Have you ever heard about the six-minute rule? Researchers from Stanford University have found that your audience tends to lose focus after about 6 minutes during an online video presentation. 

Your supervisors and some parents may strongly disagree with this, but in the era of online learning, the rule of thumb is to make your lessons shorter. Your online lessons need to be more clear and concise if you want to capture your students’ attention. The mini lessons need to be micro lessons now!

So, how can you meet the 120-minutes live instruction requirements and still engage your students in your daily synchronous instruction?

There are things you can do to constantly re-stimulate the students during online learning to achieve better engagement. Read our blog for tips to make your Zoom lessons more interactive and engaging.

However, your students should not sit in front of a screen for more than 30 minutes without a break, no matter how frequently you re-stimulate them.

You can also keep students engaged and encourage student participation by planning your live teaching time more strategically. A great method is to maximize your small-group and individual conference time, since students learn and retain knowledge better when they receive more attention, and you get to build connections with them and know their interests in small groups.

The best way to plan your time is to use:

• recorded video lessons for whole-class instruction

• synchronous teaching time for small-group instruction and individual conference

In your recorded lesson, you will state your learning objective and follow the I do - You do model like your mini lessons. The only difference is that your lesson is much shorter now! Your recorded lesson should be FUN with brief changes on the screen (think how TikTok videos cut back and forth!)

Some tools for creating video lessons we recommend:

Watch the 2-minute micro-lesson video made with Clips. How does this teacher engage her first graders and teach them about making text-to-self connections?

In this video, the teacher states her teaching point, models how she makes text-to-self connections while reading, and tell the students what they need to work on, and what tools they can use when working independently. All of these can happen in only 2 minutes!

What’s better, students can watch this video for multiple times. It is shown that students are more likely to re-watch the video lessons when they’re shorter.

When the teacher and her students meet on live in small groups, the students can take turns to share how they make text-to-self-connections with the books they chose to read. In this way:

• Students have choices when picking books they want to read.

• Students can watch their peers model how they practice this skill.

• The teacher can quickly assess if students have mastered this skill.

If you need to confer with some students, simply put each student in a breakout room, and go to the room to check in with them. The others will be working on independent tasks during this time, just like when you’re teaching in the actual classroom.

Do you like the idea of micro lessons? Try it in your classroom and comment below to let us know how you and your students think of this micro lesson idea!

References:

The Myth of the Six Minute Rule: Student Engagement with Online Videos

Connecting with Students Online: Strategies for Remote Teaching & Learning by Jennifer Serravallo