Setting up students for success with RTTTSL
- Colleen Farris
- Jul 13
- 4 min read
Is it possible to teach hands-on skills online? After viewing Martha Ramirez’s (2020) YouTube video about structuring online lessons for student success, I accepted the challenge to create a hands-on learning activity for two online learning modes: a synchronous group activity and an asynchronous individual activity. I used Ramirez’s lesson checklist as my guide. Her essential lesson components are roles, rules, time, task, turns, steps, and language, or RTTTSL for short. Keep reading to learn more about the process.
RTTTSL is short for roles, rules, time, task, turns, steps and language.
My objective was to create an activity that allows students to practice setting up a workstation in preparation for learning knife skills. Both forms of the activity serve as an alternate formative assessment for the second lesson of an introductory knife skills unit.
In Lesson 2, students are introduced to the necessary content-specific vocabulary and workstation setup information. Both versions of the activity allow students to practice their skills at home, with tools that are available and familiar to them. This assignment supports one of my newly adopted goals for the knife skills unit, which is to promote regular at-home practice. Toward that end, both forms of this activity provide an indirect way of evaluating whether students have serviceable equipment and a conducive learning environment at home. If they do not, then additional support for out-of-class practice can be provided by lending equipment, or working with parents to improve at-home practice conditions.
For the asynchronous online learning mode, the individual activity guide (shown here in the upper right image) provides the necessary support for a student to complete the assignment on their own. Evidence of task completion is presented in a video recording submitted to Google Classroom. This activity could also be used as a flipped classroom assignment in a blended learning environment. In either learning mode, the teacher and peers could subsequently review videos to provide feedback.
For the synchronous online group activity (shown here in the second image on the right), students perform the workstation set up for each other, with group members rotating through roles. The synchronous activity has the added benefit of providing students with real-time peer feedback and social interaction. In a blended learning environment, the same activity could be conducted in-person, with photos and feedback submitted to Google Classroom for teacher review.
As I began structuring this activity, I considered the individual, asynchronous mode first. I thought about how long it should take, whether the student would be able to accomplish the task without help, and the kind of help that would be appropriate. I considered how the task would be evaluated, and decided that it would be done by the teacher, with possible peer review in a later activity. I also considered the common problems I have encountered with online submissions in the past. To address those issues, the rules are explicit as to the criteria for the video production task. In order to ensure that the work presented is that of the student, their face must be shown in the video. In order to assess whether the student is able to communicate coherently using content-specific language, the task requires the unedited video to be narrated by them.
For the synchronous activity, I explored how the task might be accomplished by a group in an online setting. While the activity steps remained the same, the time and task requirements, language, roles, turns, and rules needed significant revision. In this situation, the task includes providing peer feedback, which necessitates additional language supports in the form of feedback sentence stems. In addition, the roles and the order in which students complete their parts of the assignment had to be specified. Writing concise instructions to explain the assignment and rotation of roles was a challenge.
Another consideration was how large the groups could be based on how long each student would need to complete the task, and the time needed for feedback. I decided that groups of three would allow for a reasonable amount of feedback without making the activity too long. I also changed the documentation of the activity from a video to a screenshot accompanied by peer feedback notes. Due to peer involvement and the social nature of the assignment, I did not feel the need to include a rule specifying that students must demonstrate workstation setup themselves on camera.
This was a valuable exercise because it helped me think through how I might create hands-on culinary arts activities to be delivered online. Using the RTTTSL task framework ensured that the activity guides I tailored to each learning mode communicated all the information students needed to be successful. Now that I know how to present this type of activity online, I look forward to testing both versions with my students. I anticipate that the clarity provided by the RTTTSL framework will produce better results than my current methods of teaching and assessing these skills, with the added benefit of supporting student skill development at home. I look forward to testing my hypothesis.
Reference
Ramirez, M. (2020, December 8). Tech Tips Webinar: Flipped Instruction in the Virtual English Language Classroom with Martha Ramirez. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChnWYx1ZGtHnzzpV5t98J4Q
