Remote Learning: Sorting Hat

Are you a teacher who regularly had students work collaboratively in the classroom, but now you are feeling stuck with remote learning? If you are looking for a way to facilitate student-centered work during the remote portion of a hybrid schedule this year, I have a strategy that will help.

As a Harry Potter fan, I have alway taken great care about how I group students in my classes. My approach to teaching is to blend direct instruction with a collaborative, student-centered, problem-based-learning environment. In other words, I teach a concept directly, but then give my students a problem where they need to apply the new concept in order to solve it. The Sorting Hat in Harry Potter places students into one of four houses at Hogwarts. (I personally identify with Ravenclaw, but there is also Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, and Slytherin). From year to year I have tweaked the methodology for group placement, usually basing groups on their prior knowledge of the subject from a baseline test I give. (I teach economics.) I sometimes prefer more heterogeneous groupings, but other times I use more homogeneous groupings.

While I have moved away from group names that come with the stigma of Hufflepuff or Slytherin, as a practice I still value how pre-planned groupings can allow for effective differentiation, reliability, and team building. Three years ago my school allotted grant money to purchase high-top, dry-erase table for my AP Economics classroom. We did this to facilitate more student collaboration and less direct instruction. Ever since this transformation, I have watched the blend of direct-instruction (e.g. lecture) with student-centered work in my classroom lead to improved results on both standardized test scores and measures of social/emotional growth.

Then COVID happened.

Last March, my students were practically finished with both the AP Microeconomics and AP Macroeconomics curriculum when remote learning was forced upon us, so my approach was mostly asynchronous "flipped" lessons with live office hours for help. As a long time YouTube fan, I truly enjoyed the opportunity to make my own unique, daily videos for my students. Between videos or live direct instruction in Google Meet, I had that covered. My students then had until 8pm each night (school policy) to complete the accompanying work for the concept of the day. Unfortunately, since we were all working from home, they mostly worked individually since collaboration was not easy.

That system worked for a course meeting from March-June, but will not do as a new school year starts for several reasons. First, my school now has a synchronous learning mandate in place for the PM remote sessions, so flipped lessons alone will not do. Second, students need to work collaboratively to make social/emotional gains. Finally, most classes need a student centered component to balance out direct instruction.

Enter breakout rooms.

By now, most teachers have used breakout rooms on Zoom. Coming in to this year, I was seeking something better than Zoom breakout rooms. The screenshot below is of my Sorting Hat for the coming year. This is a practice teachers might be interested in adopting for the upcoming year. A Sorting Hat (for non-Harry Potter fans) is another name for student groupings. For hybrid & remote learning, it now means a list of permanent virtual breakout rooms for groups per class. For this I am using Google Meet, not Zoom. 

A Sorting Hat allows the teacher to assign students a permanent link to a Google Meet room where the group can break-out from the larger class to work collaboratively, and the teacher can join when appropriate. Permanent breakout rooms like this offer some noticeable advantages for the teacher.

• It allows the teacher a virtual arena for the half-class not meeting live to work during the morning sessions.
• The breakout rooms can also be used in all-remote PM when the teacher is finished with all-class direct instruction.
• While Zoom offers breakout rooms, the teacher must manually arrange this each session.
• Once created, a Sorting Hat like this creates a sense of reliability and routine because the rooms are permanently linked. If you need to change groups, it is as simple as swapping names on the sheet, too.

My school is going with an AM half-class in person (A vs B cohort), PM all-remote arrangement. So I arranged groups alphabetically to accommodate the A vs. B division. The "all-virtual" students are not grouped separately because this is for the remote learning arena, not the physical classroom.

The best part is how simple this is to do. To create a unique, permanent Google Meet link for each group, use the following steps:

1. Start with this stem: https://meet.google.com/lookup/
2. Add a unique group name after the stem: Example = apecongroup1
3. Your final link should look something like this: https://meet.google.com/lookup/apecongroup1 
4. Post your Sorting Hat to your Google Classroom page so students know where the link to their permanent breakout room will always be. 
5. Now the teacher is ready to push group assignments for students to work on in their breakout rooms. 

Once this is in place, teachers have some options for how to use the breakout rooms:

• Teachers may actively bounce room to room to interact directly with groups (like a teacher going group to group in a physical classroom)
• Teachers may ask the students to record their sessions to document collaboration (very good for AM remote students). This approach can easily be turned into a mini-podcast, a Fishbowl discussion, Spiderweb discussion, etc.
• Teachers may have all the groups open in separate Chrome tabs, and selectively listening in/watching one at a time to monitor. This is what I plan on doing. I will have my camera muted when I am not active in their room, and I will unmute my camera to announce when I am observing that particular group. This is the virtual equivalent of walking up to their table in my classroom.

While we are talking Google Meet, by now hopefully you have learned how to access the settings on your course's Google Classroom page to enable a visible, permanent Google Meet link for each section. Think of this like your main classroom, and the Sorting Hat rooms as your small groups. I envision my PM remote sessions starting out in the Class Google Meet, breaking out into the small groups, and then reconvening in the big group to debrief.

Many teachers may decide to keep several tabs open at once and bounce room to room working with groups. If a teacher wishes to avoid hearing every group at once (I like hearing them all at once, but I can see it being overwhelming), you can mute the audio for each tab. (This is separate from muting the teacher's mic.) To mute a Chrome tab, right-click on the tab and select "Mute Site".  

For teachers who have already used Zoom breakout rooms, this is not a radically new practice but offers a more seamless use because there is no need to manually assign the student to each break-out, etc.

Google has announced the Breakout Rooms and Attendance feature are coming soon. There are also Chrome Extensions that can facilitate direct movement from Meet to Breakout rooms. Here are a few:

• Google Meet Breakout Rooms Extension (free)
• Google Meet Plus (paywall for premium features) I absolutely love this add-on, but it costs $4.99/month. When you install this extension you can push students into breakout rooms, poll/quiz, send reactions/badges, and use an interactive whiteboard on Google Meet.

For teachers that have not used breakout rooms in their virtual teaching approach yet, this is definitely worth a try this year!