Learning at a Distance: Can At-Home Activities Measure Up?

ABSTRACT

Due to the global pandemic, many traditionally face-to-face courses had to transfer to online teaching. We, like many others, were faced with the challenge of replicating online our purposefully-designed mathematics content courses for elementary teacher candidates (TCs). In doing so, our aim was to preserve our pedagogical commitments of collaborative learning and equitable participation. In this paper, we describe a measurement activity that we redesigned in the rapid transition to online teaching. This activity exemplifies how the constraints of remote teaching opened new opportunities for maintaining our pedagogical commitments in different and richer ways. We also highlight two takeaways from this work (1) creating space for students to explore introductory activities at home can lead to richer class discussions and more equitable participation, and (2) allowing for students to share their work in an online environment can lead to more creative approaches and presentations, as well as opportunities for students to share in-progress thinking before whole class discussions.