Times like these are crazy for teachers living and working abroad. Heck, I’m sure they are crazy for teachers just about anywhere. Sudden school closures have thrown off your entire syllabus and you now have to figure out how you are going to deliver quality instruction, while at the same time learning a new platform, and oh yeah – keeping track of the performance of hundreds of students. If you are one of those ESL teachers who was already teaching online, then the learning curve might have been a bit easier. For the rest of us, though, teaching with Microsoft Teams (or equivalent) has been quite a steep learning curve indeed.

My 2 Cents

I have to be entirely frank at this time: I don’t think Microsoft Teams (and I imagine Zoom) is designed for online teaching in the sense that we are doing it now. Administrations everywhere are probably trying to convince you that teaching with Microsoft Teams is a new and exciting medium of instruction that can be made to imitate the classroom environment. The fact of the matter is that Teams is designed for small meetings in which one person (probably an adult) at a time is talking and everyone else is intently listening.  So yeah, try to use this to teach language learners, or children, or BOTH, and you can probably guess how it’s going to end up.

Don’t get me wrong, it can – and WILL – be done. I just want to clear that up for everyone who feels like they are alone in thinking “why are we using this software?” “it’s a terrible teaching platform.” You’re right, it is. But what other choice have we got? So, here are some of my tips to success that I have used for teaching 96 10-year old boys. Things have gone very well, I must say, but it certainly has been in spite of the medium of instruction, rather than because of it.

Teams Tip #1 – Pre-record Your Lessons

Interactive, collaborative classes don’t work on Teams. Not in the way that you have done them in the past, anyway. I don’t know how big your classrooms are, but mine are about 25 students at a time. The only way that is even slightly doable is if you have every single person but the speaker mute their mics. As soon as you have more than one or two people at a time unmuted, you will exponentially amplify the background interference and see how quickly everyone else in class tunes out. To maintain a discussion in this manner puts a lot of onus on you to be a “moderator” (read: muter). My solution: I pre-record all of my lessons and post them to Teams at the prescribed time so that each student can watch them individually, free from interference. Even if you do a live session as well, it is very useful to have one version that is free from interruptions in the case that your lesson gets derailed. 

Teams Tip #2 – Hold a live class, but just for questions

If you are able to incorporate tip one – that is, if your administration allows you to – then already your life becomes infinitely easier. If not, try this. You still pre-record your lesson, but you also hold a live class at your assigned times, but just have it open for questions. When students join, direct them to your pre-recorded lesson file, wherever you have stored it, and instruct your students to watch that. Then, you can have open discussion for students who are struggling with the content in your live session. Worse comes to worse, you can show your pre-recorded lesson video in a live meeting by playing it on your computer and sharing your screen. 

The first two steps may seem like “cheating,” to either you or to your administration, but I think we have all seen how much actual teaching gets done during live sessions. So much time is wasted muting and muting, repeating what was just said because there was too much sound in the background, answering questions about the platform, etc. etc.

Teams Tip #3 – Just because your class is online, do not feel compelled to fill every minute

You don’t speak for 100% of the time you are in front of a “real” class, do you? I hope not. Students are spending a good amount of time completing work, either on their own or in groups. Teaching with Microsoft Teams doesn’t have to be any different. Since I pre-record my lesson, when I get to a point where I have given them a task to complete, I put up a screen that says “15 minutes to complete _________” and keep it up for 15 minutes. You can do the same if you are doing live lessons, too. As you can imagine, this makes pre-recording your lesson much faster, though.

Teams Tip #4 – Use the “Assignments” tab 

Since my entire approach is predicated on students watching the videos and doing the work by themselves, I give them copious amounts of small assignments to make sure they have watched the videos and are learning the material. The more autonomous your learner is, the more you will have to rely on the assignments to assess comprehension. For this, I use the assignments function that is integrated with Microsoft Forms. This collects answers and records them in the Grade Book on Teams. 

Teams Tip #5 – Get to know your school’s Learning Management System (LMS)

Often you can mass import grades via an excel (csv) file. If this is the case, you can export the grades that Teams have collected into a csv and then import this file to your schools LMS, saving you the trouble of having to manually enter all of your grades. Tip: Get to know this process BEFORE you start handing out assignments, because although it sounds simple, you will almost certainly have to play with the formatting of exported csv so that it will import cleanly. But doing a little of this work early will save you A LOT of time over the course of the semester.

And there you have it. This pretty much sums up the approach that I have taken to teaching with Microsoft Teams. These things make both my life, and the lives of my students easier. By freeing up much more of my time and automating as much as possible, I am freed up to create better content and be there to support students. After all, shouldn’t technology be making our lives easier, not more difficult? Do you have any tips that you think I should add? Send me an email at matthew@teachfortravel.com Also, don’t forget to check out my guides page for more information about teaching to travel!