The most important factor in all of this is communication. In the chaos of the March transition, as we scrambled to reinvent our courses, lines of communication – about expectations for students, why we were making the changes we made, and simply about how we were all coping with our sudden new reality – sometimes broke down. We may have taken for granted the open discussion channel, the empathy, and sense of community that our everyday classroom afforded us. We can build those channels back up in the fall semester, but we have to be intentional about it. Some suggestions:
- Be clear about the types of assessments you’ll be using throughout the semester, ideally framed in terms of your learning objectives.
- Review the schedule with your students – both at the “local” level of the week and the “global” level of the semester. Don’t just do this at the beginning of the term, but from time to time afterward. Many of our students (and some of us) experienced some temporal disorientation in the absence of the rhythms of campus life, and frequent reminders of where we are in the term helps everyone.
- Explain precisely what resources students may use in completing different kinds of assessments (homeworks, discussion posts, projects, exams, etc.). Students cited confusion over what resources were permissible as one reason for academic integrity violations in the spring. We can combat this by clearly expressing what’s on the table.
- Make time to check in with your students. You could set aside some time during a discussion section to ask how everyone’s doing, open up office hours where you’ve clearly expressed that students can come to you with concerns, or create “minute paper” or journaling assignments where students have a chance to let you know how they’re doing. These check-ins can help our students from slipping through the cracks, now that we don’t have the chance to see the danger signs in the classroom. They may have problems bigger than your classroom – that’s OK, you don’t have to fix them. But knowing about them will help you connect students to appropriate campus resources.
Finally, it doesn’t hurt to let our students know we’re human too. Many of us felt stress in the spring from having to broadcast our teaching from unpredictable environments where children, dogs, and other loved ones often made unexpected appearances. Perhaps surprisingly, students loved these moments – they reminded them that we all live in the same chaotic world, that we bear many of the same challenges they face.
