Keeping Your Students Engaged While Teaching in the BlendFlex Model

Student engagement is critical to the academic success of students in all modalities of teaching. The BlendFlex Model combines Face-to-Face classroom with Online Synchronous and Asynchronous environments all at the same time.  After you have conquered the technology involved with this model, how do you create engagement with all your students? This article will discuss three different activities that are easy to setup and use that foster student engagement in the BlendFlex Model.  

Assessing Students Experience on a Topic

Each student has a treasure trove of experiences that they can bring to the discussion. However, you may find that sometimes your students are reluctant to initially express their experiences to the whole class. 

When introducing topics you can activate this prior knowledge to begin to stimulate a discussion. Zoom has the perfect tool to get this conversation started; it is called polls. In advance of the session starting you can setup your poll questions. This will allow you to then select the right time in your class to deploy the poll to both online and face–to–face students. To effectively engage your face-to-face students, you can ask them to use a device like a phone, tablet or laptop to login to Zoom and participate along with your online synchronous students.   

You can share the results of the poll as a stimulus for discussion. Polls can also be very helpful to understand how familiar the topic is to students and can be used to gauge student understanding of a topic throughout a lesson. 

Live polling helps to activate students’ prior knowledge and can provide critical insight on any given discussion topic. 

For a brief introductory tutorial and step by step instructions, review this Zoom article on setting up polls. 

Small Group Discussions

Small group discussions often allow students more comfort when sharing their opinions. Have your students do an online asynchronous activity before the class starts such as read an article related to the topic.  When they return to class, you can group students to discuss their findings and then share their groups thoughts with the rest of the class. This is easy to accomplish using breakout rooms in Zoom. 

For students that are in the physical classroom, you can group them together. Give students clear directions about what they should discuss and what they will need to present upon returning back to the full class session. Zoom’s Breakout rooms allow you to set a specified time limit on the discussion which can be helpful for students to stay focused on the topic at hand.  Once the time for group discussion is up, you can ask for the representative to share. Classroom based participants can come towards the front of the room to be visible on camera to their remote colleagues. Students that are remote on Zoom can be given the ability to share their screen, or can be spotlighted to allow in class participants to see their presentations.   

Large Group Chats

Traditional discussions happen via a Canvas based Discussion Board. But chat during a synchronous session can be an inviting space for students to participate and in Zoom, the chat feature can be a productive space for discussion and idea sharing. You can use the chat space to solicit student opinions and feedback. Chat can be used to spark new ideas and is very easy for students to participate. 

You can ask students to document their ideas about a presentation and then visit the chat periodically to check-in as a class to examine the comments and ideas being shared there. You may also want to use this a way to gauge student involvement in the class session. You can ask for simple feedback and acknowledgment from students as the lesson progresses. Chat logs are available for instructors to download should the need arise to review them. Also, we recommend that you caution your students to be mindful about what they put in the chat. 

It also is important to note and to let students know that when using the chat feature in the BlendFlex model, the private chat is not actually private. If you have Zoom open and displayed on screen in class, all Zoom chat messages both private and public are visible to students in the classroom. 

For more information on managing the in-meeting chat, please see this Zoom article. 

These are just a few of the many ways to engage your students as you teach within the BlendFlex model. Using multiple modalities and finding the best tools that match your curriculum will allow you to foster a strong connection with your students.