Educators Reflect on the COVID‐19 Crisis

Abstract

Editor's Note: For this issue, I asked nine educators to reflect on their pivot to online and remote learning because of the COVID‐19 crisis. A few themes emerged quickly: care, empathy, accessibility, engagement and learning from your mistakes. I hope all of you learn as much as I did from each. Creating Community in a Pandemic January: COVID‐19 exploded in Wuhan while I was teaching a five‐week online course called “Going Viral & Digital Fads.” The course should have gone well. I've taught online before, but this course made me feel like a failure. Last year, I taught a similarly structured online course that went swimmingly! So, why was I continuously finding myself yelling at my inbox flooded with emails from the same five students? Why was their frustration with grades so personal? Why were we all so frustrated? The last day of class, I received a four‐page reflection, not of the students' writing process, but of me. Their account accurately reflected my failure. When confronting the worst version of myself—insecure, self‐deprecating, distrustful—I did what most would do. I turned to Twitter and the community of online instructors and instructional designers there. I sought new pedagogies, which challenged my beliefs and upended my teaching philosophy. On a blank document, I committed myself to “ungrading,” collaboration and trust in my upcoming face‐to‐face transnational cinema course. February and March: My students and I managed our expectations together, deciding what we deemed most important for assessing our growth. We set goals aligned with personal development and communal values. And then we had to transition online because of a pandemic. I was haunted. I thought I fixed everything when I challenged individualist approaches to learning and embraced that learning happens in community and collaboration. Yet all by myself, I inadvertently re‐created a familiar online plan. In retrospect, old habits were hard to break. Trusting my students helped me expel the “Going Viral” ghost. Who better to tell me what makes students anxious, excited or overwhelmed than my students themselves? On our last in‐class day, standing in front of 45 anxious students, I told them I was scared. I didn't have all the answers. Being vulnerable with my students makes space for collaboration, creating a community. Planning and making the online transition together, we recognized one another's needs and practiced compassion, patience and self‐forgiveness. With learning always in focus—experimenting, making mistakes, moving on and trying something else—we unintentionally set ourselves up for boundless success online, in crisis, but also in the kind of world we shared before COVID‐19 tried isolating us. —Danielle B. Schwartz, Ph.D. Candidate, Binghamton University Centering Students In the last couple of months, professors have struggled and panicked with transitioning their classes online. I admit to spending most of this time wondering if I was doing the transition wrong. This recent transition was easy for me because in the last few years I have radically changed how I teach. We grade conference in my class, so students show me their work and tell me what grade it deserves and why. There is no penalty for late work. I tell them they're adults, and I trust them to make the decisions they need to. From the first day of class, I work to ensure that my students know that I care about them first, their learning (not grades) and how I can help them. Since this is how my classes ran before COVID‐19, students knew that whatever we did as a class would center them, and I would listen to what they needed. So, our “pivot” online had three simple steps. I emailed all my students and told them what to expect. I created a discussion board on Blackboard. I emailed them a survey about what their concerns and needs were with this pivot. That was it. The email explained that because our syllabus was a Google Doc with hyperlinked resources that I'd be making changes to it. These changes were mostly moving to a “this week, we'll cover X” rather than the Monday, Wednesday, Friday set‐up we'd had. My classes each have class/lecture notes in Google Slides, hyperlinked on our syllabus, so we kept doing that. I told them I'd probably add a short YouTube video at the beginning of each week just to give them an overview. The discussion board was first, so they could ask questions. It wasn't a “post once, respond twice” thing for a grade, because that wasn't how our class worked. I wanted to make the transition as easy as possible by building on what we were already doing. And I wanted my students to know I care about them, which guides all I do. —Karrå Shimabukuro, Assistant Professor, Elizabeth City State University The Viability of Digital Learning A few months ago, I found my friend rubbing his temples in my kitchen. Organizers of the education conference he was supposed to attend canceled the event due to concerns about COVID‐19. He had just received an alert that his university was to shift entirely to online instruction. His anxiety wasn't born from a lack of technological resources. Like most universities, his institution already had an asynchronous learning platform like Blackboard or Canvas in place. But there was little institutional expertise for how to use these notoriously unwieldy and non‐user‐friendly tools. It was his responsibility to close this knowledge gap and rapidly develop tutorials for faculty who would be scrambling to digitize their classes in a few hours. Impossible deadlines compounded by impossible deadlines. Luckily, he was sleeping on my couch. For five years, I have taught asynchronous and synchronous classes through Blackboard to middle school students. I know its specialized tools, the obscure functionalities, what works and what doesn't. We raced through the platform together. I pointed out what tools would be most vital (or the most opaque), and he relayed this advice to his team, who would then produce the instructional resources for their website. In a moment of rare efficiency, a person with experience and a person with access collaborated to support instructors. Now, months after my adrenaline has settled, I can only speculate how higher education might bloom if such resources were organically incorporated out of interest instead of crisis. Digital learning platforms are not one‐to‐one replacements for face‐to‐face learning, and I'm not advocating for universities to suddenly mandate all classes be online transferable. But in giving my classes digital viability, distance learning platforms have offered my students greater access to my instruction, flexibility in how they utilize resources and transparency. It is not a secret that the systems in place do not serve all students, or faculty for that matter, and students with disabilities have been on the forefront of advocating for more accessible classrooms. While technology is no panacea for all accessibility and equity issues, I suspect growing more comfortable with online learning could make higher education more adaptable for the next pandemic, or just the next cohort. —Kayla Meyers, Writer and Instructor for the Well‐Trained Mind Academy Making the Best of a Difficult Situation In order to teach in the public school system in Switzerland, teachers must hold a degree from a cantonal School of Education. I teach at the School of Education in the Canton of Vaud (Haute Ecole Pédagogique de Vaud in French, and HEP for short). There are 2,800 students enrolled in degree programs, the majority in the primary school bachelor's program. We also provide continuing education to 9,200 teachers every year. On March 13, we learned that all educational institutions, from preschool to postgraduate, would be closed until April 30. HEP gave us a week to adapt our courses for online delivery, uncharted territory for most of my colleagues. COVID‐19 anxiety, child care, homeschooling, working from home and strict confinement created a decidedly challenging work situation. All HEP students are also student‐teachers. Despite their lack of experience in traditional settings and remote learning, many of them helped overtaxed and unprepared public schools sort out distance education for 92,000 pupils. This makes our situation as instructors even more delicate: providing our students with the necessary knowledge and skills to become great teachers while carefully setting expectations. I'm in the digital education department, and one of our future courses is on designing learning scenarios for school children using a homegrown platform, learnflow.ch. It's an experiment, but we have nothing to lose and much to learn. But designing an online course takes time. Ideally, faculty work with an instructional designer over weeks or months to produce something valuable. We didn't have this luxury. So, how did we make the best of a difficult situation? By distilling courses down to their essential content—what students really need to take away from your course: delivering course content in easy‐to‐digest pieces, keeping activities simple and effective, designing activities for students to evaluate one another's work, setting clear boundaries for student communication, avoiding overextending ourselves and being compassionate to students, colleagues, parents and ourselves. There was a silver lining to this experience for us at HEP. The president and provost urged teaching staff to focus on our well‐being and our families. This pandemic is difficult for us as human beings and as educators. But we have an opportunity to reflect on what's critical both in life and in learning and deliver something of value. —Heidi Gautschi, Associate Professor of Media Literacy, Haute Ecole Pédagogique de Vaud Classroom Community and Accessibility Two months ago, it was unclear how much COVID‐19 would affect the United States. Given the damage it caused abroad, I was relieved when Florida State University, where I am a postdoc in the Mathematics Department, announced that classes would be moved online after spring break. I taught two small sections of Calculus II with fewer than 20 students each, and I was fortunate to have spring break to plan the online transition. I identified what issues I cared about the most for my classes and what I was not willing to change in the move to remote teaching. I kept coming back to two concepts: community and accessibility. Students often have a built‐in fear of mathematics and feelings of inadequacy. Building a sense of community fosters productive learning conditions where students feel safe and actively participate without fear of judgment. My first priority was to maintain the sense of community for each section in the transition online, so I livestreamed my classes and office hours to keep in direct contact with students. FSU provides institutional access to Zoom and integrates it with Canvas, our learning management platform. Although it was helpful, it didn't solve all accessibility issues. I personally did not expect anyone to be functioning as if these were normal circumstances—I know I am not. I attempted to prevent as many accessibility issues as I could think of so that my students didn't have to deal with added complications. I surveyed my students about their expected access to an internet connection and technology. I recorded all livestreamed lectures and posted them on Canvas with captions, which helped those who couldn't attend live classes and everyone who wanted to hear, watch or read along as I went through concepts and examples. During class, I screen‐shared my tablet as I wrote out notes and then posted them. This allowed students to listen without having to worry about writing down everything I said. I also added more resources because I was sure there were accessibility issues I didn't consider or address yet. Thankfully, students were given the option of switching to the Satisfactory/Unsatisfactory grading scheme for this semester. I know this past semester wasn't my best teaching performance—how could we expect it to be theirs? —Francesca Bernardi, Dean's Post‐Doctoral Scholar, Department of Mathematics, Florida State University Claiming Enough When the going gets tough, the tough, the contingent and the already overextended get asked to do more. Precisely in these moments, we, the tough, need to recognize doing enough as being fully within our rights. Like most of the rest of the world, I am navigating the strange conditions of living through a global pandemic. But I am in a position to navigate. My job and income are secure. My family is healthy, and we have all the resources we need to work and do school from home. We live in a European country where the necessary measures to limit the spread of COVID‐19 have been judiciously carried out. The streets are quieter, the number of new infections seems to be stabilizing and people are following the new rules of social distancing. I teach at a school that has had time to prepare and the resources to put our PK–12 students population into distance learning mode fairly quickly—each child with their own device. Internet access is not a question we need to ask about in our parent community. Things are going well. Lessons continue. Students show their work. Teachers share feedback. That said, it's all still a struggle—emotionally and logistically. We use the descriptors “so much” “too much” or “a lot” to articulate how we experience competing and stacked commitments to family, work and ourselves, sometimes in that order but not always. We rarely invoke the possibility of “enough.” We speak and behave as if there were no such thing as “enough.” One of the hardest things is acknowledging the social‐emotional toll this pandemic is taking on all of us. We are in a state of massive uncertainty, yet the impulse to try to create a new normal in teaching and learning through primarily digital tools remains. Institutions gonna institute, I guess, but the humans who give those institutions life and purpose are likely to burn out trying to recoup lost minutes, lost lessons and lost learning. Instead, as educators, let's apply our compassion, insight and care to ensure as much as possible that we are supporting rather than burdening, listening rather than directing, and putting on our own masks before assisting others. —Sherri Spelic, Elementary Physical Education Specialist, American International School Vienna Empathy and the STEM Classroom There's a hidden acknowledgment within the COVID‐19 crisis and social isolation that we are overwhelmed, a feeling that may only increase as the virus hits closer to home. But while our instinct may be to hide how broken we teachers and our students feel, by acknowledging our humanness, we'll be more connected to one another. When the going gets tough, the tough, the contingent and the already overextended get asked to do more. Having empathy for my students recognizes our common humanity and a power to transform one another's lives. When that humanity is celebrated, my classroom transforms into a place where student voices are given priority and the process of teaching and learning becomes a conversation. After all, my students are doing the critical work of learning—trying to understand the chemistry or statistics that I teach and presumably assess their work while also enabling them to become more self‐directed and independent. As a teacher, I'm a guide, coach, cheerleader, mediator and content enthusiast aiding my students' journey to new understandings of our world. “Embracing our brokenness creates a need for mercy.”—Bryan Stevenson Embodying these roles without mercy is hypocritical. My job is not only to understand the content but to understand my students' worlds. This understanding of the individual is real, specific and empirically tested with each student in one‐to‐one interactions in small classes. Because these interactions are rarer in my larger classes, I approach my students with compassion and a recognition of their likely overwork and stress. My students need a classroom structure (including deadlines, grades, etc.), but flexibility in my classroom helps me, as the instructor, acknowledge that mercy is not a gift to my students, but a human right for all. “Little by little we human beings are confronted with situations that give us more and more clues that we are not perfect.”—Fred Rogers My STEM classrooms and teaching style are by no means perfect. They are messy, experimental and entropically elastic with an undercurrent of empathy, social justice and reflection. My pedagogy has several underlying premises: trusting my students, compassionately listening to them and recognizing that their learning needs may not be my own and, as such, my students may need different and innovative ways of connection to one another, to me and to the content. Especially in this challenging time, my pedagogy acknowledges the essential humanity that connects us all, even in our brokenness. —Clarissa Sorensen‐Unruh, FT Chemistry Faculty, Central New Mexico Community College Leading and Teaching in a Crisis When I got offered the chance to teach a graduate class in higher education leadership this spring, I was excited. While I've taught a few community college classes previously, it had been almost a decade since I'd been in the classroom. In that time, I completed my doctorate and moved into a VP of student affairs position at a community college. After 20+ years of working in higher education, I was ready to teach the next generation of student affairs professionals. I had to get approval from my president to teach at another institution. He agreed but cautioned me about “having so much on my plate.” If I stayed ahead of the students, I'd be fine. Spoiler alert: I was not fine. As the COVID‐19 crisis started to unfold, my day job became all‐consuming. Both of my institutions moved to only online learning in the same week, but at my home institution I had to get my entire division ready to telework in four days. Figuring out the IT needs for a whole division, navigating federal regulations for our grants and student workers and coordinating the response of our counseling and health services departments while leading my justifiably anxious division was hard work. I worked 12+‐hour days for almost two weeks in a row. I was mentally and physically exhausted. My graduate students waited patiently for me on our Canvas site, which I had set up before the semester began. I quickly set up a discussion board and asked them to reflect on their COVID‐19 experiences so far. It was a hastily planned exercise, nowhere near the kind of carefully planned class lectures and discussions I'd been hoping to do. I wanted to be the instructor who helped them make sense of what was happening on their campuses, but I couldn't even check their emails daily. I basically ghosted my class for two weeks. I didn't have the time to teach them how leadership responds to a crisis in real time because I was too busy responding. We eventually met online to go over an altered syllabus and revised assignments. One of our learning outcomes became crisis management. I have more than enough material to cover. If I teach it right, maybe the students will feel better about not being my first priority this spring. —Wendy Robinson, VP, Student Affairs at Inver Hills Community College and Adjunct at the University of St. Thomas Being There, Building Anew On March 15, the provost announced the suspension of face‐to‐face classes due to COVID‐19, so I had to immediately transition my courses to an online format. The next day, I tweeted the announcement using my class hashtags, updated my Home Pages on Canvas (our learning management system), and recorded a video explaining the situation. I teach three face‐to‐face sections of English 102 and English 265, a literature survey, online. Then I emailed my students these questions: How are you doing? What are your immediate concerns? Are you able to work online regularly? A quarter of my students responded, and many were nervous about having more work than before. Students also mentioned having more work shifts, losing jobs, familial responsibilities, flying home and difficulty with web access. I felt their general uncertainty, confusion and fear. My job is not only to understand the content but to understand my students' worlds. A face‐to‐face class is not the same as an online class, and it certainly can't be pivoted into one across a week of pandemic haste. So, I rethought what each class was doing in the term. I pulled back and reduced the work. What I did was salvaging. My field of writing and literature is anchored in written communication, critical thinking and information literacy. English is the exploration of the making of narrative and its meaning. In the comp sections, we finished the research papers, while in the lit survey, we closed with a collection of writers from Hawaii and the Pacific. Salvaging, I chose Twitter and Instagram as the most appropriate, relevant and meaningful spaces for us to think critically and collaboratively about what is happening in our world. For example, on Twitter, I asked students to complete the sentence, “COVID‐19 is making me rethink ___.” I asked them to tweet something from the point of view of someone who thinks differently than they do, and then reply with a summarization of how that perspective differs from their own. Students Instagrammed examples of social distancing, and I asked them to share three public spaces we can improve to better serve the local community. So much is broken and collapsing all around us. In what will get worse and much darker, I want us to do more than merely survive. Most importantly, I'm in this with them. I'm there, behind the screen, with all of you too—not to return to the norm, but to build anew, make better, grow, thrive, evolve and love. —Brooke Carlson, Assistant Professor, Chaminade University