Thursday, April 30, 2020

How to Manage Teaching Online

In this season of isolation and shelter-in-place, many teachers have suddenly found themselves teaching at a distance. There are all kinds of technological and pedagogical challenges for this, obviously. But working from home provides another whole challenge of its own.

I had an email from one of my grad students that named this challenge pretty squarely. He reached out, knowing that I teach online a lot, and wondered how I manage teaching online. I was glad he asked! He asked several questions, which I've included below, along with some of my thinking to respond to each of them. 

I should note that while some of these are aligned to research-based best practices, a lot of this is anecdotal examples of things that I have found that work for me. Consider this a case study in managing the work of teaching online, as developed through practice, experimentation, (some) research, and a bit of the school of hard knocks too.

Image by Thomas Lefebvre via Unsplash

Monday, April 27, 2020

Lament and Joy and COVID-19

I have been so busy. So, so busy. It's weird that in a season when so many things have been cancelled so we can keep distance, I have felt as busy as ever.

Pivoting online has meant extra work in some ways, and different work in others. Working mostly from home has been good, overall, but it means a lot of distractions from my kids and my dog.

As you can see, he is very distracting to me as I work from the couch.
I've been wanting to blog more during this time, to capture my thoughts and feelings and document them somehow for the future. I've been wanting to write more words of encouragement to folks who are new to distance teaching, since that's something I know a bit about, and have things I could share.
I've been wanting to take time to write about things other than the current pandemic crisis.

But here I am, about a month since my last post, and feeling a little glum about it.

Truth is, I've realized I'm in a season of lament. I am grieving things that feel "lost."

This doesn't mean I haven't still felt deep joy as well. But I am lamenting the state of the world, and the state of our country, and the state of my own situation.