#79 Eight Steps To Make Synchronous Online Learning Really Work with Dr. Helaine Marshall

In this episode of Why Distance Learning, your hosts talk with Dr. Helaine Marshall — retired professor of education at Long Island University Hudson and creator of SOFLA, the Synchronous Online Flipped Learning Approach — about the pedagogy most online courses never get around to designing, and what it costs when they don't. Drawing on five years of development work, Community of Inquiry theory, and her own linguistics teaching, Helaine walks through an eight-step cycle that treats synchronous virtual instruction as its own medium rather than a degraded version of in-person teaching. The reframe at the center of the conversation: online learning isn't a tool problem, it's a design problem — and empowerment isn't something teachers do to students, it's what happens when the conditions are built for it.

Together, the hosts and Helaine explore why most virtual classrooms default to lecture-over-Zoom, the eight-step SOFLA cycle that weaves asynchronous pre-work with structured synchronous sessions, the two steps that actually determine whether it succeeds (the SHAC share-out protocol and "preview and discovery"), the control issues that make teachers resist the model, and how SOFLA adapts across content areas — from linguistics to Boyle's Law — and age groups. They also work through Helaine's four E's framework — equity, enrichment, engagement, empowerment — and a single linguistic observation that reframes how to think about agency in virtual classrooms: empowerment is not a transitive verb.

Key Topics

• The eight-step SOFLA cycle: pre-work, sign-in, whole group application, breakouts, share-out, preview and discovery, assignment instructions, reflection
• Why pedagogy outlasts tech tools — and why most online teaching skips pedagogy entirely
• The SHAC protocol for accountable, substantive peer feedback
• "Preview and discovery" as the motivational hinge between lessons
• The four E's: equity, enrichment, engagement, empowerment
• P-P-R-R (patience, persistence, reflection, renewal) for teachers new to the model
• Adapting SOFLA across content areas, age groups, and even in-person classrooms

4. Links & Resources

• SOFLA® (book, forthcoming May 2026) — Helaine W. Marshall and Ilka Kostka, University of Michigan Press, Brief Instructional Guide Series: https://press.umich.edu/Books/S/SOFLA-R
• Helaine's SOFLA hub — overview, training team, and resources: https://malpeducation.com/sofla/
• Helaine's bio and full publication list — https://malpeducation.com/our-experts/helaine-w-marshall/
• "Fostering Teaching Presence through the Synchronous Online Flipped Learning Approach" — Marshall & Kostka, TESL-EJ, Vol. 24 (open access): https://tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume24/ej94/ej94int/
• Breaking New Ground for SLIFE: The Mutually Adaptive Learning Paradigm, 2nd ed. (2023) — Helaine's other signature framework (MALP), University of Michigan Press
• Meeting the Needs of SLIFE: A Guide for Educators, 2nd ed. — Marshall, DeCapua, and Tang, University of Michigan Press
• Perusall — the social annotation platform Helaine uses for pre-work: https://www.perusall.com/
• Flipped Learning Network — founded by Jon Bergmann and Aaron Sams, referenced as the origin of flipped learning: https://flippedlearning.org/
• Community of Inquiry framework — Garrison, Anderson & Archer, the theoretical grounding for teaching presence: https://coi.athabascau.ca/
• CILC — Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration: https://cilc.org
• Banyan Global Learning — https://banyangloballearning.com/global-learning-live/

Guest Bio: Dr. Helaine W. Marshall

Dr. Helaine W. Marshall is the creator of two instructional frameworks — SOFLA (Synchronous Online Flipped Learning Approach) and MALP (Mutually Adaptive Learning Paradigm) — and currently serves as president of MALP, LLC, where she trains educators on both models. Her work centers on culturally responsive-sustaining education and online flipped learning, particularly for teachers working with language learners and students whose prior schooling has been disrupted. She is retired Professor of Education and Director of Language Education Programs at Long Island University – Hudson, has published three books with University of Michigan Press, and received the 2023 Lifetime Achievement Award from New York State TESOL.

About the Hosts: 
Seth Fleischauer is the founder of Banyan Global Learning and host of Why Distance Learning. Through Banyan, he designs live virtual programs that connect K-12 classrooms to global peers and expert facilitators — building the kind of structured, human-centered distance learning the podcast explores. See https://banyangloballearning.com/

Tami Moehring and Allyson Mitchell work with CILC, the Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration, to help educators implement high-quality live virtual learning experiences across grade levels. Discover more at CILC.org.

Creators and Guests

Host

Allyson Mitchell

SF

Host

Seth Fleischauer

TM

Host

Tami Moehring

What is Why Distance Learning??

Why Distance Learning? is a podcast about the decisions, design choices, and assumptions that determine whether live virtual learning becomes shallow and transactional—or meaningful, relational, and effective at scale.

The show is designed for education leaders, instructional designers, and system-level practitioners responsible for adopting, scaling, and sustaining virtual, hybrid, and online learning models. Each episode examines the structural conditions under which distance learning actually works—and the predictable reasons it fails when it doesn’t.

Through conversations with researchers, experienced practitioners, and field-shaping leaders, Why Distance Learning? translates research, field evidence, and lived experience into decision-relevant insight. Episodes surface real tradeoffs, near-failures, and hard-won lessons, equipping listeners with clear framing and language they can use to explain, defend, or redesign distance learning models in real organizational contexts.

Hosted by Seth Fleischauer of Banyan Global Learning, and Allyson Mitchell and Tami Moehring of the Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration, the podcast challenges outdated narratives about distance learning and explores what becomes possible when live virtual education is designed intentionally, human-centered, and grounded in evidence.

[00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to Why Distance Learning, the podcast for education leaders and practitioners who are making real decisions about how virtual learning gets designed, adopted, and sustained. I'm Seth Fleischauer, founder and president of Banyan Global Learning, and my cohosts are Allyson Mitchell and Tami Moehring of the Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration. Every episode we try to surface at least one assumption worth questioning.

Today we're talking with Dr. Helaine Marshall, retired professor of education at Long Island University Hudson and the creator of SOFLA — the Synchronous Online Flipped Learning Approach — a pedagogical model she spent five years developing and codifying into an eight-step cycle. Her new book on it, co-authored with Dr. Ilka Kostka, comes out in May 2026 from University of Michigan Press.

The assumption on the table today: online learning is a degraded substitute for in-person teaching — an emergency medium we tolerate, not one worth designing for. Helaine's work suggests the opposite: that synchronous online learning has its own pedagogy, and when teachers treat it as a tool problem instead of a design problem, they lose their students in ways they wouldn't lose them in a physical room.

*This episode is brought to you by CILC, the Center for Interactive Learning and Collaboration, connecting students to real experts through live virtual field trips and experiences — visit cilc.org to learn more. And by Banyan Global Learning, which brings K-12 classrooms face to face with global peers and expert facilitators through live, thematic international exchange programs — find them at banyangloballearning.com.*

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**[MAIN EPISODE]**

**Allyson** [00:01:30] *(approx)* Dr. Helaine W. Marshall is a retired professor of education and director of language education programs at Long Island University Hudson. She has published three books with the University of Michigan Press and her articles appear in TESOL Journal, Urban Review, ELT Journal, and others. She served on the board of the Flipped Learning Network from 2013 to 2018 and is the winner of the 2023 Lifetime Achievement Award from New York State TESOL. Dr. Marshall has developed a model of online flipped learning and her most recent article on the topic — the Synchronous Online Flipped Learning Approach, or SOFLA — an eight-step learning cycle for digital age pedagogy, was published in Advances in Online Learning and co-authored with Dr. Ilka Kostka. She and Dr. Kostka have co-authored a teacher's handbook on SOFLA, to be published this May with University of Michigan Press as part of the Brief Instructional Guide Series. Dr. Marshall, welcome to the podcast.

**Helaine Marshall** [00:02:30] *(approx)* Thank you. I'm delighted to be here and especially with the topic being SOFLA, which is near and dear to my heart, and I really want to share it with everyone.

**Seth** [00:02:45] *(approx)* Amazing. We are eager to dive into SOFLA, this flipped online learning method. You have been working in TESOL forever, hence the lifetime achievement award. And you even have a whole separate framework that you developed for a specific audience for English language learners called the Mutually Adaptive Learning Paradigm. Maybe we'll talk about that on another day, but at some point your attention turned to instructional technology and online teaching. I'm wondering what drew you in that direction, and what problem were you trying to solve when you developed SOFLA?

**Helaine Marshall** [00:03:20] *(approx)* So I have to thank my university, Long Island University. And the reason is that when I started there back in 2003, it just so happened that they had a grant for faculty that was interested in learning about instructional technology. And I had a little pin in that for myself because recently, before I went to LIU, I did a lot of interviews. And one of them was with a college, and the first question they asked me at the interview was, "Do you teach online?" Deer in the headlights. I didn't get that position, but I made a little note: I've got to learn about teaching online. That's the future, and I want to be a part of it.

So when this faculty grant came through — me, please — and I took a course with Vance Stevens of TESOL, who started the Web Heads group that I then became an avid supporter of, and took a course with him called Enhancing Online Learning with Audio and Webcam. So I've always been, since way back, an advocate of synchronous real-time interaction online and followed Vance's lead for many, many years. We just lost him a year or so ago. But in any case, I took advantage of the grant, and I learned a lot about how to teach online and became very interested in instructional technology. So that's how I first got into it.

**Seth** [00:04:35] *(approx)* And so when you developed SOFLA, what were you seeing where you came to the conclusion that a new model was necessary?

**Helaine Marshall** [00:04:45] *(approx)* Yes, well, what I found when I was teaching online is that everybody was focused on tech. Tools. What are the tools to use? How do I use Zoom? There are people that still can't share their screen. They don't see their video. To me, the big thing is the pedagogy. It gets left behind. We're teaching online. We're not online teaching. It's kind of a different mindset. And because my field is teacher education, and my interest is more pedagogy — I do like the tech tools, but the tools change all the time. You use one tool, then it's gone. You use another tool. Pedagogy stays. It's there forever. You come up with a good methodological approach, you can use it regardless of the content, regardless of the tools.

So I needed to do that. And what happened was I had a colleague at another campus. LIU is very big, we have about eight campuses. And she was teaching many of the same courses I was teaching. And we had low enrollments at one point. And I thought, this is a great time to do online teaching. And we had a cross-fertilization — it was beautiful — of her students. She was in an urban area in Brooklyn. I was in Metro New York in a suburban area, and the students cross-fertilized beautifully. We had them in her classes and my classes. So it was a cross-campus online program. And we started asynchronous because that was the way the university expected us to do it online.

And gradually I said, can't we — do you have any kind of place we can meet? And they had this thing they used for the administration to have meetings. I said, can we use that for class? And so we started to put in synchronous sessions. And eventually she and I — her name is Nancy Lemberger — we put together the beginnings of a structure for SOFLA, which is having asynchronous pieces and then synchronous interactions. But it wasn't really codified yet.

This took me a long time. I discovered online learning back in 2003. By 2008, I was teaching online in this cross-campus course, but I hadn't heard of flipping. I was teaching online. The students were there, but I was lecturing. I was teaching in a traditional way. But then — the other thing I want to thank LIU for is we had retreats every year, teaching with technology retreats. And we listened every year to the experts. And one of them would always give us what he called the bleeding edge. And that year, 2011, the bleeding edge was flipped learning. And the minute I heard it, I said, that's the missing piece. If we flip it and we have the students get their concepts and input out of class, we can make it even more dynamic when they're in the synchronous session with us.

And I thought of my linguistics class right away, because when you talk about what problem I was trying to solve — you're always going to have a top tier of student and they were doing fine no matter what, but I was losing a lot of students when I was teaching online. And the in-person classes were going more smoothly because we were right in touch with each other. But when you teach online, you have that distance. And I was losing the students. So there was a big split between those that got As and those who literally failed. So I said, this is not going to work. And I thought flipping is perfect.

So then I started to create videos from the lectures. Instead of doing them live, I did them on video, I punctuated them with questions, I downloaded the data, and I was able to see some students were getting everything correct and others were very confused — linguistics, precise area. I was able to individually guide the ones that were struggling. And then I was able to see what everybody got: fine, I don't have to mess with it anymore. They did retrieval practice during the video and I could see they got it. And then there were some that everybody was confused. That gave me my material for the synchronous session. So the problem I was trying to solve was success for all. I wanted all the students to be lifted up. And I found that by doing the flipped model combined with the online practices that I already had, that I was able to have more equity and democratize my teaching.

**Allyson** [00:08:25] *(approx)* So amazing, especially to be able to think about how comprehensive the synchronous and asynchronous pieces can be together and to identify where are the places where you need that live moment together. Because the synchronous, it is always the question. We work in CILC with a lot of museums and science centers and zoos and aquariums, and it often becomes the question of, what's the challenging part that you're having in the teaching? Let somebody else come in and talk a little bit about that or reinforce what they might see in that asynchronous or even synchronous experience. It's just an outside perspective. So it's a beautiful opportunity to see how tech is not a trend, it's a tool. And when used correctly, you have these models that are really tried and true.

And I love the idea of thinking about the flipped model and synchronous, because the flipped is such a beautiful experience and it really does allow people to learn in partnership. And then the idea of bringing synchronous in, it really does organize the opportunity of learning. And it's my understanding with SOFLA, there's eight different steps in the cycle that weave together the async and the synchronous components. So just for some of the listeners who aren't familiar, the core idea is that direct instruction moves outside of class time, freeing that shared time for application and interaction. And I just wonder, could you walk us through what it actually looks like for a student moving through a lesson or a course or a module? What's their experience from beginning to end with this beautiful model?

**Helaine Marshall** [00:10:05] *(approx)* What I call it is a perfect blend. Because I take the best practices of flipped learning and the best practices of online learning and I put them together. That's the way I see it. So I thought the best way I was thinking about — I knew you were going to ask me about eight steps, and I thought the best way to do it is to use a specific example. So I'm going to take you through a lesson. It's in our book. It's a cultural artifacts lesson. I'm going to give you the very brief version of it. There's much more about it in the book, but just to give you the flavor.

In this lesson, it's focused on cultural artifacts, and students — everybody, not just students — we all have cultural artifacts up on our shelf. I have a bunch right here in my office. And so it's a universal topic. I use it for ESL classes. I use it for teacher ed, multicultural perspectives in education. You can use it in a bilingual education program. It has a lot of flexibility.

So for the first step, which is asynchronous, I assign pre-work. Now that's called pre-work. It's classic. It works pretty much the way a flipped learning model works, except I have three requirements for it. It must be structured, interactive, and multimodal. Those are the three. And so it's not a passive watching of a video. The video contains — and I believe I mentioned this earlier when I was speaking about the punctuation of the video with questions that are low-level Bloom's. We're talking about retention. Comprehension and retention are the two goals.

And we do those, but we also do text. For text for pre-work, I can use textbook or I can use an article, but I put them in an application that alongside has social annotation. And what that means is students can highlight something and comment on it. They can ask each other questions. They can even upvote. You can do a smiley face. I can be in there. I can be seeing how the conversation's going. I can put a prompt of my own. And it is asynchronous, but it's not freestanding. You know how we used to do online discussion. Those were sort of performative. So what I'm trying to do here is link it to the text of the pre-work. They're all reading the same copy together. I do sometimes have students who say, I want the hard copy. Okay, fine. But they're reading in the digital copy. There are tools for that. The one I use — I'm sure 10 years from now, it'll be very different — but right now I use Perusall, but it's not the only one. And I think that combined with the video, sometimes I use one, the other, both. That's pre-work.

All right, then they come to class. So the pre-work for this lesson is my Intercultural Communication Framework. It has three principles. It's something at some point, if you're interested, we could talk about, but basically it's a framework and they need to learn the framework. I have a video for it and I have a document that describes it. We want to reach all learners. Okay, now come to class, and they bring their artifacts.

So the next activity is step two, the sign-in activity. And the sign-in activity — this is an issue because people need to understand, and that's why I use this example. The sign-in cannot be something that everyone answers the same way. It can't be a question about the pre-work that is just a fact. Did you watch the pre-work? It's got to be something individual for each student.

**Seth** [00:13:25] *(approx)* So a little higher on Bloom's taxonomy.

**Helaine Marshall** [00:13:28] *(approx)* And so that's why this is a really good example. Because they have to post — and again, there is technology involved — they have to post their artifact and describe it and write their name. So there's a board with all the artifacts up there. And their name is important because this is the sign-in. And I always say, I don't start class. They start class when they come in and post their artifact. This is the way the class begins. And it's a way I take attendance, see who's late, but I don't talk about that. I talk about where your artifacts are. And they look at each other's artifacts. So it's transparent. In fact, all of this is transparent. There's much less emphasis on "hand this in to me." That's just me. I want them to learn from each other. And so it's built into SOFLA that they share with each other. It doesn't mean they can't individually submit something. I know instructors like to do that, and that can be done. But SOFLA itself, self-contained as it is, is transparent.

So the next step is whole group application. In this case, what they do together — and this is very important, because I am not an intermediary here. I am stepping back. This is what I call the dangerous stage. This is where the professor or the instructor wants to lead and take over. You step back. Your job is threefold. You're going to observe, you're going to informally assess, and you're going to give feedback as needed. But that's your role — not to teach.

So what they're going to do is they're going to look at the artifacts, and together they're going to organize them any way they want. They're going to organize them geographically, maybe what country they're from, chronologically if some things are old, what material they're made of, whatever — because these are objects. There's so many ways they could talk about how to organize the artifacts. And that's something they can create on a separate document. Now, I'm not wedded to any platform at all. Use whatever you want with SOFLA, but they need a shared space. The shared space can be anywhere. They all have to have access to it. And they don't put their names anymore. They signed in. So this isn't about "you did this and you did that." It's collaborative. And if someone is a little quieter, that's okay. I'm not looking here that everyone is accountable. That's not this step. This step is just to encourage them to collaborate. They can use a chat if they want to contribute, whatever.

Now they're beginning to get a handle on the artifacts. They're ready to go out to a breakout room without me. So that's step four. If you've ever done group work, that's this. But I find that in many countries, it's new. And that was the hardest step for some people. They go in the breakout, they don't know what to say, what to do, the teacher's not there. That was new for me. So I have structure in such a way that the breakouts are effective.

So what happens is sometimes I group them heterogeneously, homogeneously. I group them according to who was absent last time. You have complete control over how you do your groups, but bias them for success. Think ahead who you want in each room and how you want to do it. Now every now and then I'll push the random button because it's so easy. And then we go. What's key here — what they're going to do is, you give them very specific tasks. And I have to thank Martha Ramirez for teaching me the list of parameters for successful breakouts. All of that is discussed in the book. I don't want this to be too long, but we talk about how to structure the breakouts and what it is you have to make sure you give them ahead of time so that you have a successful experience in the breakout room.

In the case of the artifacts, I give them three questions. What are you learning by sharing your artifacts? What are you learning about the person and why this artifact is important to them? What are you learning about their priorities? And are any of these unfamiliar objects to you? Do you want them explained — what they are, you've never seen them before? So it was just engaging with the artifacts.

But the key here, and there are two keys to SOFLA — this is the first one: when they come back. Step five, the share-out. They know they have to share. So they're in the breakout, but they know when they come out of it, group one, group two. So they know they have to share. They don't all always share — in interest of time, repetition. They don't have to share necessarily everyone, but they know they might. And that's your accountability piece. And they have to listen to each other because they're not going to repeat. If you have the same thing as some other group, you're not going to say it because you're listening and you're paying attention.

So I have a protocol for the share-out, which is called SHAC. And I like to give everyone credit who put SOFLA together, because I may be the prime mover, but there's a lot of people in that recipe. One of them is — I mixed a metaphor, sorry — Khalid Fethi. He's in Morocco. Good friend of mine. The way he structures feedback — he's very humble about it, but it's fantastic. People love it. It's called SHAC: Share, Help, Ask, Comment. So when they come into step five, whoever's presenting, everybody needs to either share something that they relate to from what the group's sharing. They have to help in some way, which is not critiquing or evaluation. We're just helping. And number three, ask a question. When all else fails, you can think of a question. And then the last is comment.

Now that's tricky. You have to teach them that. In the book, we talk about how to teach SHAC. So what we do is if they just say, "great job, group three," I erase it. We're very powerful. We can erase it. What I do is I say, "tell me more about why it was a good job. What resonated with you?" So it has to be a reaction on substantive. And they learn that pretty quickly early on in the class. So they knew what to do.

**Seth** [00:18:30] *(approx)* Can I just get a point of clarification real quick? The difference between a share and a comment is a share is about the person who's commenting, whereas a comment is about the person who did the work.

**Helaine Marshall** [00:18:40] *(approx)* So what they share is — it can be, "in our group, we said a similar thing to you," or "in our group, we saw it differently." So this is where you can have a discussion. Or "in my personal life, I have experienced what you're talking about. It actually happened to me." So it's wide open what they choose to share in that moment. Now, remember, SHAC has four elements. We're not saying everyone does all four. We're just saying everybody needs to do something.

**Allyson** [00:19:05] *(approx)* Yeah, participate.

**Helaine Marshall** [00:19:08] *(approx)* Exactly. And there's the ability piece.

**Seth** [00:19:12] *(approx)* Step six. This is a preview and discovery.

**Helaine Marshall** [00:19:18] *(approx)* Yes. Now, remember I said there are two keys to the success of SOFLA. One of them is the SHAC protocol. The other is step six. And step six is my little secret, because one of the biggest problems, both in flipped learning and in online learning, is that you hope that you'll be successful from lesson to lesson. But it depends upon the students. If they're not doing their part in between the lessons, then everything falls apart. And that's one of the things people say about flipped learning: what if they don't do the pre-work? And online learning: what if they just don't participate? They're just sitting there. Okay.

So preview and discovery is key. I call it the movie trailer. You watch the trailer and you say, I've got to see that movie. So this is your chance. I know we're not marketing people, we're academics, me especially, I'm not oriented for selling — but you have to sell it. And so this is a motivational technique. What you do is you pick the most compelling pieces of the pre-work and you peak their interest. I even sometimes show them a cartoon. One of the linguistics books from Fromkin and Rodman used that all the time. They had cartoons in every chapter. I got the idea from them. And I try putting cartoons that relate to the content. So you want to get them interested.

The other piece is cognitive. You want the cognitive load to be lowered a little, and you want them to have confidence going forward into the pre-work. Because some of them stay away from it due to fear. And so you take the most difficult concept, challenging concept, term, new term they haven't seen, and you front-load, and you do that in step six. And so step six provides almost a guarantee that they're going to be motivated and cognitively prepared for the pre-work. And it works. If you don't do that and you just give the assignment, which is what a lot of people do, you're just praying, really. And you have to be more efficient with your time and their time. You have to make sure that you get to step six.

Because I think people misunderstand. They teach the lesson and then, okay, go home, do the next one. No, the next lesson's part of your lesson. So that's only at step six, there are eight.

Seven, I call the boring step. Because all it is is the assignment. But in that case, it's separate from step six — that's pieces, little excerpts. This is to tell them exactly what to do. And the problem here sometimes is you can't make assumptions. You have to make sure they understand exactly where to go and what to do. And you have to build in redundancy. And I do it orally, I do it in writing, I put it on the platform, I even shoot out a reminder email with all the information again. I tell them they can contact me. There's nowhere to hide. I really show them in step seven everything, and give them a chance to ask questions.

All right, step seven. Step eight — we finally got there — is the reflection. And I call these bookends: sign-in, reflection. Because they have to sign their name now. Granted, they could leave the room and come back. I understand that. But it does show, when they reflect and have to sign their name at the end, that they were there at the end of class. And the reflection — I've had a hard time with some conscientious students because they say, well, I need time to reflect. I want to write you a true reflection and show you what I've learned. I say, no, that's not the reflection. You can do that. But all I'm looking for is your biggest takeaway.

And it's different from — people talk about an exit ticket. I'm not sure if you're familiar with that. I'm dead set against a lot of things: raising hands, worksheets, exit tickets, do-nows. I don't go for any of that. But a lot of that I talk about in my other work. In SOFLA, the reflection is: what's your biggest takeaway? And sometimes it's, I learned a new way to use the whiteboard. Okay. I want to know what resonated with you. And sometimes it's the technology. Sometimes it's the content of one other student's — "when so-and-so said this, it just blew me away." Or it could be something that they learned just through the course of the lesson about the material. I leave it wide open. I just want to know what they're taking away.

But remember transparency. So they will see what everybody else put. That's the key for me. They look and they see. Also, class doesn't end when I end it. When they write their reflection, they can leave. If they don't want to read everyone else's, that's their call. But it's a whiteboard. I then post all the whiteboards on the platform. So anything that was created — the sign-in, the whole group application, the breakout room materials that they created, and the reflection piece, and of course the assignment instructions — all that gets posted on the platform. So absentees can look at it, and people who may have left before they read the rest of the reflections, just for example. So that's the eight steps. There we go. That's it.

**Allyson** [00:24:40] *(approx)* With artifacts at the center too, amazing. It's just so — all the eight steps — it's just so wonderful to hear it broken down because it really is a step towards personalizing the learning experience. And in the same way, it's a proactivity and giving agency to the learner. While the educator really does get to be in — in what I believe is the 21st century model, which is we're here learning in partnership. Because in these reflections, I'm sure — this is just me taking from being a museum educator — in any type of time when we were talking artifacts or how does this connect to you personally, you are able to learn more about yourself, learn more about a person, an idea, a culture, a concept. And I think sometimes that's where in education, conversation becomes that driving point. That personalization, the conversation, that comfort. And just to hear it laid out in these eight steps — you create such a beautiful environment for people to feel comfortable to do that in an organic way, not in a forced way. Because there's nothing worse than when you're sitting in a virtual class and you're just waiting for someone to raise their hand or their virtual hand and you're like, I guess I'll say something. It's just baked into the process. So I appreciate you breaking it down because it really is such a model. I know it's in an online format that we're talking about it, but even in the classroom, it's a great example of how to motivate.

**Seth** [00:26:10] *(approx)* And I see a lot of really good online learning best practices embedded within here. You talk about the SHAC model of how to comment on each other's work. You talk about these different pieces of accountability along the way, previewing something that's coming up, the entire idea of speaking to motivation and making sure that that is a part of the work that you're doing. The whole group application with breakouts. You have all of these different touch points along the way. And it's a teacher — especially one who is new to online learning, but even veterans who listen to this podcast — I think that there's at very least a lot of reminders, if not new ideas in here for how to create a solid online learning experience. I am wondering: what is the hardest part of this for teachers? You've been working with this for a while now. What are kind of the fail points? You talked about these different keys — are those the often the fail points? How do you approach, when you're training someone, the common failures that might happen?

**Helaine Marshall** [00:27:15] *(approx)* Okay, actually there are several. But the key is, teachers like to be in control. They don't want to give up control.

**Seth** [00:27:22] *(approx)* How did you know that?

**Helaine Marshall** [00:27:25] *(approx)* And when you're online, it's very scary to give up control — much more than even when you're in person. You're online and you're not in control. But I always say you're giving up some control, but you're keeping authority. You still have your authority, and you're the one that can decide ultimately: do I need to give feedback now? Do I need to do some assessment? Do I need to change one of the activities? You're orchestrating it.

But the idea of control — particularly, leaving it open. The sign-in activity is open, the whole group activity is open, the breakouts are open. That makes teachers uncomfortable. But what I tell them is — whenever you're going to face a change like this, I have a way I speak about the process in letters. I like to have little ideas couched in letters. So it's P-P-R-R. You have to be patient with yourself and with the students. You're doing something new. This is an innovation. We have to take our time. And they just want: quick, quick, what tech do I use? No, no, no. You have to be patient. You have to be persistent. Don't give up. People who do flipping, if they haven't tried it before, they give up too easily. Don't give up. The students will have FOMO. It's all going to work. But be persistent. And then along the way you have to reflect. It took me five years to develop SOFLA. So you're not going to learn it in one workshop. And it's difficult. It has a lot of moving parts. So it's going to be new for you. It's going to be uncomfortable. But when you reflect, you'll say, I really need to work on this piece, that piece, the other. And then the last is renewal. You renew yourself. And it's kind of a cycle.

And I find when I'm working with teachers, it kind of brings the temperature down when I tell them this is the process you're going to go through. The other thing I tell them — this is from David Rosen, I like to do all these shout-outs, there's a lot behind the scenes here — what he does with teachers is he says, look, there are some equivalencies. Things you're going to do that are the same that you've always done. You're instructors. You know how to teach. So some things will be equivalent in your new context. Others are going to be limitations. There are things you love to do when you're teaching and you won't be able to do them. Like an example is physical simulations. I used to do Bafá Bafá. It's a great game for people who have heard of it. And that's not going to happen. So you have to accept that.

The third is there are going to be advantages. And I always talk about the fact that right now we're sitting here, but if there's a chat going, people can chat and it won't bother us because the chat's going alongside. In person drives you nuts. So there's advantages. Those are David's. And then I add the fourth, which is, when you're teaching online, it gives you an opportunity for innovating. You can do something totally new, which is SOFLA — totally new. Here you go, try it. So those are some of the pain points for teachers that I try to break through with some of this advice.

**Allyson** [00:30:45] *(approx)* Reminding them that they are amazing educators. These are just new tools that they can utilize. And it is interesting to think about the advantages, the idea of the built-in tool, the medium — because like you said, there are things in person that you can't recreate in a virtual way. Everything has their benefits, and everything has something where you have to be a little bit more flexible.

And I know that you have a book coming out in May 2026. You have so many different training opportunities, courses, articles — so many different ways that we can get into the different pieces of these models and the many other models that you have also created. So I wonder, what inspired you for the full book? What made the full treatment of the book necessary?

**Helaine Marshall** [00:31:30] *(approx)* Well, I didn't think it was. I thought to myself, look, use the eight steps. I'm giving it to you for free. Take it. I have videos. I have a whole playlist with videos of me explaining the steps. I have articles, everything. It's out there. Take it, do it. And they can't. What is it you can't? But what it is is, people really want everything spelled out.

And I found that, because I grew it over time and internalized it, that things that were obvious to me — like the sign-in activity has to have individual responses, it can't have everyone answering the same — there are things that I'm like, this is the way it is. We had a lot of misconceptions. And when I taught with — particularly with Carolina Rodriguez-Buitrago, also a shout-out to her, she helped me. She's from Bogotá and she does the same thing. She does SOFLA. She wrote a SOFLA book herself before I did. She took all of the work that I had done and made a book in Spanish about it. So it came out and I thought, gee, maybe I should do a book in English.

So I realized what had to go in the book. What had to go in the book was not just a description of each step, but the parameters of each step, the caveats, all the misconceptions that I have seen other people have. I took those and I said, be careful not to do this, be careful to do this — caveats. Also FAQ, questions that came up during trainings. I said, you might ask me this, ask me that. And for each section, we have an FAQ. Then I have at the end of each chapter, "your turn" activities. So you try this, you try that. So it could be used as a book study. It could be used just in a course, actually, too. So that's all built in.

And then I give sample lessons. There are three sample lessons. One is the cultural artifacts lesson. The other is a podcasting class — so really, this is work. We're doing one right — a podcast, fantastic. She does podcasts and she's interviewed me a couple of times, and she uses SOFLA in her teaching at Long Island University. We met because we're colleagues. The third lesson — the reason I hesitated is it's a tough one. I'm not a STEM person, but I learned about Boyle's Law from John Bergmann and Aaron Sams. I have to give a shout-out to them, because without those two guys, you and I would not be talking. They changed my life. They are the founders of flipped learning. And they have videos on teaching Boyle's Law. And I said, if I can learn Boyle's Law from these guys, sky's the limit. So when it came time to the book, I put in a Boyle's Law lesson to show that you can do STEM lessons.

Now, you don't do labs. There we go again. There are limitations. The actual lab, that's something else. But learning the laws, three gas laws, one of which is Boyle's Law with pressure and volume — I can do it. I think it's important for the readers to see that you can use SOFLA for any subject, any content. Even though Ilka and I and Carolina and everyone who's worked on SOFLA — and there are a couple of other people on the team — we're all language people. That's coincidence. We know each other and we're language people. But I really think anyone anywhere can take this. It's pedagogy. It's not content. It's not tech tools. Use your own content. Use your own tools. I'm telling you how to organize your instruction.

**Seth** [00:34:55] *(approx)* And so it could be used for any content area. What about age group? Because there are some components here — obviously you're in higher ed — there's some components here where it requires a certain amount of independence on the part of the learner in order to complete the different phases. What have you found in terms of age application?

**Helaine Marshall** [00:35:15] *(approx)* Well, so we're in higher ed, most of us that are working in this. You can obviously use it for adult education as well. One of the people on our team who is most excited about SOFLA, her name is Kazuko Saito. She teaches Japanese to middle and high school students using SOFLA, and she has adapted it. In the book, we talk about how to adapt it to younger learners and how to adapt it to various types of situations. Elementary is something else. And that's okay. Because SOFLA is good enough for many audiences. I do have some elementary teachers that have talked about wanting to do it. I even had teachers who said they want to do SOFLA in person. I said, no, no, SOFLA online, it says synchronous — but they convinced me. And we created rubrics for them. Heather Rubin helped me. She's my rubric person. And she created an in-person SOFLA rubric. Can you believe it? Think about it for a minute. What are we saying? It's pedagogy. It's pedagogy. So of course, you can still have the eight steps and adapt it to in-person learning. It's still a great way to teach.

**Allyson** [00:36:25] *(approx)* Yes, it's a teaching model. It can be applied if you're a good teacher.

**Seth** [00:36:32] *(approx)* So just for a little data point for you, I just Googled SOFLA, and South Florida did not come up — your website did, which is malpeducation.com, and you can backslash SOFLA in order to find that. Is there anywhere else our listeners can find your work?

**Helaine Marshall** [00:36:48] *(approx)* Find my work. Well, on YouTube, I have playlists on YouTube. I have many academic articles if you search for that. And we do training. We have a team of six people and we do virtual training. We can do in-person training, and I've done a lot of SOFLA training. I present at conferences. It's pretty easy to find all of this, but I think the best thing ultimately — in May you can pre-order the book.

**Seth** [00:37:20] *(approx)* And that comes out soon. When does it come out?

**Allyson** [00:37:23] *(approx)* Yes, pre-order it. We're going to link it in these show notes.

**Helaine Marshall** [00:37:28] *(approx)* I just wanted to say — I haven't had a chance — and I just want to point out, because I know that your organization is very interested in advocacy work and in making connections across borders and cultures and in collaboration, I just wanted to talk very briefly about that. Because I have a mantra in my work, and I think that a lot of people who teach online just don't think this way. They have a mindset that teaching online is less than. It's more for emergencies like COVID, and it's going to go away, and I don't have to really think about it.

But what I talk about is: you're creating fertile spaces online. You're creating spaces for learners where they can grow and develop. And I think we don't think enough — we think about covering curriculum and delivering instruction, meeting standards if we have to, but we don't think enough about creating fertile spaces. And if you think about the eight steps, that's what was behind it. It's almost like my mantra: create fertile spaces. And I do that with the four E's. The four E's are equity, enrichment, engagement, and empowerment. And they're built into the eight steps.

Equity — people say equity is our goal. No. Equity is the beginning. Equity gives access to instruction, curriculum, assessment. Equity is through the pre-work. It's also extended through the sign-in, because they can see what other people got from the pre-work. The enrichment is your chance to do something fun and exciting for that whole group collaboration. Have them work with the material. Think of some way to enhance the material. That's enrichment. That gives them motivation. You want them motivated by making it interesting, not boring. You don't have to be an entertainer, but you think ahead: what's going to be interesting for them to work on together?

And then engagement is the breakouts and the share-out. They become engaged. That makes them actively participating. And when they're actively participating, they feel empowered. And empowerment is not a transitive verb. I just lose some people. Okay, we don't empower people. We create conditions — fertile spaces — for them to feel empowered. So if you do equity, enrichment, and engagement, they will feel empowered. And what happens when people feel empowered? They take ownership of their learning. Really, do we ever really learn anything unless we take ownership of it? That's when we know.

So I just wanted to spell that out and make people see that online learning can be warm and wonderful. It doesn't have to be cold. I gave a presentation on online learning: is it warm or cold? And the answer of course is it's warm if you do SOFLA.

**Allyson** [00:40:00] *(approx)* Oh my goodness. And I like your number sequence too. Two main principles that we see, four E's that come in that are intrinsic within the eight steps. So you have like the two, four, eight — not to bring numerology and stars into it, but two, four, eight. I mean, they all end up coming to equal each other and create something that's really comprehensive.

**Helaine Marshall** [00:40:22] *(approx)* I'm going to credit you next time with that. Thank you.

**Seth** [00:40:28] *(approx)* And I think that "empowerment is not a transitive verb" is perhaps the most linguistic professor thing that has ever been said. That's great. Dr. Marshall, thank you so much for being here. We really appreciate your time.

**Allyson** [00:40:42] *(approx)* Thank you so much.

**Helaine Marshall** [00:40:44] *(approx)* Thank you. It's been a delight. It's been wonderful. Thank both of you so much.

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**[OUTRO — recorded separately]**

[00:40:50] *(approx)* That's a wrap on our conversation with Dr. Helaine Marshall.

The line that does the most work in this episode is probably the one Seth called the most linguistic professor thing ever said: empowerment is not a transitive verb. You don't empower students. You create the conditions — equity, enrichment, engagement — and empowerment is what happens in that fertile space. The eight steps of SOFLA are a template for building that space, but the underlying claim is bigger. It's that online learning fails when we treat it as a delivery problem and succeeds when we treat it as a pedagogy problem.

If you're making decisions about how synchronous virtual instruction gets designed in your program — whether that's K-12, higher ed, or PD for your own teachers — Helaine's eight-step cycle is worth studying in full. You can pre-order the SOFLA book from University of Michigan Press in May, and find her training, videos, and articles at malpeducation.com. Links in the show notes.

Thanks for listening to Why Distance Learning, and we'll see you next time.