As Spring Term wound down and hints about the structure of Fall Term (and the summer) emerged over the past few weeks, I found myself reflecting on the past year+ of pandemic teaching. I talked in my last post about returning to some of the normalcy of interacting in person, and how much I’m looking forward to little things I used to take for granted. At the same time, I recognize how much grief and trauma we carry forward, individually and collectively, and wonder / worry about what that will look like and how we will deal with it, next year and beyond.
Somewhere in the middle of those two spaces lies pedagogy — what it was in the Before Times, what it became in Pandemic Times, and what it will look like henceforth. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the “henceforth” part. What have I learned in the last 4 terms of teaching online? How will this carry over into my future courses? What’s going to “stick”?
This, of course, is not a one-time reflection — I’m sure my thoughts will morph as we settle into whatever becomes our normal. But at this point in time, I keep settling on the same 5 things, which makes me think these will be the most likely to “stick”.
1. Weekly grid
I first saw this idea in a Resilient Pedagogy workshop last summer (and blogged about it here). The grid communicates expectations to students about what’s going on in class in a particular week, in what mode, and how long each item should take them to complete. I’ve found the grid invaluable for planning out each week. It shows me whether activities are balanced across modalities or whether I have to switch things around (e.g., do I have too many asynchronous team activities planned?). It keeps me honest in my expectations of students — I can quickly see if what I’ve planned will take 8 hours or 16 hours, and adjust accordingly. And I find it much, much easier to parse than looking at a list of activities on a Moodle page. So much so, that I embedded the grid for the week into that week’s Moodle page.
I’ll continue this because: It makes planning easier for me! And it has all of the key information for the week in one place for the students, including when office hours are and how to access the lab assistants.
2. Sunday night videos
I’m pretty sure I got this idea from Small Teaching Online, by Flower Darby and James Lang. The Sunday Night Video, so named because I often ended up recording and/or posting the video on Sunday night, is a short, 5-10 minute video which presents a high-level review of what we did in class last week and what’s coming up this week. The review and preview focus on how the course activities, concepts, skills, etc. fit into the learning goals and the larger arc of the course. Similarly to the grid, it provides orientation and context within the course — why are we doing this set of activities now? How will this get us closer to achieving the learning goals in the course?
I’ll continue this because: It’s a quick and accessible way to remind students of how all of the pieces fit together. It shows students how we’re progressing towards the learning goals for the course. It helps them connect the dots.
I might modify this by: Instead of recording a video, I could start off the first class meeting of the week with this content. I don’t know if that’s the best use of limited class time, but I could probably do a variation of this in a shorter amount of time. I may experiment with this in the fall, when I’m teaching a first year seminar.
3. Collaboratively annotated readings
I’ve posted previously about my use of Hypothes.is in my Computer Networks course (also written up here), and I’ve also used Hypothes.is in Software Design. When I first experimented with it, I thought of it exclusively as an asynchronous team tool, for students to label and highlight course concepts together. (For instance, in Software Design I have students apply Steve Krug’s Trunk Test to a web site, finding and highlighting answers to each of the Trunk Test questions.) The more I used it, the more I realized how I could use it to focus students’ attention on key concepts in particularly dense readings, or guide students through reading a recent paper related to course concepts, or (in the case of Computer Networks) walking students through a protocol specification. The example below shows my annotations in our online textbook for a particularly tricky topic.
In turn, students can add their own highlights, comment on my annotations, and so on — which leads to a dialog about the material before we even get to class!
I’ll continue this because: It’s an effective way for me to communicate how students should read a particular selection and what to focus on, and help them be more effective readers of technical content. It allows students to communicate with me as they are reading so that I can get a clear sense of what’s confusing and what’s piqued their interest. The act of annotating a reading also serves as a valuable check to me — I can hone in on what’s really important, and cut out sections that I may have assigned in the past but that don’t carry much weight in terms of student comprehension of a particular concept.
4. Using Google Docs during small group activities
When we moved to online teaching, I lamented the loss of in-person group work and of teaching in my favorite classroom space, a large room with tables and walls of whiteboards. How would I reproduce the collaborative brainstorming, the collective question-answering, the creation of communal artifacts, and my walking around the room to answer questions and redirect the wayward group?
Answer: collaborative editing of Google Docs.
Collaboratively-edited Google Docs allowed me to reproduce the spirit of all of those things. Student teams either had their own document to edit, pre-populated with the discussion questions and prompts, or had a section of the document to edit, also pre-populated with the questions / prompts (shown in the example above). I’d send student teams to breakout rooms after setting up the activity. Sometimes I’d travel from room to room, but because I found this more disruptive than helpful, I’d usually just monitor the activity on the document(s). If I wasn’t seeing any typing for a while, I’d stop by the room. If someone in a team wrote a particularly interesting, insightful, or good point, I’d add a comment. I also used comments to ask guiding questions if a group seemed to be heading off-track or in the wrong direction. The document(s) provided a record of class discussion, which students could revisit or, if they’d missed class for whatever reason, use to catch up. (This was particularly valuable when I had students literally on the other side of the world for whom class met in the middle of the night and who rarely attended synchronous class meetings because of that.)
I’ll continue this because: In addition to providing students with a record of what each group produced, this provides me with a record of what each group produced. Even when I walk around the room, I miss things.
I might modify this by: having students take pictures of the whiteboards and post those to Google Drive, when we use the whiteboards in class. (It might also be an interesting learning activity to have teams annotate the pictures after the fact, as a way to consolidate their learning from a particular class session!)
5. Instructional videos / walkthroughs
I tried, as much as possible, to avoid lecturing in synchronous class meetings, instead opting to record smaller-sized lectures and posting those along with targeted readings. As the pandemic wore on, I found other valuable uses for instructional videos:
- Walking through worked examples of problems.
- Providing feedback on things that many students missed on an assignment or exam, to help students who wanted to revise figure out how to approach the revisions.
- Walking students through the steps of a lab activity — showing them how to do something, and then asking them to stop the video and do a particular section of the lab (shown in the picture below).
- Providing feedback to individual students and/or teams on an assignment, when it was easier to show them where they went astray instead of trying to put it into words.
I’ll continue this because: Not every student is going to catch everything in a lecture or demonstration the first time around. Allowing students the opportunity to review and rewatch things at their own pace provides more opportunities for real learning — particularly if the students work the example, step through the problem, etc. along with the video. And the students who received video feedback indicated that they found this form of feedback particularly helpful, because they could see what part of the assignment particular pieces of feedback matched.
I might modify this by: finding ways to record the lecture / problem examples portion of class, maybe not all the time, but when I’m teaching a particularly difficult concept.
In reading over this list, I’m struck by the fact that all of these pedagogical practices increase transparency. They expose how students approach and apply the course concepts, and the work of small teams. They give students a glimpse into how I think about the pieces of the course and my expectations for their learning and engagement. They make more of the construction of the learning process visible. And hopefully, by being more transparent and not assuming students know why I’m doing what I’m doing, I’m also being more inclusive.
If you’ve taught during the pandemic, what new practices do you plan to continue?
This is what a computer scientist looks like 
Thank you for writing this up, Amy. I have on my to-do list to write a similar post, but I think maybe I can just refer to yours!
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