What will you keep?
Allison Henrich
By Allison Henrich, Seattle University; Haydee Lindo, Harvey Mudd University; Natalie Naehrig, University of Washington
The following post is based on conversations from the Pacific Northwest Section NExT workshop where Angela Siple and Allison Henrich from Seattle University facilitated a panel and discussion on current and post-pandemic teaching. The panelists were Ramadha Piyadi Gamage (Western Washington U.), Brandy Wiegers (Central Washington U.), and Katya Yurasovskaya (Seattle U.). Ideas for this post were also generated by a teaching discussion of University of Washington faculty facilitated by Natalie Naehrig.
Haydee Lindo
Teaching mathematics, at all levels, is a highly skilled profession. Our effectiveness as educators depends on being given the time and support to hone our craft. It also depends on our individual well-being as people. It is no surprise, then, that the last year and a half of the pandemic have been incredibly disruptive in the academy. The job has changed. We have changed. It feels like we have less time, less support, and less clarity around the profession. Some people have lost their jobs. Some others have quit. Many have changed jobs, and many more are contemplating whether to go or remain.
Natalie Naehrig
There are surprising and unsurprising things about the changes that the last two years have brought. Though burdensome, the increased caregiving we often gave at home within our families may have been expected in light of mandated lock-downs and social distancing. It was less predictable that the necessary caregiving towards our students and even our fellow faculty would so greatly expand the boundaries of our jobs. As educators, our caregiving to the other members of our profession manifests, in part, in sharing all the pedagogical tricks, practices, and knowledge that we learned during the pandemic that will make us all more adept teachers. Together, we can rise to the new challenges of our profession by adapting to the new demands of teaching mathematics, keeping the best practices we have learned under this pressure as we establish a new “normal.”
So, what is it that we plan to keep?
Flexibility
One key to a classroom aimed at student success is a thoughtful mix of grace, flexibility, structure and support. As the pandemic progressed, many of us realized that the semester deadlines for course work we may have previously held firm for our students seemed unnecessary, illogical and, sometimes, counterproductive for the overall learning and success of our students. Did the world fall apart if an extension was granted? No. But sticking to a deadline just on principle can cause irreparable harm to a student, depending on their personal circumstances. However, extending grace around deadlines without a plan or structure to help students get back on track can also end in disaster. Some faculty noticed that being very flexible or having no deadlines in Spring 2020 hurt students, especially graduating seniors. Work would pile up at the end of the semesters, and previously struggling students could not possibly get everything done. This calls for a multi-layered plan. Going forward, many faculty we heard from will make a general plan for their course which includes a built-in allowance for students who will need flexibility. This will enable struggling students to get through temporary difficulties without the stress of having to request special treatment from their professors.
Weekly Quizzes & Surveys
An amazing result of pandemic teaching is the repurposing and reimagining of the weekly quiz. One may use a weekly quiz simply as a reminder and a little added pressure for students to keep abreast of the course material and not fall too far behind. During the pandemic, faculty expanded the weekly quiz to a fully-realized extra touch-point and opportunity for two-way communication between the teacher and their students. Faculty even used tools like Canvas Quizzes to issue quizzes that were more like surveys, asking questions covering not just course material, but also things like class dynamics and mental health. They asked “What concepts were confusing?,” “Do you have questions?,” “Are there any issues with your discussion group dynamics?,” “Do you have any suggestions to improve the class?” They also instructed students before assessments to “Take a breath. Write yourself a note of encouragement.” They opened extra lines of communication, asking, “Is there anything you’d like to share with me?” They received answers, ranging from “It’s my birthday today!” to admissions by some of their students that they were struggling with food insecurity. Without this extra tool, teachers would have known less of the information about their students that is incredibly relevant for their learning and performance in the classroom. Keeping this tool in our classrooms is a powerful way to increase connection with our students and understand how their personal circumstances affect them both as people and as students.
Active Learning
Before the pandemic, some of us were teaching our courses using various forms of active learning (e.g. flipped classrooms, POGIL, IBL) while others of us had only ever taught via traditional lecture methods. For those who were used to incorporating active learning when the pandemic hit, we needed to figure out how to adapt our methods to Zoom. Being forced to adapt may have been a catalyst for trying a new teaching technique altogether. For instance, if you relied on in-class mini-lectures coupled with group work before, you may have tried to flip your pandemic classes to avoid any synchronous mini-lecturing at all. Some people in this camp have shared with us that they plan to continue teaching this way even after in-person instruction resumes, especially now that they have a collection of videos they’ve recorded to implement the idea. In addition, many of us learned that what worked for facilitating group work in person completely failed to generate conversation in Zoom breakout rooms. So, we collected some new tricks for getting students to discuss mathematical ideas together that we plan to continue using in the future. For those who love lecturing, the learning-how-to-teach-without-lecturing curve was much steeper. Some folks we surveyed tried to lecture for an entire class period over Zoom only to realize that students weren’t able to learn much (or, perhaps, anything) from this method. So, many quickly shifted to recording short videos, effectively flipping their courses instead. Several faculty members we talked to in this camp indicated that they found some significant benefits for students by making this shift, and they will continue to teach using some flipped elements in the future. Wherever you were on the active learning spectrum in your classes before, you’re likely to teach in a more active way as you return to campus, a shift that will certainly benefit your students in the long run.
New Technologies
As we listened to faculty members discuss what they plan to keep from pandemic teaching moving forward, many instructors mentioned different software that they’ve come to rely on and won’t give up with the return to campus. For instance, several people reported capabilities of OneNote that they discovered that they will continue to use, e.g., to help them record mini-lectures for students to watch before class. They will also use recording technologies to give students audio and video feedback on their work. Some faculty members discovered more capabilities of Google Drive and JamBoards that they plan to use in the future, especially to give students an opportunity to provide feedback or ask questions anonymously. Other faculty members enjoyed using Gradescope and WeBWorK to facilitate grading. You’re probably reading this right now, thinking of some new technology you began using as a result of remote teaching that you plan to use in the future! What will you keep of your new technological tools?
Zoom as an Alternative
We love Zoom. We hate Zoom.
If you’re like us, you can’t wait to teach students in person again. Enough staring at an array of muted black boxes everyday! On the other hand, did you notice that office hours over Zoom were more successful than your former in-person office hours? It might be nice to hold an evening office hour once a week without having to stick around on campus. Some of us need to leave campus in the afternoon to pick up children from school or daycare, but we can pop on Zoom after the kids are in bed to answer a few Calculus questions. Or maybe you used to routinely have 20 students trying to cram into your 50-square-foot office for office hours, and now you can meet with everyone over Zoom instead! What about those snow days? As climate change continues to disrupt our lives, forcing cancellations of class due to unprecedented inclement weather, teaching one or two classes via Zoom may be a perfectly good alternative to in-person teaching. We’re more prepared to be flexible with how we engage with students thanks to Zoom, and that flexibility is likely here to stay.
CANVAS & Other Learning Management Systems
The remote reality during the time of COVID made course organization crucial for students and instructors. Students did not have the opportunity to spontaneously meet up, to get small questions answered in the hall by their peers, or to check back with the instructor after the Zoom session was over. Instructors needed to make sure important due dates, changes to schedules, and review information was easily made available to students. Many faculty members who shared their experiences teaching during COVID pointed out how course organization systems like CANVAS built the core of the organizational side of their courses. For some, it meant learning the system from scratch, while others used remote teaching as an opportunity to master the system’s services: organizing assignments; grading them; enabling student-student or student-instructor interactions to answer questions; and providing videos, quizzes, and lecture notes in one place. For students, it meant they only needed to go to one place to learn about assignments and deadlines for (almost) all their courses, which simplified their organization tremendously. Overall, instructors felt that the remote setting required them to be much more organized, which they managed through such learning systems and which they plan to continue in the future.
Mastery Based Grading
Even before COVID hit, the hunt for good grades seemed to have replaced the original idea of enrolling in courses for the sake of learning about the topic. Consequently, we encounter students who are primarily motivated by a desire to learn far less often than we’d like. Our system encourages cheating, discourages fruitful group work, and it creates a body of students for whom forgetting about the material after the semester is over is nothing to fret over. To return to a learning-centered motivation, some instructors moved to a mastery-based grading approach. With mastery-based grading, students can move forward with topics if they have shown to have gained sufficient skills and knowledge on previous ones. If that level of mastery has not yet been accomplished, they revise assignments, guided by the instructor’s feedback. Instructors have used the changes necessary for remote teaching to introduce mastery-based grading or a variation. The experience was (1) that the overall performance of students was notably better than in traditional classes with exams, (2) that the absence of Zoom exams unburdened the instructors of dealing with cheating, and (3) that more engaging discussions were possible. At the same time, it required much more reading and providing feedback on the instructor’s behalf. Despite the higher workload, mastery-based grading was so rewarding that many teachers have decided to continue it in future classes.
Do any of these ideas resonate with you? What will you keep?
Allison Henrich is a Professor at Seattle University. Her favorite course to teach is Quantitative Reasoning because she likes the challenge of changing the minds of students who don’t like math and think they can’t succeed in the subject.
Haydee Lindo is an Assistant Professor of mathematics at Harvey Mudd College. Dr. Lindo is a commutative algebraist with research interests in homological algebra and representation theory. She is excited about scientific communication, curricular design, and broadening participation in the mathematical sciences.
Natalie Naehrig is an Assistant Teaching Professor at the University of Washington. She has been living in Washington for nine years after moving from Aachen, Germany, where she worked at the RWTH Aachen University. In her role as faculty she has been focussing on evidence-based teaching methods, diversity in the STEM fields, and equity issues in the STEM fields.