My first semester as a tenure-track professor started on August 19, 2020, in the middle of a pandemic, with no precedent and no playbook.
I’ve never designed and led a course on my campus that didn’t involve masked faces or checker-patterned Zoom screens. I’ve never not had to teach remote and in-person students simultaneously. I have had to recite our “six feet, mask up” mantra while figuring out why my Zoom students can’t hear, my cursor has disappeared, and my in-person students can’t see the PowerPoint slides — as all of us are overwhelmed by the absurdity of it all.
I’m part of a faculty group — the post-pandemic generation — that for the next few years will define the future of instruction in higher education. For us, the past year or so was daunting, but it was also liberating. Because with no expectations of normalcy, many of us in this new faculty cohort have been approaching our strange new academic world with a sense of possibility more than of trepidation.
If anything, the past year has been freeing for a lot of us. Some faculty members, of course, dug in their heels. They anticipated that, thanks to the pandemic, 2020-21 would be a “lost year,” a year that couldn’t possibly measure up to our institution’s standards. But many of us who were new to academe enjoyed the relative weightlessness of the unknown. Unlike our veteran colleagues, we didn’t know what we’d “lost,” because we had nothing to compare our new jobs to.
The unprecedented times allowed us to try new things without as much fear of negative repercussions. And our experiences may be instructive. Here are a few ways that the experiences of rookie faculty members hired amid Covid can inform the future of teaching.
Rethink your grading. Even before the pandemic, the “ungrading” movement was on the rise among faculty members who saw traditional grading systems as a barrier to learning. Instead, they opted for ungraded assessments that emphasized students’ self-reflection, improvement, and growth. Covid-19 made that approach almost a necessity. For those of us who were leading classrooms for the first time, numeric grading and high-stakes testing felt completely out of step with the realities faced by our students — even as we also felt pressure to do things the way they were “supposed” to be done, the way they’d always been done.
In the midst of global upheaval, however, it became clear that an effective learning experience couldn’t be one that held students accountable for rote memorization or squeezed a semester’s worth of learning into a hour of Zoom stress with no time to think critically. Good teaching meant recognizing students’ level of effort and growth far more than nit-picking mistakes in the final product.
As a new faculty member, I feared doing anything too radical or unconventional. So I created detailed rubrics for grading some run-of-the-mill assignments — and proceeded to drown in them. By mid-October, I knew there had to be a better way to assess what my students were learning. They were so articulate in class, so thoughtful in their conversations, so engaged and enthusiastic when I pushed them to challenge their beliefs. But when they submitted assignments, my rubrics boxed them in and penalized them for human mistakes.
Over winter break, I overhauled my syllabus, reading up on the value of “ungrading” as a way to more accurately assess student learning. In the spring, I dipped my toe in the water: The exact same course would now be taught with only low-stakes assessments, flexible and optional deadlines, and letter grades alone (no pluses or minuses either).
Here’s where things got interesting: On average, students in the spring classes had lower overall final grades than those in the fall. Yet students in the spring reported much higher satisfaction with their assignments and their own progress as learners.
This past summer, I developed a new course that will be entirely ungraded. My hope is that if switching to simple letter grades could improve student-learning outcomes so significantly, ungrading may have an even more demonstrable effect.
Embrace the best of technology. I know from firsthand experience that the pandemic made many academics feel like they had to become tech experts overnight. That pressure had a polarizing effect. Some instructors scrambled to adopt as many tools as possible; others eschewed any tech that wasn’t absolutely necessary and struggled with the basics of Zoom.
Neither end of that spectrum is best for students. Rather, instructors should select technology tools that reflect what you and your students need — whether that’s more engagement and interaction with one another, more exciting learning experiences, or more opportunities to self-assess and practice what they’ve learned.
That preference will be different for everyone. For me, it was Packback, a platform that facilitates inquiry-based online discussions. It helped me save time on the rote parts of assessment in order to engage with students on deeper and more meaningful work.
See your students for who they are (and how they are). I mean that literally and figuratively — even though the former is not so easy to do when the lower half of everyone’s face is covered. Recognizing students’ humanity can take many forms, such as removing expensive textbooks from the course syllabus or adjusting deadlines if unexpected work or family issues arise.
In my classroom, this also meant encouraging students to look at the course materials and let me know if they didn’t see themselves represented in the readings or topics. I tried to go beyond lip-service representation to actually affirm the multifaceted identities our students bring to the classroom. For example:
- I used they/them pronouns deliberately in examples about course topics, especially when all of the students in a class self-identified with binary pronouns (so they’d be exposed to nonbinary pronouns in an intentional yet unassuming way).
- I honored Indigenous beliefs about representations of people by not showing depictions of Tecumseh and Tenskwatawa that would be offensive to the Shawnee. Instead, I showed landscape paintings from a Shawnee artist. And I told students what I was doing and why I was doing it.
- We learned about the Black Panther Party alongside other activist groups including the Young Lords, the Young Patriots Organization, the Brown Berets, the I Wor Kuen, and the American Indian Movement. And my students didn’t get overwhelmed. They didn’t get confused. They were curious. In fact, they were impressed. They saw themselves in the college students and young adults who built, led, and fought in those organizations.
Recognizing students’ humanity meant changing my Packback deadline when students told me midsemester that they wanted more time. The reason? They knew they could write stronger posts with a few more hours. They wanted to give it their best shot. In short, they wanted to learn. Who was I to get in the way of their drive? I listened and I moved back the deadline.
Often, I polled students about their feelings. On Election Day. After midterms. When we were supposed to have spring break. Randomly on a Wednesday. In March, when I asked them to raise their hands if they were tired, every single hand went up, mine included. So I canceled the next class period. I told them to sleep. To recharge. To do something — anything — that made them feel whole. My goal there: to recognize that caring about students as people means not only seeing them for who they are, but also for how they are — not to mention being honest with myself about how I am.
If our goal as instructors is for students to feel visible in the classroom, and empowered to speak up and engage with their peers, the first step must be for us to acknowledge their voices and ensure that they feel represented within the very structure of the course itself.
With the fall semester just underway on most campuses, it’s still hard to tell whether any semblance of what was once “normal” will return to college classrooms. But even if it does, those of us who began our teaching careers in the pandemic will always think of this strange time — hybrid teaching, social distancing, and all — as its own form of normal.
Maybe that’s a good thing. In the months to come, the real test for faculty members around the country will be whether we can take the lessons learned from the past 18 months and put them to use in ways that help more students succeed on the increasingly complicated journey through higher education and beyond.
