This post was adapted by Alycia Gilbert from IWP Director Dr. Megan Callow’s and CIC Director Kimberlee Gillis-Bridges’s talks at the Fall 2021 CIC workshop: “Strategies and Technologies for Pandemic Classrooms.” A recording of the full workshop, as well as the transcript used to create this post, can be access by UW instructors here.

During the Fall 2021 CIC workshop, the CIC, IWP, and EWP shared the following tips for flexibility and navigating the transition between online and in-person instruction. With the online start to Winter 2022 and the announcement that courses can operate fully online or in hybrid formats at the time of this post’s publication, these insights feel even more timely (please note: guidelines on instruction may have changed since this publication; please reference your current university guidelines for up-to-date information on remote vs in-person teaching requirements).

Though many of the following tips focus on course design, these changes can still be made in your course as we enter Week 2, or even later in your course! Transparency with students on the evolving nature of your course can help you adjust to sudden shifts in your teaching environment as well as incorporate student feedback during this time.

Build a Strong Course Structure

When classes were fully online, organizing Canvas sites through modules became a useful structure for students to navigate course materials and assignments. Using Canvas modules for hybrid or largely in-person courses can similarly provide a cohesive structure for your course. This cohesion can make pivoting between in-person and online teaching more intuitive for students and less labor-intensive for instructors.

You might consider setting the modules as your Canvas site’s homepage, so there’s no extra steps for students to access that information. A “Getting Started” module for the very beginning of the course can also be helpful; when students first log into the course site, they are immediately directed to important starting documents, which could include introductions to the course and basic course information.

Create Consistency

Structuring every week in your Canvas course around a few basic parallel elements can help create consistency for you and your students.

For example, organizing your modules by week and beginning every module with an overview page can set clear expectations for students. Personalizing overview pages or other Canvas materials with elements like images can add personality and levity to your course while subconsciously enhancing parallelism and consistency across weeks. The Canvas site showcased in the workshop features weekly overview pages with an image, a little prose description, and then a bulleted list of what tasks have to happen that week.

Irrespective of whether the course can meet in-person, or if the class has to suddenly pivot online, those overviews are ready to situate students. While a sudden pivot in classroom modality will inevitably need some adjustments (for example, creating and sharing Zoom links, etc), a strong Canvas organization and overview pages will still provide a kind of anchoring document.

Having your assignments as similarly structured from one week to the next also establishes consistent expectations. Choosing consistent activities like discussion posts or reading forums, with regular due dates, can help students stay on track during a pivot.

You might even consider having all weekly assignments due on the same day each week, or even the same two days a week. For example, in the Canvas site shared during the workshop, all assignments, no matter what they were, are due Sunday at seven. Students finished assignments at different points during the week, but the singular deadline was very positively by students who appreciated the flexibility for their own schedules and circumstances.

Foster a Pedagogy of Care

When pivoting a course on or offline, students might have different needs during the transition, or due to circumstances in their own lives. In the workshop, Dr. Callow discussed student needs during online pivotes and ways to create boundaries as an instructor. Describing a paradigm shift in her own teaching across the pandemic, she explained how a pedagogy of care has become front and center in her teaching.

A pedagogy of care can look like modeling a culture of flexibility in your classes, to foster open communication about student needs and deadlines. As Director Gillis-Bridges said, this moment requires us to make accommodations that go beyond those accommodations that we were familiar with pre-pandemic; now we have insight and communication with students who need accommodations that could not be described in a disability accommodation, but nevertheless impact our students ability to access and do the work that we are asking them to do. We’ve all seen in our classrooms how students are struggling with pandemic-related tolls on their mental health, from grief to stress. A pedagogy of care can make flexibility and compassion the guiding classroom policy.

Director Gillis-Bridges also discussed approaches to negotiating student needs and feedback with the limitations of our classrooms and our own boundaries. She suggests creating a classroom contract through Google Doc to establish agreed upon communication norms for both in-person and online teaching, which can help facilitate that level of communication that helps instructors make flexible accommodations. Checking in with students, through tools like surveys or Poll Everywhere, about their needs and the structure of the course, can help make sure your classroom centers students and operates in a way that’s useful and navigable even when the layout and format of your class may be changing.

It can sometimes be easier to center compassion for your students’ circumstances than we are with ourselves as instructors; often, we don’t give ourselves any slack with deadlines, grading, or course development when students would extend that graciousness to ourselves if we’re transparent with them. The final portion of Dr. Callow’s talk emphasized the importance of extending that pedagogy of care to yourself as an instructor, of being gracious with yourself in this high-pressure experience of teaching in grad school during a pandemic.

Especially for new instructors in UW writing programs (“Or people like me who are very type A and need to have their entire course planned out before the quarter starts,” Dr. Callow added), it’s helpful to accept that in the current teaching environment, it’s necessary to accept that you might not have your entire class planned out from the start. And that’s okay! Having that parallelism and really clear structure in Canvas and across your course design helps ease the work of transitioning between classroom settings and makes it okay if not every single module is built out. A syllabus with all major deadlines and consistency in how you build and present your course can give you a solid baseline for students while allowing yourself flexibility. Director Gillis-Bridges discussed how her system of uploading modules week by week (posted the Thursday evening of the week before) gave students plenty of time and awareness while still allowing for flexible course design in terms of readings and in planning online vs in-person class sessions.

Above all, the Fall 2021 workshop hoped to highlight that open communication with students and a course infrastructure that allows for consistency and compassionate accommodations can help instructors navigate the week-by-week, day-by-day shifts that we may need to make in our teaching. Please check out the full recording for more thoughts on these topics, as well as for recommended tech tools for accessible masked classroom communities.

If you’re feeling overwhelmed by lesson planning or course design, please don’t hesitate to reach out to our staff, who are happy to help and collaborate!

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