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What will that mean, Secchi wonders, for the nearly 400 students in her course on contemporary environmental issues? She could put them — maybe — in the one 800-seat auditorium on campus. But will that spread them out sufficiently? If some join remotely, is she supposed to keep one eye on a computer screen and another on the classroom? And if she conducts lectures wearing a mask, will everyone be able to hear her?
Then there’s her “Introduction to Sustainability” course, which typically has about 80 students and is designed for collaborative learning. Instead of asking students to gather around a table or write on whiteboards together, should she have them open their laptops and do breakout sessions in Zoom — even though they’re sitting in the same room?
“We are getting a lot of inspirational and aspirational talking points: ‘We’re in this together. We’re going to make sure there is shared governance,’” says Secchi, an associate professor in the department of geographical and sustainability sciences. “But nobody has come to me and said, Hey, this is what we’re going to do.”
If a student doesn’t wear a mask, what do I do? Do I kick them out of class?
As professors put the spring semester in their rear-view mirrors, many are, like Secchi, wondering exactly how they’ll be able to teach this fall in a way that is both safe and effective. As unappealing as another semester online might seem, they are even more unsure of how face-to-face classes would work.
The challenges are both logistical and pedagogical. Are there enough large classrooms on campus in which to spread students out? Will instructors teach more, but smaller, sections of the same course, well into the evening or on weekends? How will they navigate hybrid classes and student collaboration? Who cleans the classroom equipment they will be using? Can people talk at length, comfortably, wearing masks?
And what about stress levels, already high and sure to climb higher as people congregate for significant periods of time in enclosed spaces? How does that affect a professor’s ability to teach and students’ capacity to learn?
“If a student doesn’t wear a mask, what do I do?” Secchi wonders. “Do I kick them out of class? Do I call security? There are all these things that are not part of my job that I have to worry about.”
Limited Control
As instructors begin to navigate such challenges, teaching experts fear that college administrators are not involving faculty members enough in conversations about teaching face to face. It’s one thing to make a bold statement about resuming classes. It’s another entirely to figure out how they’re going to function.
Such tensions came to the fore recently at Purdue University, after Alice Pawley, an associate professor of engineering education and incoming president of the campus’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, expressed concern about the logistics of social distancing in the classroom and about the health risks of face-to-face teaching. Mitch Daniels, Purdue’s president, dismissed her remarks as representing a “very tiny minority view” and suggested that one solution might be to put plexiglass barriers between the professor and students.
Daniels later doubled-down in an opinion piece in The Washington Post, arguing that to tell students, “‘Sorry, we are too incompetent or too fearful to figure out how to protect your elders, so you have to disrupt your education,’ would be a gross disservice to them and a default of our responsibility.”
Cheryl Cooky, chair of the University Senate at Purdue, called Daniels’s remarks “dismissively cavalier” and says she is concerned that the faculty will become demoralized and afraid to speak up as a result. Professors miss their students and they miss the classroom, she says, but they are also worried about things like whether students will adhere to safety measures and how flouting guidelines might increase the risks of teaching on campus. “It’s great they wear a mask and social distance, but we know 18- to 24-year-olds,” she says. “They’re going to want to go to parties. They’re going to want to socialize. That’s part of what the on-campus experience is. There’s only so much of the environment that can be controlled.”
Cooky says that she appreciates Daniels’s desire to move forward but that Purdue is a very top-down institution. “Faculty can provide input and can advise, but in terms of making the call or even being in the room, that isn’t always happening.”
At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Kelly A. Hogan is also preparing to be on campus this fall. Hogan, associate dean of instructional innovation, has been part of the planning process and believes that faculty members have had regular opportunities to weigh in through surveys and communication with their deans.
Still, she says, it’s hard for anyone to fully know what teaching in person will be like until they actually do it. That became obvious to her a few weeks ago, when she entered a classroom with the fall in mind. “I was thinking, Can I move around the room? If a student is here, I am no longer six feet away from them,” she says. “Whether there is plexiglass or not, we have to think about space in a lot of different ways.”
“Honestly, what does it mean to be in a room for an extended amount of time and a lot of people are talking?” she asks. “Is that more dangerous, that my students are talking and engaged?”
‘Resilient and Determined’
Some colleges are planning for hybrid instruction as a way to manage space and other logistical challenges. In that scenario, cameras would be installed in classrooms so that some students could watch lectures remotely. In one scenario, for example, half the students would attend a twice-weekly class in person, while the other half would attend remotely. Those groups would switch for the second class.
That cuts down on the number of people occupying the same space. But it presents complications for instructors. They would need to monitor online-chat functions while also leading in-person discussions, so that remote students could ask questions and participate. And if groups of students were rotating through the classroom on different days of the week, the professor might find it hard to create a sense of community within the group.
Courses designed for active learning, in which students spend class time collaborating on problem sets or projects, present another level of complexity. For years, professors in many disciplines have been strongly encouraged to move toward active learning. And, as a result, colleges have reconfigured some of their classrooms so that, instead of sitting in rows in large lecture halls, students gather around tables or stand at whiteboards placed throughout the room, as professors and teaching assistants walk around to supervise their work.
But what happens when instructors can no longer peer over students’ shoulders to look at their work or lean in to advise them when they get stuck? And how can students collaborate at a distance? “When you take that cluster of things together, it paints a picture that is not hospitable to active learning,” says Christopher Heard, director of Pepperdine University’s Center for Teaching Excellence, who has been wrestling with this issue as he helps the campus gear up for the fall.
Among other difficulties, Heard is exploring the problem of noise. If 40 people are in a large lecture hall, he wonders, how can the people in the back of the room hear or be heard? It’s easy enough to mic up the professor, but what about the students? He is considering whether to place standing microphones in the room that can be wiped down after each use, or whether students can speak through their computers in a way that will amplify their voices.
Group work will be a challenge, too. Students will need to speak with raised voices when sitting six feet apart. But they could end up drowning each other out as different groups of students attempt to work in the same room, all talking loudly to one another.
Technology will most likely be needed to mediate some of those face-to-face challenges. Instead of leaning over worksheets together, for example, students might share a Google doc or a virtual white board. But that poses its own set of problems. “We don’t want to just bring students in a room and give them the equivalent of a remote class,” says Heard. “I am seeking more creative solutions than just having people log onto Zoom and go into breakout rooms. I am not there yet. I don’t know what the answers are.”
Heard believes it’s worth bringing students back to campus despite the limitations. Many professors struggled in the spring to build or maintain a sense of community with their students online. And as co-curricular activities are likely to be severely curtailed in the fall, classrooms will be some of the few spaces where those connections can flourish. “I am confident that our students are resilient and determined to build community within the classroom,” he says. “And our professors are resilient and will find ways for meaningful interaction.”
Those interactions themselves often extend beyond the classroom, something Nancy Chick has been thinking about at Rollins College. Chick, director of the campus’s faculty-development center, says that on their small campus, students regularly come in contact with librarians, tutors, advisers, and — in the case of community-engagement courses — outside organizations over the course of their day.
This spring, those connections continued virtually, with coffee hours and weekly meetings through videoconferencing. How that would happen in person in the fall is still a work in progress. For now, she imagines that rather than the casual meet-ups students might have with advisers and partners in the lunchroom or lounge, the college will need to formally schedule such gatherings, in much smaller groups.
Chick and others also raise the question of how professors and students will be able to read each other’s facial cues from behind a mask. That’s a central component of face-to-face teaching, yet one that will probably be inhibited.
“It’s not just a logistical challenge, it’s a moral and pedagogical challenge,” she says. “There are certain ways we teach, and we don’t want to lose that. So we really have to think that through.”
Trauma-Informed
Stress is likely to affect learning. Students and professors will probably feel like they just navigated a minefield going to and from classrooms every day. And something as simple as a cough could lead an entire room to tense up.
“Higher-order thinking skills, executive-functioning skills, they all kind of get wiped out when we’re going through a traumatic experience or recovering from one,” says Karen Costa, a faculty developer who specializes in online pedagogy. That means students — and professors — will find it more difficult to focus, manage their time, and make decisions. Deep thinking is also going to become more challenging.
Costa is worried that administrators, in their desire to return to a semblance of normalcy, are underplaying how stress will make face-to-face learning more difficult. “I haven’t seen a lot of higher-education leadership take it seriously,” she says.
Research suggests they should. Joshua Eyler is the author of How Humans Learn: The Science and Stories Behind Effective College Teaching. He is developing training programs for faculty members on trauma-informed pedagogy, something he learned about while writing his book. He will be encouraging them to be as organized as possible with their teaching and as flexible as possible with students.
“Some faculty members might be tempted to walk into the classroom and try to assume an air of normalcy. That works against you,” he cautions. “Everyone in there knows that something absolutely gigantic has happened in their lives. The best thing you can do is address that and say, ‘None of this is normal. We’re going to work together, piece by piece.’”
Costa suggests that instructors read up on the effects of stress on cognitive functions, and adapt their teaching accordingly. That doesn’t mean that professors have to become therapists or counselors. Instead, says Costa, instructors should empathize with what students are experiencing and talk with them about how it might affect their ability to learn.
Practically speaking, Costa says, instructors are likely to find that they have to repeat themselves to distracted students, explain their lesson plans more fully, and offer alternative forms of assignments. Some students might find it difficult to focus on writing a lengthy paper, she says, so perhaps they could produce a podcast or record a video.
Costa and Eyler worry that too much may be expected of faculty members at campuses where leaders say they will reopen in the fall. They are being asked to plan for many contingencies, such as moving their classes online if the pandemic re-emerges, even as their own health concerns are coming into focus. “Our brains are not built for that kind of cognitive demand,” Costa says.
And both have reservations about a teaching model called HyFlex,
which has drawn the attention of college leaders as a way to offer students all possible options. The idea is that on any given day, students will have the option of attending a class remotely, in person, or asynchronously. But, Eyler says, “That doubles or triples the work that faculty have to do.”
Secchi, at Iowa, would agree. She is spending her summer, unpaid, creating several versions of her course: in-person, hybrid, and fully online. Nobody has asked her to do that, she notes, but neither has anyone told her exactly what is going to happen this fall. She wishes there were blue-ribbon panels creating a repository of best practices for teaching during the pandemic. But she knows that’s unlikely to happen, given the lack of coordination anywhere else, whether it’s public-health protocols or reopening businesses.
“What I see happening in higher education is happening in every other domain of society,” she says. “We are grownups, but we don’t really have a clue what we’re doing.”
