Distance Teaching Tips

I've been thinking a lot about what I have to offer my fellow educators in this season where so many of us are teaching at a distance. I like teaching online, and I feel like I've been equipped for this work--one of my areas of focus in my graduate work was online teaching and learning, after all. But the downside is, I know the things I know, and I know some of the things I don't know, but there are also the "unknown unknowns"--things I don't even know that I don't know. And...I'd hate to be seen as overestimating my own capability (because the Dunning-Kruger Effect certainly is a real thing!) So I'm a little apprehensive about sharing "here's how to teach online" sorts of posts.

But I've also had great feedback on posts I've shared in the past, such as this one offering tips on How to Manage Teaching Online. So, in that light, I'm going to try to share a distance teaching tip every day for the month of September. These will probably be relatively short posts, with just a quick blurb of explanation and an example or two from my own online teaching practice. My hope is that these will be encouraging for fellow educators who are teaching at a distance.

A couple of caveats before I begin:

• I'll call these "promising practices" for online teaching, rather than "best practices." Some of these tips have a strong base in research over the long term. Others are tips that I've adapted into online teaching from other learning environments. 
• Most of my online teaching experience has been at the graduate or undergraduate level. It's not that these things can't also translate into a K-12 teaching environment, but let's recognize that teaching adults or young adults might be different than teaching high school, middle school, or elementary students online. 
• I believe teaching is best viewed as a craft, not an "art" or a "science." It's the sort of thing where the more you practice, the better you get. If you try one of these tips as a one-off, it might work great, or it might flop. Chances are, like most everything in teaching, the more you practice it, the more success you'll find.
• These tips are based on my experiences teaching online. Your results may vary, so take these tips as what they are: stories of things I've been doing in my own teaching practice that have worked out relatively well for me. Use at your own risk, okay?

What kinds of things will I be sharing? Well, here's a sampling of the list I came up with just now for some topics I'll likely share about:

• Tips for engaging students
• Tips for motivation
• Tips for communication
• Tips for building community
• Tips for presenting content
• Tips for assessing learning
• Tips for managing the work of teaching online

In full disclosure, part of this writing project is that I hope to get back into the habit of writing something every day, and this seems like something that is both doable for me, and will potentially provide some benefit to anyone who might be reading along as well.

And...if you have questions, or things you'd like me to weigh in on, please drop me a line by either commenting in response, or tweeting to me at @d_mulder. I hope you'll read along!

Photo by Sergey Zolkin on Unsplash

Teaching in 2020

I want to make some kind of 20/20 vision joke as I start this post, but nothing is coming to me. I am a little overwhelmed with how this school year has started.

It's year 23 for me as a teacher, and year 9 for me at Dordt. I still love this work immensely. I still am learning all the time about how to do this work. I still am my own worst critic too--in my heart of hearts, I know that I'm fulfilling my calling in what I'm doing here, and yet, I see all my errors and missteps and agonize about these.

This feels like a confessional, so I'll keep going in that vein: I think that this has been the most ambivalent beginning of a school year for me in my years of teaching to date. Don't hear this wrong: I am THRILLED to be here, and ELATED to have students on campus again! That part has been so, so wonderful. I have thoroughly enjoyed meeting up with my new students, and reconnecting with students I've taught before. I don't have any brand new courses this year, so it's a year of revising, and refining, and a little re-imagining. And it's all off to a great start, honestly.

But...

On the other hand, teaching in the Age of COVID-19 is perhaps the most demanding thing I've done since those first years of bumbling through, when I learned something new about this arcane craft every day. Teaching in a mask or face shield ain't all it's cracked up to be. Teaching in two modes simultaneously (with some students in our face-to-face classroom and some joining in via Zoom) has an incredible cognitive demand. I am so grateful that I was scheduled to teach two of my courses online this term, because I have those ones more-or-less dialed in at this point, which frees up some more of my cognitive energy to focus on reinventing how I will connect with my students in my "face-to-face" courses. (Which are now hybrid format.)

It's not that I feel like a first year teacher again...but it is definitely a feeling of "unsettled" that I don't think I've felt since that first year.

And so I am calling this an "ambivalent beginning." The elation of being able to meet up with students again that I usually feel at the beginning of every school year is being tempered by anxiety about the unknowns and the ongoing extra work of retooling my teaching on the fly. And teaching with a mask and/or face shield, or hiding behind plexiglass at the podium? This is really cramping my style!

All of that said, I'm reflecting on the lesson I taught on day one of Introduction to Education, a lesson I revised a bit from the way I've taught it in the past to accommodate having students Zooming in, and teaching with my PPE in place. But the heart of the lesson was unchanged. Lesson 1 in Intro to Ed is this: "You Teach Who You Are."

Begging the question...who am I as a teacher? 

Does the mask, and face shield, and Zoom-split cognition, and weirdness of having students sitting six feet apart in our classroom define who I am as a teacher?

Not in the least.

This is a season of struggle for me, one that I hope to not repeat anytime soon. But I'm tapping into my creativity, my resilience, my flexibility, my empathy, my professionalism, my resourcefulness, my passion--all those dispositions that I hope to be fostering in my students--and I'm going to serve my students to the best of my ability, with all the care, and compassion, and responsiveness I can muster.