Teaching in the time of COVID: what's working?, what's not?

Now that many of us are a month or so into fall semester courses, and have been teaching in new formats due to the pandemic, I thought it might be good to have a thread checking in with readers to see how things are going. What format(s) are you teaching in? What things are you doing that seem to be working well? What things haven't worked well?

In my case, I'm teaching two classes twice a week in-person in the classroom to half of my students each day, while the others Zoom in. By and large, I've tried to keep the class format similar to how I normally run courses, with the first-third of each two-hour session involving discussing student reading responses, the second third giving a lecture, and the final portion of each meeting having students do graded group work. Aside from using Zoom (which I think has actually worked quite well), the one major difference is that instead of having student compose short written reading responses to discuss, I'm having them record short video responses (there are a number of platforms for this, including Flipgrid). My basic rationale for trying this is that I took an online teaching-certification course this summer, and learned that one of the more important things (apparently) for online teaching is to get students engaged with each other. I figured that since my students aren't all going to be in the classroom with each other and will be wearing masks when they are, it would be great to begin each class session with students by playing selected video responses as a springboard for class discussion. I also thought this would probably work well given the general demographic of my students: namely, the fact that they are generally young people who grew up with social media, including short video platforms like TikTok (one quick note: I don't require students to actually film themselves on video. I leave it open to them whether to just record audio instead of video, and I'd say probably 2/3 record video and the other audio-only).

Anyway, I didn't know how this would go, but I have to say: I think it has worked spectacularly well. I have frankly been astonished at how consistently good and insightful their video responses have been. It's clear to me that students have a much easier time speaking insightfully about philosophy than writing about it--as the responses have consistently been far better than the kinds of written responses I've required in previous semesters. I've also found it helpful to play several video responses back to back when multiple students raise similar issues--as this can help them and their classmates see that more than one student had the same kind of reaction to the reading. Now, to be sure, there is a cost here: my students are doing more speaking this semester than normal, and less writing. But, to be frank, I don't think this is a bad thing. Students in my classes have plenty of other assignments where they have to write (including daily group assignments where they collaborate on Googledocs or whatever), and for most of my students who are non-majors, I'm inclined to think that being able to think and speak about philosophical issues competently is probably more important (after all, how many students are ever going to have to write about philosophical issues in their lives after university? It seems far more likely to me that in real life, the ability to think and speak about philosophical issues will be more important--as they are likely to have discussions about morality, politics, religion, etc. with friends, family, and so on).

Other than this, I've tried to keep my courses as close to 'normal' as possible. The only other major difference is that whereas students in previous semesters did group assignments in the classroom, this semester they are doing them via Zoom breakout groups--with some members of groups in the classroom (or leaving the classroom to work outside) and others Zooming in. Aside from giving groups more class-time to complete the assignments, I haven't done anything different here, and it all seems to work pretty well. To be clear, this has been a challenging semester. Teaching this way (half via Zoom, viewing and selecting videos before class) hasn't been easy, and has required more work and juggling than normal. But, on the whole, things seem to be going okay and my students seem pretty engaged and happy.

Anyway, this is what I've been doing.  What have you all been doing? What new things have you been doing that you have found work well? What hasn't worked so well? Why?

Comments

[Guy Crain]

Not a direct answer to the questions posed, but I wanted to share a thought about the speaking vs. writing. I've noticed this in semesters even prior to the pandemic: I hear students making insightful comments to each other during group work, but then when I require a writing assignment, I get nearly incoherent muck. While it seems as though a person who can orally explain things should be able to write them down just as clearly, that just doesn't seem to be the case. I haven't tried it directly yet, but I'm thinking that one way to assign written work might be to start with requiring a video talk, then requiring them to write a transcript of that talk, and *then* requiring them to turn that transcript into a more straightforward written work. Any thoughts about the merit of that idea?

[Abdulrahman Bajodah]

I wonder if this observation about speaking VS writing is a consequence of the pressure on students to write in a specific "academic writing" way, and in philosophy a specific way of constructing "philosophy arguments."

[EAL]

Thanks for sharing this, Marcus! I have just been convinced to try video/audio for my upcoming class. Re Guy Crain's comment: what immediately comes to mind is the thought that some EAL students may be insecure in oral presentation in general but also thinking & talking on the fly. This, of course, can be easily addressed by relaxing the guidelines & allowing students to read from a script if they must. Anyway, thought I'd just put it out there that, while it may be true that many (perhaps most) students benefit from talking before writing, there are exceptions.

[Polaris Koi]

I have been using Zoom's polling function to great benefit. I do two polls each lecture: one multiple choice poll that asks a pretty tricky question about the reading to gauge how well students understood it (with an extra option for "I didn't read it"), and another that allows students to tell how much they agree with the reading. I keep the polls anonymous to facilitate honesty. It's been exciting to see how convinced (or not) students are by the assigned reading, and I've also found it useful to see whether all who read the text understood it.