Hi Everyone! Welcome to the first episode of Compendium’s companion podcast. In this episode, myself, Missy Gonzalez-Garduno, and a handful of other instructors, Jacob Wilson, Micaela Chavez, and Angel Garduno, got together for a roundtable discussion. We talked about the various challenges we’ve faced in the last few years of teaching, the importance of building teaching community, and the resources that have been the most useful for us as we’ve built on our current materials and/or transitioned to new courses. We had a great time recording this podcast and we hope you enjoy it too!
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.
“Self-care is not a buzzword.”
– Dr. Callow
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!
Interested in contributing to Compendium or participating in other EWP events? Check out our Resources menu toGet Involved!
As we wind down the first half of the quarter there’s been a bit of looking around in shock–really? We’re already almost halfway through?–and it seems a good time to take stock of where we find ourselves right now. We want to invite you to check in with yourself–and with us–around how the return to in-person instruction is shifting your experience of teaching or is presenting new rewards as well as challenges.
You can check in with us in any way you like–and this Director’s Note, co-written by Missy González-Garduño and Stephanie Kerschbaum, takes up the theme of check-in to describe some of the ways that you can connect with us and with a supportive network in our program.
This google form is a check-in of the sort that you might use with your own students, and it offers a brief set of questions that can communicate to us as EWP administrators what we need to have on our radar as well as what we should ensure we continue or maintain. This is new terrain for us as it is for you, and we don’t want to just guess at what may be at the forefront of your minds or experiences as we prepare resources, supports, and next-steps. So if you’re willing, please consider taking 5-6 minutes to jot down quick responses. We will share in a future Director’s Note what we learn from this mid-quarter check-in and how we are moving in response.
In addition to the above Google Form, we are also doing other kinds of proactive outreach. One of these efforts has focused particularly on instructors who are teaching in-person for the first time in our program. One of us, Missy, has been organizing small-group conversations among 2nd year instructors during collective office hours. EWP ADs have been giving short tours of the A-11 suite and chatting with instructors about their course plans, in-person experiences, and COVID concerns. We have particularly enjoyed showing folks around the suite for the first time: showing off our new communal table, the printing room, and the different AD offices as folks popped their heads out for quick hellos. Feel free to stop by and get some tea if you are cold and curious about the space.
These small-group conversations have been open and collaborative spaces where ADs and instructors alike have helped each other troubleshoot different issues such as time management, new lesson plans, and challenges around fluctuating attendance patterns as students negotiate cold/flu/possible COVID symptoms. These challenges include trying not to teach two classes at the same time (one remote, one in person) or doing extra work to support absent students–and we’re glad to talk more about these kinds of challenges with any others who might want to consult or check in with us. We’ve enjoyed hearing folks talk through the transition to new courses and in-person teaching; for those of us on duty, it has been so great to live vicariously through the awesome teachers who have been so generous as to share their experiences with us.
And as a reminder, Stephanie is in the office Monday-Friday and has open office hours where she is available both in her personal zoom room or in person in A-011 from 3-4 p.m. on Wednesdays and 2-3 p.m. on Thursdays. If those times don’t work for you, just email kersch@uw.edu to schedule a time to come by. We’re currently working on trying to get a chalkboard to make it easier to signal when Stephanie is in the office & available for you to stop in and ring her doorbell.
Finally, another way to connect and check-in would be to attend our first Fall quarter Teacher Talk. This event, hosted by Francesca Colonnese, begins with the recognition that many of you may be experiencing complex emotions–including anxiety and uncertainty–as you continue to hear about positive COVID cases and close contacts and navigate teaching in this time. If this resonates with you, please consider joining our virtual event this coming Wednesday, 27 October at 2:30 on Zoom (RSVP link here). Francesca is explicitly designing this as a space to process and share what it has been like to teach under these difficult conditions.
