The Golden Rule for Distance Teaching

Teachers expect a lot from their students. At least, this is true in my experience! We expect students to read, to write, to compute, to think, to discuss, to reflect, to make models, to generate hypotheses, to create beautiful artifacts to illustrate their learning...the list goes on and on!

This is probably not surprising, if you've spent any time at all in a classroom as either a student or a teacher. And...students are expected to comply with teachers' expectations, right? In my experience, almost every time I've had conflict with a student, it's because I had an expectation, and the student did not meet that expectation. Most of the time these kinds of conflicts are behavioral, but they can also be connected to content, or communication, ...or my poor pedagogy. (I hate it when that happens, but it does sometimes happen.)

Why bring this up? Well, I'm thinking about teaching at a distance, and how this is relatively undiscovered country for so many teachers. We might not be as adept at communicating our expectations in this new teaching environment. Teaching online can look a little different than teaching in a face-to-face environment, and because of this, we might have to check our expectations as educators. At the very least, we might need to be much more explicit in communicating our expectations!

And here's the conflict: I think that some of us (okay...me)--particularly when we are new to teaching online--might have to check some of those expectations. We are (okay...I am) so used to the power dynamics in a face-to-face classroom setting, we might be surprised with how the online environment can disrupt some of our sense of what is "normal."

Here is my encouragement for everyone teaching at a distance: consider the "golden rule for distance teaching." What is this golden rule? Here's how I'll frame it:

Never ask your students to do something you would be uncomfortable doing yourself.

Here are a few examples to illustrate what I mean:

• I like to have my students create short introduction videos to help us all get to know each at the beginning of the course. So, if I'm going to expect students to create such a video, I make my own introduction video and post it for them.
• I use discussion forums pretty substantially in the online courses I teach. If I expect students to be actively involved in reading and responding to their classmates, I too am active in reading and responding.
• If I want my students to take small risks in the kind of work they undertake--in responding to controversial issues, for example--I model this by doing some self-disclosure about my own thinking.

On the flip-side, I also try to be very cognizant of the message that I send to students in the things I ask them to do in the way I manage the learning environment. If it's something I would be uncomfortable with personally, I try to not ask students to do those things as well. For instance:

• I don't typically use plagiarism-checking software when having students submit assignments. If you read the fine print on services like Turnitin, it is nebulous at best as to whether the student or the company maintains ownership of the intellectual property contained in that academic work. I want to be able to maintain my own rights to my intellectual property, and so I also want my students to maintain these rights for the academic work I assign to them.
• In synchronous web conferences (e.g., Zoom meetings) there are times I want to have my camera off and my microphone muted, because I'm eating lunch, or my dog is going crazy in the background, or something of the like. Because I want to be able to have some privacy in these kinds of moments, I also want to extend this sense of privacy to my students as well.
• Personally, I would be very uncomfortable with having my work monitored digitally, through constant screen recording, or having my webcam turned on, or having my keystrokes logged--not because I'm doing anything morally reprehensible, or unlawful, or questionable, but because of the principle of being trusted. For the same reason, I don't ever want to use some sort of invasive proctoring system for my students; the fundamental message in this is "you are not trusted," and I don't want to model that for my students either. (I know that there are many concerns about students cheating in online learning environments; I'll have another post sometime on that topic. The point is, I would be terribly uncomfortable constantly being "watched," and so I don't want to demand this of my students either!)

Do I follow this golden rule perfectly? Perhaps not. But the longer I've taught online, the more important I've found this to be. I want my students to trust me...and that means I have to lead by trusting them too!

 

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(This post is part of a series offering tips on distance teaching. You can read more about this project here: Distance Teaching Tips. You can also read all of the posts in this series here: Distance Teaching Tips Series.)