What Should You Ask Students About Their Day In Remote Learning?

by Terry Heick

A simple enough premise that doesn’t seem to need contextualizing: what kinds of questions can you ask students after their remote learning to support or enhance what they’ve learned and their ability and tendency to use it in their lives?

So, in the spirit of 44 Alternatives to What Did You Learn In School Today? are the following questions to ask students about their day remote learning.

1. What seemed to be the goal of the lesson (in one of your classes)? How did you know that was the goal?

2. What tools or technology did the teacher use? How did it go? Is there another (better) way they might have done something–sharing a file or polling the class, for example? How would you have done it and what effect might that have had on your learning?

3. What’s something one of your friends/peers did that was funny or interesting or surprising?

4. Did you invent or create anything new today?

5. What are the limits of remote learning? Or, for younger students, ‘What are the ‘cons’ of remote learning’? Which parts do you wish were better?

6. How do you feel and why do you feel that way? What can I do to help? Who could you help with what and how would that kind of action affect you (versus them)?

7. What are the benefits of remote learning? What does it allow you to do that you couldn’t otherwise (that has to do with learning)? If you can’t think of anything, is it because there are no benefits or because the teacher is still learning to adapt their teaching to virtual settings?

8. What do you want to do with what you learned? What could (or should) you do with what you learned today? What do others do with this kind of knowledge, skill, or thinking?

9. If you were to extend today’s ‘learning,’ should it be done offline or on? Why?

10. How could you organize what you’ve learned today? How does it relate to what you’ve learned in the past? How might you ‘save’ or curate or ‘store’ the learning so that it’s accessible to you in the future?

11. What patterns did you notice today? In anything–the lesson, the teaching–before, during, or after.

12. How could the teacher have taught or structured the remote learning class in a different way and what do you think the effect of that might’ve have been?

13. What will a class like this (the one you had today in remote learning) look like in 10 years? 50 years? What kind of technology might exist to facilitate and enhance understanding?

14. Did you get stuck at all today? How do you respond emotionally/psychologically when you get ‘stuck’? How does that emotional response help or hinder your learning? What resources did you use when you got stuck to get ‘unstuck’? What (physical or human or digital) resources could you have used but did not or could not?

15. What was the most and least valuable thing you learned today?

16. What’s something you learned today–or something you reviewed–that may not seem useful today but could be one day? Or vice-versa–What’s something that you learned today that seems useful but one day could be less useful or relevant?

17. How does your mind ‘work’? When are you at your best in remote learning?

18. More than anything else, what do you need from ‘school’ right now?