Critical Considerations in COVID College Classrooms

Based on my extensive one semester of experience teaching remotely, and some amazingly good advice and training from colleagues at my university, I’m looking forward to this coming semester. Here are five principles I’m keeping in mind as I prepare to teach...and wait for my vaccine.

Principle 1: Think Backwards

Wiggins and McTighe wrote a book called Understanding by Design, in which they laid out a very effective way to develop courses. I’ve known about backward design for years, but it really saved me when I made the switch to remote teaching.

The most important tenet of backward design is this: Start with your goals, what you want students to be thinking, feeling, and doing at the end of a course, rather than what you are going to do on the first day. Being clear (with myself and with my students) and intentional about my goals allowed me to avoid many pitfalls, such as spending too much time thinking about what technology would be cool rather than instrumental. Of course, I did (a) buy a green screen, (b) collate hundreds of virtual backgrounds, and (c) spend days making my first two-minute video.

Principle 2: Be Explicit About What We’ve Lost

Last semester I taught first-semester freshmen, who will never know what it’s like to be on a new campus on their first day, meet friends that they’ll have for the rest of their lives, and eat soggy hamburgers off of wet paper plates at the welcome barbeque.

What I missed most was running into students on campus and having impromptu discussions of their lives, the course, college, and soggy hamburgers. I also missed shaking hands with each student on the first day as they walked into the classroom.

We spent some time talking about what we missed; acknowledging these lost elements of the college experience made it easier for us to focus on the many goals of college that we could achieve. It allowed us to actualize Principle 1 and move on to Principle 3.

Principle 3: Be Explicit About the Affordances and Advantages of Our New Formats

In one of my first assignments, I asked students to make a video in which they introduced themselves and then answer this question: “What is one benefit of having this course via Zoom that you can imagine for yourself?”

Students generated lots of wonderful responses, and we were able to refer back to these during the rough spots in the course. Among the advantages: more inclusive and equitable discussions, no commuting, no time spent walking across campus to the next class or meeting, the comfort of being at home, quicker transitions into small discussion groups (once I got the hang of breakout rooms), easier out-of-class meetings for group projects, having people’s names (and pictures) on the screen so we’d learn them quicker, and some interesting ways to communicate (e.g., videos, polling).

Indeed, online learning predates the pandemic, and some (e.g., Rezaie) are arguing that we should continue developing these new formats and actualize their many advantages. My hope is that what I’m learning (including these principles and their actualization) will improve my teaching regardless of whether I teach on campus, online, or at a coffee shop (my personal favorite).

Principle 4: Help Every Student Learn

Issues of inclusivity, equity, and diversity are critical to the survival of higher education. Those who feel they don’t belong on a college campus may also feel that they don’t belong in the online environment either. Disparities in backgrounds may be exacerbated by disparities in technology. Thus, we must be that much more vigilant in making a human connection with all our students by welcoming, teaching, and striving to inspire every student. One way to do this? Take a look at Principle 5.

Principle 5: Exhibit Grace

In a wonderful essay called “The Lesson of Grace in Teaching,” Francis Edward Su defines grace as “good things you didn’t earn or deserve, but you’re getting them anyway.” Showing grace, for Su, facilitates an important lesson that we hope to teach every student: “Your accomplishments are NOT what make you a worthy human being.” This lesson may be especially relevant in these times.

Here’s one story about inadvertent grace that turned out well: In my first-year seminar for this fall, I decided to give people a 1-week “grace period” (pun intended) before I deducted points (my “20% discount") from their assignments. This was a departure for me because one of my course goals has always been to help students learn professional habits such as promptness.

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But by accident (I think), I neglected to specify a deadline for when they could turn in late assignments. Thus, for the first time ever, I allowed students to turn in assignments up until the end of the semester. Given the technological, emotional, medical, and academic difficulties students experienced during the semester, a significant number of students took the whole semester to catch up on their assignments.

The good news was that doing these assignments (which they would not have done otherwise) gave them valuable practice in the skills they were learning. Thus, my more grace-ful policy really helped fulfill many course goals. What I concluded was that this is not the time to help students learn how to meet deadlines. This is the time to help students learn how to be human beings and participants in a democracy. And that leads us right back to Principle 1 and a major goal of all my teaching.

These five principles are not an exhaustive list, of course. If you have other principles to add, or thoughts about these, please let me know.