improve their self-management, and as a result, improve their engagement and motivation during lockdown and at school. Additionally, maintaining high expectations and holding students accountable for meeting these expectations is also critical for maintaining students’ motivation and engagement and facilitating learning. 

• Ensuring flexibility in when students can do work. Too many set times reduces engagement and opportunities for self-management. 
• Setting realistic amounts of work. Don't fall into the planning fallacy (a prediction phenomenon, all too familiar to many, wherein people underestimate the time it will take to complete a future task, despite knowledge that previous tasks have generally taken longer than planned.)
• Set work at the start of the week so that students can plan out how they will do their learning for the week. 
• Setting tasks that are truly independent as parents and caregivers are not always able to support.
• Don't overload students with too much information or communication - keep it simple and concise with a clear and easy option for following up if they have questions.
• Make videos for students to watch in their own time. 
• Must do/Should do/Could do tasks to ensure that workload can match student context, but also to provide a sense of agency. 
• Setting deadlines and time limits of tasks, and following up with students who have not met these. 
• Supporting students to complete a daily planner to help them identify deadlines and prioritise their efforts (see student example from Hobsonville Point Secondary). 
• Providing regular formative assessment and feedback that was connected to the expectations set by the teacher was crucial for motivation and engagement as well as for ongoing learning.
• Students who established some form of routine or daily structure were more likely to stay up-to-date with work and to maintain their engagement. eg. daily small group check-in, daily planner. 
• Use coaching conversations (eg GROW coaching) to help students problem solve and self determine their next steps. 

Hopefully, there are some helpful ideas in here to help with your ghosts. If you have more ideas of things that have worked for you. Please leave them in the comments too!

Further reading

• Responding to the Covid-19 crisis: Supporting Auckland NCEA students (ERO)
• Learning from lockdown (Education Hub)
• The Nature of Learning (OECD)