Award-Winning Chess Coach's Remote Learning Plan

WFM Elizabeth Spiegel, featured in the 2012 documentary "Brooklyn Castle", is the longtime coach of IS 318 in Brooklyn, NY. Her school is the only middle school ever to win the high school nationals. Spiegel has a master's degree in education and is also the author of ChessKid's Classroom Lesson Planner. UT-Dallas awarded her 2019 Chess Educator of the Year in the U.S. She has inspired many teachers, including the one penning these words. -- FunMasterMike.

I’ve been a classroom teacher for 20 years, but I’ve really had to learn new ways to teach in the last six months. Learning remotely is challenging. Kids lose focus easily at home with all the distractions: phones, music, parents, siblings, and without the reinforcing energy of the classroom.

But teaching online also has its upsides, and I’ve found a few features, hacks, tricks and websites that get me through. There are some wonderful features of Zoom: the mute button, the chat feature, and breakout rooms, which all allow you to control how students interact with each other.

The most recent of IS 318's whopping 58 national titles. This is the 7th-grade championship team from the 2019 K-12 Grade Nationals. Photo courtesy 318chess.com.

My favorite teaching program is Kahoot!, which makes any lesson into a game show. Finally, ChessKid makes it easy to organize large classes, give and grade homework, and assign high-quality asynchronous lessons.

Here are my favorite online teaching tricks!

Think, Pair, Share and Breakout Rooms: "Think, pair, share" (TPS) is a teaching technique in which students tackle a problem or worksheet individually first, then with a partner, and finally as a large group. I might use TPS by posting a mate in two sheet on Google classroom and then kids have the first 15 minutes of the period to solve as many as they can by themselves, the next 15 minutes in a zoom breakout room with a classmate, and then we go over the answers together.

TPS helps remote classrooms feel more like a community. It makes every student in class actively discuss assignments (as opposed to the one kid who traditionally gives an answer). It makes solving tactics more fun, more social, and less intimidating. You can strategically pair talented new kids with higher-rated older kids to create teaching and mentoring relationships. You can also make sure struggling learners feel supported by pairing them with the kinder, patient, stronger students.

IS 318 has also fostered the chess talents of thousands of girls over the years. This is thefirst-place team from the 2019 U14 National Girls Championship. Photo courtesy 318chess.com.

Zoom Chat: Group chat is fantastic for fostering group discussions. It has some real advantages over the normal classroom setup. No one has to wait their turn, but at the same time, kids can take the time they need to think and respond. The shiest kids (who would never raise their real hands or voluntarily speak in real class) often will type in the chat, sometimes incredible long thoughts you would never have otherwise heard. Kids can respond to each others’ ideas and variations. You can ask a question to the class and have them respond privately in the chat. This gives multiple kids a chance to answer, rather than the single one who you would call on in a classroom.

Elizabeth Spiegel in her natural habitat: reviewing kids' games, and keeping things student-centered.

Kahoot!: Kahoot is a website that adds instant sparkle to any lesson by transforming it into a game show. By showing the leaderboard after every problem it also creates immediate social recognition for doing well in class. When you teach with Kahoot!, every student in the class is answering and getting feedback on every problem.

How it works: kids log into Kahoot! on their phones (or another tab of their browser). On your Zoom screen, they see a position and a question, and then have a teacher-chosen amount of time (30-240 seconds) to select from four answer choices. (You can also pay for the premium version, where they type the answer in; it’s worth it for me.) I toggle between Kahoot! and ChessBase or ChessKid to explain the answers in more detail. At the end of the Kahoot!, there’s a podium and some special effects that celebrate the top five finishers.

One of the Kahoots that Spiegel created. Can you figure out White's 5th move?

Kahoots are easy to create from ChessKid or any chess program: take a screenshot of the board only (windows-shift-s in Windows), add the screenshot as the “media” in the kahoot, and enter the answers. Creating a kahoot takes me about 10 minutes.

ChessKid to manage enormous classes: I teach public middle school in NYC. While my in-person classes are beautifully small, my remote ones are enormous. My largest remote class has 52 students, who range from total beginner to 1700. I’ve divided the kids into three groups, and they follow this schedule:

Each group gets 1-2 lessons, does 1-2 worksheets, and plays twice a week. On Monday I teach a 30-minute lesson to the advanced group, while the intermediate group does a tactics sheet as think-pair-share. I put the intermediate group in breakout rooms halfway through the advanced lesson. The advanced group leaves after 30 minutes, which frees me up to release the intermediate group from their breakout rooms and go over the answers with them. Group 3 is playing on ChessKid, so they don’t even need to log onto the Zoom call. It’s easy for me to check afterward that they were logged in and playing.

For an in-depth look into the success of IS 318 and Spiegel's work ethic, check out the documentary "Brooklyn Castle."

ChessKid tournaments: These are the perfect asynchronous learning. My NYC middle school does not have enough staff to teach the blended kids when they are home, so we are supposed to give them extended homework assignments for those 2.5 days per week. Parents want their kids at home to be engaged, learning, happy, and busy during the day. ChessKid tournaments are perfect for this: they are fun, social, student-centered, and you can make them as long or short as you want!

I also assign 1-2 ChessKid videos each week. They are fantastic: short, easy to watch, and packed with quality positions.

Interested in getting live instruction from Elizabeth Spiegel? She often teaches with other esteemed colleagues at masterchess.org.