One frustration that I personally and selfishly have had with online teaching is that, four years in, I had FINALLY developed a pretty solid toolbox of instructional strategies. Then COVID-19 came, and it was like someone dumped all those out and I was a credential student again — well-versed in what I wanted to achieve but ill-equipped in the tools required to achieve it.

One of my go-to strategies my first two years of teaching was Dividing Lines. I read a statement, if you agree with the statement, move over to the windows; if you disagree, move to the doors. Share why you chose your position. It works well because it is a visual indicator of how many people take one position versus another. It gets students out of their seats and moving around (something I am not normally good at doing), and it invites some good debate.

The visual indicator and good debate are the parts we can easily keep with distance learning.

My new district uses Zoom (my old district used the less fully featured Google Meet), and the other day, I used the “yes” “no” buttons to digitally recreate dividing lines. I revised my statement into a yes or no question. Students click “yes” or “no,” and Zoom automatically tallies the number of votes on each side, so you can still quantify the different sides (and, in fact, do it with a degree of accuracy). And you can still call on “Someone from the ‘yes’s,’ why did you choose that?” Or say, “We had five no’s,” and then read the list of names (each student’s vote appears next to their name in the Participants’ list) to encourage accountability.

The downside, of course, is that we lost the kinesthetic part: students stay in their seats and are unwilling to get up (for example, to move to one side of the screen vs. the other). But this distance learning era of education is an era of compromise. I feel that we teachers have been thrust back into the position of beginning teachers: trying to first identify ANY tools that work reliably before we can be more discerning about the best and most effective tools for our students in our class this year. This is one technique that will do for now.