Resources

The most important pedagogical practice I have engaged in during this time of pandemic stress and isolation is making sure to check in with my students. At the beginning of every class, after we pray, I poll the students to find out how they are doing. Responses are anonymous (though have I have had many students email me to follow up about their answer, letting me know which responses were theirs). This honors the humanity of my students and gives me the opportunity to know what is in the Zoom room with us when we are trying to learn together. This also gives the whole class the opportunity to know how we can pray for the members of our learning community. My school moved to online learning the week of March 16. Each week I have asked different questions and offered different ways to engage while also offering space for how my students are coping. I have maintained four core questions: How am I doing in general? How am I feeling about my work in this course? What else do I need my professor to know? How am I feeling? This past week, I added a question about how they were feeling about the end of the semester. The week after Easter I asked students to share where they had seen signs of hope and new life. I have shared with my students that the most important thing right now is their mental, spiritual, and physical health. Not their schoolwork, not even for my class (I’m teaching my favorite class this semester and everything!). Taking time at the beginning of each synchronous learning time shows them that I am serious about that. When I ask students how they are doing in general, I have a multiple-choice response and one of them is “falling apart, like the world around me.” As their professor, I need to know when I have students who feel like they are falling apart. Not only do I take the opportunity to remind them that I am praying for them, but I also remind them that this is a perfectly normal response to a highly stressful situation and encourage them to seek help. I also get to remind myself that talking about course material might matter very little to the students who share that they feel this way. When I ask students how they feel about the course itself, I have another multiple-choice response option. One of those responses is “Help! I’m drowning!” I need to know when students feel like they are drowning in coursework. Just like me, my students are strapped for time to get work done and may often get interrupted by family members (including small children). Just like me, they may experience brain fog sometimes. When I know students feel like they are drowning, I can offer them a lifeboat. Do they need me to cut out some readings? Extend a deadline? Read a draft because they can’t tell if they are on the right track? Right now, my policy is that I will be as flexible as I possibly can with students; but if I don’t know that they need flexibility, I can’t offer it. When I ask students how they are feeling, I receive answers in the form of a word cloud. Each class these word clouds are profound, real, and heartbreaking. They are works of art reminding us of our humanity and the humanity of our peers in the classroom. We are tired, anxious, and stressed. We are worried and grateful. We are excited about graduating and devastated that it won’t be happening like we’ve been dreaming of for years. We are happy. We are sad. In a normal semester at the beginning of class, I ask students “How are you all doing today?” I usually receive short answers that are varying shades of “fine.” But this is not a normal semester, and we need more opportunities to check in and care about each other. We need to know that we are valued for more than our productive output in the classroom. What I am teaching my students through this practice is that I care about them as people, and I care about and honor whatever they are going through. As a seminary professor, this lesson is at least as important as the pedagogical content of my courses.

When we suddenly made the transition online, I wanted to try to maintain as much normalcy for my students (and myself) as possible. I teach a small, honors section of our introductory Religions of the World course. There are only 11 students enrolled this semester—a real luxury. I thought we might be able to continue synchronously, if they all were able. So, I asked: Did they have the technology to make it happen? Did they have the availability? Did they have the space? Did they have the desire? They did.  After our first synchronous class session, the Monday after an extended Spring Break, I asked my class, anonymously, how it worked using Zoom for our class that day, in a PollEverywhere poll (which they were used to doing face-to-face). This is the kind of check in, a form of formative assessment, that I love. If I want to know what students think or how a class activity is going for them, I ask. Among their replies: “I really liked how we could all see each other” and “It will be a good way to keep the community feel.”  We made it to the end of the first week, during which time I led whole-group discussions among all students, offered mini lectures, used Zoom’s breakout rooms to set up pair and group work, asked them to do quick writes and type their thoughts in the chat box, showed videos, and even had them share drawings on the computer screens. In their weekly reflections, which I’ve written about elsewhere, I asked them to respond to one additional question: “How did it go having our class online this first week?” As expected, students were struggling with motivation and time management, known challenges in any online learning environment. But they also shared: “This is the only class I use Zoom for and it also feels the most normal because of the level of interaction;” “I think having class online this week went well, especially since we are using Zoom, which I think helps preserve the community feel of our class;” I like the fact that we are able to break out into smaller groups and still have discussions with each other;” “I am really happy we are able to maintain the personal contact and the feeling that our class is a community.” What my students have reminded me, in this moment of social distancing, working remotely, and self-imposed isolation, is just how much they crave connection, how much they benefit from learning in place and among people. I work hard, in a variety of ways, to create this community in my face-to-face classes—and I have worked hard to maintain that communal feeling, even though we are now all separated, flung across the corners of the United States, with our cats crawling across the video feed and our classroom attire now consisting of grungy sweatshirts and bed covers. What this COVID-19 crisis has underscored for me is just how much students knowingly appreciate and crave those connections too.  There are lots of ways to stay engaged and connected with your classroom community without all meeting at the regular class time as I’m doing. I recognize that what I’m doing may not be possible, or even advisable, for all religion instructors, given class sizes, content, personal comfort with technology, instructor and student availability, and so forth. Perhaps it’s as simple as creating an announcement on your LMS just to ask students how they’re doing—not academically, but as people. Perhaps it’s creating a Google Voice Number so that you can give students a way to text you, without giving out your private contact information. Perhaps it’s holding online office hours, through Zoom, WebEx, or Google Hangouts, so students can see you if they’re in need of a friendly face. Perhaps it’s calling all of your advisees, as one of my colleagues did, or reaching out to former students with a mass email. Perhaps it’s creating opportunities for pair or group work, for instance, through an online discussion board. Perhaps it’s simply sharing with students that you’re feeling anxious or stressed or worried or discombobulated too. On our campus, we are hearing from students (and sometimes from their concerned parents) just how disconnected, discouraged, and dissatisfied they are now that the human dimension of learning has largely been taken from them. Students do not simply want to read a textbook and submit a short essay in response. They want to talk to their peers; they want to hear from a real, live instructor; they want to sit in the same space; they want to learn in the context of others. A student once asked me, a few semesters back, if I thought learning always takes place among others. I said yes. Another student disagreed. By way of evidence, he said that he taught himself how to play guitar. I asked how he did that. He said he watched YouTube videos. Okay, I said, but who created those videos? There was a long pause. Learning is communal. Never has there been, paradoxically, a moment when this has been more clear—to me and to my students.

I love the face-to-face learning environment. Even when I stood before my first class, uncertain if I knew enough to teach for 10 minutes much less 75, I thrived on the energy in the room. I also felt somewhat at ease with the basics, given I could draw on a lifetime of experience as a student.  When we become teachers, most of us start by emulating the best we have known and their classrooms. In my career, I have handled the auditorium lecture, the seminar, the project-based learning course, and on-site education in the streets of another country. I had good models for them all. Then came online. Until I started working on a system-level “e-learning” committee, I knew little about this mode of delivery. It did not exist when I went to school. And at my institution, there was a decided distrust about the whole enterprise. Most faculty thought online education ran counter to the best of what college instruction should be. Many administrators thought it ran counter to the ethos of the institution itself. But I needed a change and a challenge.  Out of curiosity, I enrolled in an online course at another UNC-system institution. The course was well thought out, beautifully mounted, and, with an engaged instructor, I loved it. I wanted to try teaching in this format, although I recognized that I was an advanced adult learner and my students were largely beginning undergraduates. Luckily, my chair and colleagues said okay. Even with no institutional training or incentives, I dove in. My first time out, I taught three different fully-enrolled general education courses. Miraculously, I survived and some fifteen years later, I have no desire ever to go back to a traditional classroom. The reasons for that change are complicated, but I want to focus on three ways in which I found myself becoming a better teacher online. First, online teaching reinforced that learning happens when students invest in pursuing questions that intrigue them. Thus, when conceptualizing my classes, I chose to position myself as a mentor and a guide instead of the authoritative voice or the day’s entertainment. By creating opportunities that assist students in understanding and formulating the kinds of questions scholars ask, I watched the learning space become less about transmitting knowledge and more about helping students find their own academic voices in line with their interests and learning goals. Rather than mastering a set of facts, we spend our time on skills such as locating appropriate academic resources, analyzing primary and secondary texts, crafting better arguments, and making persuasive and polished presentations. Second, being attached to a computer all day produced greater diligence with my own research. The pressure of setting up an online course (and I change my courses almost every term) feels intense while it is happening. But once class gets underway, the structure of each week produces a rhythm. The teaching tasks (answering questions, grading, interacting in discussion) come in predictable spurts and get accomplished more efficiently. I am not constantly scrambling to get materials together for the next class session. This calmer and steadier pace allows me to build in the time I need for my scholarship, which, in turn, feeds back into my teaching and makes for improvements on the next course iterations. Third, I see student needs and challenges more clearly. Believe it or not, evaluations prove key here. Do not get me wrong. Feedback about online courses invites trolling. And many students, most likely due to the physical remove, tend to be harsher with their assessments. But if you look past the complaining, you see that they are frequently saying “we are ill-equipped for self-directed learning” (especially if the expectation was for something rote). My students are smart and capable. But they have often not been pushed by an increasingly impoverished K-12 system to ask their own questions, to evaluate resources analytically, or to make cogent arguments in sound grammatical form. They are also not accustomed to seeing professors as partners in learning, who will work with them. I have to do considerable outreach and encourage students to ask for the time and attention they might need. I still have spent more of my life in a face-to-face educational environment as opposed to online. But I now know more about the mechanics of learning because of leaving my comfort zone and teaching online. I was forced to think through my pedagogical choices. I stay current with and adapt to the available technology. And I have to work to construct a learning community, rather than counting on shared space to do the job. Teaching online is making me a better teacher. Questions for Consideration: Who am I in the classroom? How do I define my role and how does my pedagogy reflect that position? Do I make time to review my classes over the duration of each term, making certain that my assignments correspond to the learning goals I have established, including the skills I want to help my students develop? How can technology be helpful to me in my instruction? What do I use outside of the classroom (e.g., to stay in contact with family and friends, to shop, to organize my life) that might be useful in the classroom?