Classroom organization and orchestration (EdTech)
From The Learning Engineer's Knowledgebase
Technologies for classroom organization and orchestration are used to help teachers keep their classrooms operating smoothly, organize tasks and materials, and help them monitor what is happening with students in both face-to-face and online settings.
Definition
Classroom organization and orchestration are tasks related to keeping classroom operations running smoothly and well maintained. Classroom orchestration involves keeping student engagement high, helping students stay on track during assignments, monitoring student performance (including through formative feedback), organizing class materials and information sources, facilitating class assignments and activities, and maintaining classroom resources.
People who design technologies for classroom organization sometimes also help teachers with planning, goal setting, and personal reflection processes.
Additional Information
Keeping a classroom running smoothly can be a challenging task for a teacher. This is especially true if the teacher is using a new educational technology or product in which they are required to keep student engagement high and monitor participation with the product.
In the concept of orchestration, a teacher can be seen as a sort of orchestra conductor, making sure all the moving parts and actors are working together toward the activities and, ultimately, the learning objectives. Actors can include all of the students, the teacher themselves, digital technologies (especially automated technologies), and outside experts or people who might participate in the class. In this classroom orchestra, teachers simultaneously balance all of the classroom activities, students' needs and interests, technology requirements, time, media and resources, and school requirements - a sometimes challenging task, to say the least! With orchestration and organization technologies, the probability of carrying out the interactions that the designer intended increases as teachers' implementation tasks are directly supported by these technologies and teachers can even offload some of these tasks onto technology.
Orchestration and organization technologies are devices and software that directly assist the teacher and students with staying organized, on task, and well informed about the learning activities.
Common things that orchestration and organization technologies can do include:
- Monitoring and notifying about performance and participation of students and teachers
- Supporting sequencing of activities, such as prompts when to move to the next activity or topic, or things to notice among students' activity
- Scheduling, timekeeping, and time management for activities, lessons, and longer-term units
- Moderation and administration tasks within digital learning environments, such as bad word filters and automated content screeners in online discussion forums
- Providing cues to teachers when to take certain teaching actions with students during activities, such as through providing teaching scripts and cues to look for during class activities
- Suggesting scaffolds and support mechanisms to teachers and students when needed
- Automatically nudging and notifying students when they need to participate in an activity, such as when someone posts new content on a class website
- Automatically providing feedback on students' work, tests, and activity, when possible
- Goal setting and planning
- Capturing, archiving, sorting, and making accessible all classroom documents and history, including capture of recordings of classroom discussions, whiteboard use, video, and documents
Note that orchestration technologies are distinct from those that provide scaffolding or support mechanisms to learners. Orchestration technologies are solely focused on supporting teachers or facilitators while they are implementing an educational product or are teaching their students.
Tips and Tricks
- Teachers in formal classroom settings have to balance a lot of things while they are in the classroom. Adding a new curriculum or educational product can be a daunting task considering this balance of things they are already doing. Consider all of the tasks that you are asking teachers to do with your product, and then think of ways that you can support some of these tasks or, alternatively, help teachers completely to not do those tasks through the use of technology. To improve orchestration, ask yourself what are some of the things that teachers do that can be handled by software in support of the teacher?
- Formal K-12 settings are not the only learning contexts that need help with orchestration, although it is a concept that is most often used in formal education settings. Using the list of common ways that orchestration is supported while an educational product is being implemented, consider how the product may be used in other contexts than K-12 or higher education (such as business or nonprofit industries). How might the product's implementation tasks be supported by software or automation?
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