Back to Class

Last Friday UW announced the return (for all but a few large classes) of in-person instruction on Monday Feb 7. Here are some suggestions for making the return as painless as possible, while still supporting student learning.

  • Establish classroom norms. It would be a good idea to take a bit of time to introduce yourself and make your expectations clear about classroom participation (raise hands? call out answers?) Many students have never been in a university classroom, and you have the chance to shape the culture of yours.
     
  • Take advantage of in-person time. Have students engage with the material and each other. Even something as simple as asking and answering questions is active learning!
     
  • Make use of existing online resources you already have access to. You could have students watch short videos before class (e.g. just the definitions) and then use class time to work through examples and answer questions. Note: this is only a suggestion if you have the material already, you're not being asked to teach two modes at once.
     
  • Support students who cannot attend class. You do not have to do anything, but it would be a good idea to have at least one option for students so they are not incentivized to come to class when sick. Here are some ideas:
    • Advise the student to get notes from a classmate (maybe get a volunteer note-taker)
    • Invite the student to ask questions during office hours, post on the discussion board, speak to a TA or the tutoring centre if they have questions about what they missed
    • Provide a video from a previous term on similar material
    • Livestream or record the lecture(s) they will miss and provide link to that individual student
    • Livestream or record lectures regularly and post for any student to access
    • If there are marks associated with in-person engagement in lectures, build in flexibility (e.g. the lowest 25% of participation/clicker marks gets dropped)
  • In-person replacements for online technologies if you want to keep using them:
    • Backchannel chat – lots of students may be more comfortable typing questions than asking them, so you can use an open Zoom/Teams room (or other software, google “backchannel chat”) and check it when you would normally pause for questions
    • Polling – use Kahoot, PollEverywhere, iClicker, or other software, or the great low-tech version (from Eric Masur) of students holding their fist in front of their chest with 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 fingers raised.
    • Breakout rooms – you are absolutely allowed to have students work in small groups, even a “think-pair-share” activity is a great way to have active learning
    • Captioning – this is a bit weird in person, but you can open a Zoom/Teams room and turn on automated captioning, which will produce a reasonable (though not perfect) transcript of what you are saying, which can also be saved.
    • Online office hours – keep them! (could do at the same time as in-person, or just only online)

If you need any help or suggestions for tools or technology, please send me a message on Teams and I will be happy to chat!