Wednesday, December 30, 2020

Teaching is Not for the Faint of Heart...and HyFlex Teaching in Particular

I saw this tweet this morning, and boy did this resonate... 

I've said to a few people that this past fall semester was the most demanding for me since my first year of teaching. Most of the challenge was that I have such high expectations for myself and my teaching practice...and I fell short of those expectations. 

A lot.

Here's the thing: the HyFlex model of teaching sounds great in theory. But it's really, really hard to do it well in practice. HyFlex is "hybrid flexible," and the basic idea is that students should be able to fully participate in class whether they attend in person or via distance learning. Early in my doctoral studies, we considered HyFlex as a pedagogical approach in a case study in one of my courses. One of the biggest problems we identified is the huge cognitive demand for instructors using this approach. You have to be able to teach students in the room and students joining via videoconference simultaneously, and either of these modes of teaching is already plenty demanding...let alone simultaneously! 

To do HyFlex teaching well, you basically have two demanding tasks--teaching face-to-face, and teaching via live videoconference. These require similar skillsets...but not identical skillsets. And the difficulty is that you have to do them both at the same time. It's a problem! And, I think that's why I felt like I was failing almost all of the time this fall: I couldn't focus on my normal face-to-face pedagogy, because I was constantly distracted by trying to keep my Zooming students involved in what was happening in class. But the Zoomers were always the minority (just my students who were in quarantine, most of the time) and if I focused on good distance pedagogy, everything felt lifeless in the room, where the majority of my students were. And here was the most-likely-to-fail point for me: I couldn't do either of these things well (or at least, not well enough to meet my own high expectations for my teaching), so I felt a constant sense of frustration that I wasn't doing enough to support at least one group of students' learning. But what made it most difficult for me was that I was also recording each lesson, because some students were not able to join the live class meeting via videoconference, particularly if they were sick. And while teaching is always a public endeavor (you're always doing it in front of someone, right?) having a video record of my work makes me much more self-conscious!

So, to answer the question prompted by the tweet I shared above, here's my best analogy... 

I can yo-yo pretty well. I was a pretty big nerd in middle school, and I yo-yoed a lot. I can do some fun tricks: walk the dog, loop the loop, around the world, and rock the cradle. Not the most impressive repertoire, but a variety of entertaining tools in my yo-yoing toolbox. 

I can also juggle fairly well--with three beanbags, if I have both hands available, or two beanbags, if I have just one hand available. I was still a pretty big nerd in high school, and taught myself to juggle one afternoon, just because I decided I wanted to learn how.

I also can balance a meter stick vertically on my foot for quite a long time. I was able to balance a meter stick on my hand for years and years...and early in my middle school teaching career, I realized I could also balance it on my foot, much to the delight of my students. (Middle school teachers, am I right?) :-)

Now, here's the thing: I think HyFlex teaching is sort of like yo-yoing with my right hand, while juggling two beanbags with my left hand, and balancing a meter stick on my right foot, all at the same time. It's keeping the face-to-face teaching going, while also getting the online teaching going, and then an awareness of the camera, and how this all looks to the students who are watching it after the fact. I might get the yo-yo going (in class students), and keep the beanbags flipping and flopping (Zooming students), but then I'm suddenly derailed by the meter stick dipping--maybe a tech problem with the camera--which has me dropping beanbags, or tangling my yo-yo string.

Ugh. It was an exhausting semester. 

But there were bright spots for me. My students were GREAT throughout--they were very encouraging, despite my feeling that I was failing. My colleagues were amazingly supportive in a "we're all in this together" sort of way. My fully online courses (the ones that were planned to be offered online) went really, really well, which was a buoy for sure.

I think the biggest lesson for me was that I have to be okay with letting "good enough" be "good enough" sometimes when it comes to my teaching practice. (This is HARD for me...) I will do what I can to support and encourage my students' learning, obviously, but I have to check my own expectations for teaching during a pandemic, I think. Sometimes I'm going to drop a beanbag, or get a knot in my yo-yo string, or trip over the meter stick I'm balancing. Who wouldn't flop sometimes, with all of that going on? 

Maybe it's more amazing how often it all worked than the 10% of the time that things went sideways? I guess the real take-away for me is what I always tell my students, future teachers that they are: if you ever stop learning, perhaps it's time to stop teaching?

Image by Gerd Altmann via Pixabay

Saturday, December 26, 2020

Merry Christmas (And All That Stuff)

2020 has been weird, weird year. If you've spent any time at all on social media, I'm sure you've seen all the posts and tweets and reels and memes about how this year has been the absolute worst. And, yeah, I feel that too. It's been an emotionally taxing year for me in almost every way. And yet, there has been good, and beauty, and surprises.

In the month of December I've started several posts for the blog, and ended up discarding a couple of them, and saving a few as pieces of string I might unspool in a future post. But I didn't want to end the year on a down note...and most of the posts I had been writing were cynical or downright grumpy.

But, against all odds, I found some Christmas cheer this year.

My church has had rough times this year, but our traditional Christmas Eve service was exactly what I needed. Singing carols, celebrating communion, and a hope-filled message helped me reframe and remember just how much I love these people I worship with each Sunday.

Several of my family members have moved to the same small town where I live this year, which meant spending time with loved ones I don't typically get to see at Christmas. This was a joy!

I've made deliberate time to rest, to do unproductive things. This has been an exercise in intentionality, as I typically strive to be as productive as possible to feed my inner achiever. (Ah, the joys of being an Enneagram 3...) But over the past week or so, I've taken a lot more time to read for pleasure, to play games, to spend time with my wife and kids...and none of this is wasted.

Silly as it might sound, the hyped-up "Christmas Star" conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn was a lovely reminder that the world is a wonderful place. The science teacher in me marveled at this celestial moment, and the child in me was reminded of just how much I love astronomy. (Seeing Halley's Comet in 1986 left an impression!)

I am seriously thinking about starting a podcast with a colleague in the coming year, and I've found joy in brainstorming about what this could look like. Working with colleagues who continually inspire me to sharpen up and keep learning has been--and continues to be--a tremendous blessing.

Even the blizzard we experienced in Northwest Iowa this past week was a surprise blessing. I have realized I feel disappointed now if we don't have snow at Christmas (which is a little weird for this former Californian!) and it was looking like it was going to be a brown Christmas for us this year...until we got six inches of snow chased by a ferocious wind two days before!

I'm generally a pretty positive person, but the stresses of this year have gotten me down. I suspect I'm not alone in this. 

But I hope that you, dear reader, were able to find joy in the midst of a hard year. I wish you a Merry Christmas; I hope you are able to experience a sense of hope, and peace, and joy, and love as we close out 2020.

From our mudroom letter board to you...