At our January meeting, we discussed Small Teaching Online’s Chapter 4 Building Community. I’ve been teaching online for over ten years now and if there’s one thing that I consistently come back to trying to improve it’s how to build the community I can foster in the classroom online.
It’s a difficult process, made even more difficult by the stresses of remote teaching and the allowances we need to give for our students and even for our own personal lives.
Our discussion focused on some of the tools and how you can allow for some forgiveness for students as the concept of an Oops token or dismissing their lowest grade can be down easily in Canvas gradebook. We also discussed badging systems that incentivize and gamify the classroom so students can prove some the community participation work they do. For instance, in a Composition classroom they can get badges for peer review, going to the writing center, a particularly strong in class discussion.
And yet some of these tools and skills to help often put more of a burden on the instructor to keep track and monitor who is participating. This also led to discussing instructor centered vs. student centered classrooms and how the organic student interaction happens more easily on campus than it does online. This seems to then lead back to how to we connect students with each other to again build that community of scholars that can think and learn from each other and with each other.
Our discussions also talked about engagement and choice in terms of breakout groups and allowing students who want to work on an activity by themselves the option vs. students who might want to work in pairs or groups.
The end of our conversation, though, came back to remote teaching and the burnout that we feel during this pandemic is different than if we were teaching online for students who have chosen to take these classes. And with that, where can we put limits on our time since online does require so much more work to do it well? In the mode of accommodation, it seems difficult to say no. However, it really is important for us to know when to put those limits on our time when it increasingly blends into our personal lives. And the question is really deciding what is one thing I can say no to?
On that note, afterwards, one of our member shared this recent article from Flower Darby on “8 Strategies to Prevent Teaching Burnout” that reinforces the idea that we can put some boundaries on what we’re able to do for our students.