Emily Barber – Page 10 – EDVICE EXCHANGE

The Zoom Black Box Blues: Building a Flexible Camera Policy

Kyle Vitale & Jeff Rients

The question of whether or not to require that students keep their Zoom cameras on during synchronous online classes can be fraught. On the one hand, we use faces to help gauge participation, presence, and even the flow of conversation. On the other hand, a variety of legitimate concerns can keep students from turning their cameras on. As we enter a new semester, here are some ideas and strategies for crafting a course policy that respects your students’ needs while ensuring effective and rigorous class participation.

Let’s start by acknowledging that students have a lot of good reasons for turning off their cameras. These reasons can range from social (anxiety over being constantly seen by the rest of the class) to familial (sharing a small room with other zoomers) to technical (Zoom optimizes bandwidth, so turning off the camera may be the only thing keeping them in class when using a subpar internet connection). It is better to assume good faith on the part of the students. They logged into the Zoom room, after all, so let’s find ways to honor that decision.

Zoom is a communication tool and we recommend using it to communicate! Talk to your students. If the array of black boxes on the screen is impacting your ability to teach, discuss that fact with the students. As with all things, relate to them as human beings first. You might provide a flexible camera policy in your syllabus, and be sure to discuss your camera policy throughout the semester.

Also, please keep in mind that a live camera is not necessarily evidence of student engagement. Have you ever been in a meeting where you appeared more attentive than you actually were? Even in physical classrooms, presence does not always equate to attention. A robust participation policy will ensure engagement more than any hard rule about camera usage. Also, consider that the Zoom classroom is not a perfect recreation of a traditional classroom. Prior to the COVID lockdown, we did not spend our entire class time looking every single student in the class directly in the eyes from mere inches away. Now we spend all day doing exactly that! Meanwhile, we have no idea what students are looking at on their own screens.

With these facts in mind, you can take some simple steps to mitigate the issue. First of all, ask students to add a profile picture. This can be done by going to the profile section of zoom.temple.us or, in a live meeting, using the video settings tool to navigate to the profile settings. Some smiling faces, even still pictures, may help you feel more comfortable teaching in the Zoom environment.

Second, begin Zoom sessions with a breakout room activity. Students are more likely to turn on their cameras when doing a small group activity like discussing a question, reviewing prior material, or completing an activity. Some of those students may leave their camera on when they return to the main room, and regardless, students will have had a chance to warm up to class time.

Third, consider warm-calling. This strategy lets students know that they are expected to participate during class. In warm-calling, students reflect quietly on a question or chat together, before the instructor randomly calls on names. While reducing stress by giving students time to sort their thoughts, this strategy also maintains the expectation that students be focused and attentive to class lecture or discussion.

Fourth, practice screen rest. For long synchronous classes, consider a “screen break” or encourage all students to turn their cameras off during a reflective moment. This practice helps students suffering from Zoom fatigue and can reenergize everyone’s focus and attention.

Finally, we acknowledge that different types of courses require different levels of camera use. An acting instructor, for example, needs to see the faces of students performing a scene. If you need cameras on, make your case to the students. Explain how the camera helps them achieve the learning goals of the course. Specify when cameras must be on–such as when giving a presentation–and when it is okay to have them off. Review this policy with the students early in the course, remind them of it regularly, and incorporate these rules into your syllabus. Whatever approach you take to Zoom, make sure the students know what to expect from the beginning of the course.

The resources below offer more ideas for navigating Zoom camera policies. As always, feel free to reach out to the CAT with any questions!

“Should Showing Faces Be Mandatory?” Matt Reed, Inside Higher Ed
“Should We Require Students to Turn Their Cameras On in the Zoom Classroom?” Anna Lännström, Wabash Center
“Please, let students turn their videos off in class.” Vincent Nicandro, Aditya Khandelwal, and Alex Weitzman, Stanford Daily News.

Kyle Vitale and Jeff Rients are Associate Director and Senior Teaching & Learning Specialist at Temple’s Center for the Advancement of Learning, respectively.

Opening Doors: Promoting Equity through Accessibility

Hleziphi Naomie Nyanungo, Linda Hasunuma

When hearing the term ‘accessibility,’ many immediately think about accommodations to meet the needs of specific individuals or groups, primarily those with disabilities. While related, accessibility and accommodation are not the same. According to LaGrow, ‘accommodations are reactive solutions to address special cases. Accessibility is a proactive solution to providing equal access for all.’ The word “proactive” is essential here as accessible learning spaces are intentionally and thoughtfully designed and delivered so that all students have access to the tools, resources, and support they need to be successful. In Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto, Kevin Gannon (2020) invites teachers to think of access as a feature of our pedagogy by asking the question: ‘Do all of our students have the same degree of access to us, the course, the material and to learning? (pg 74).

Accessibility promotes equity by making it possible to engage students who would otherwise be pushed to the margins. Take, for example, a student like Tanya (name has been changed). Due to COVID safety restrictions, she lost her job as a waitress, and now lives with her grandmother, mother, and sister. The only place she is able to get her work done is in her car. A course designed to provide flexibility and options will allow Tanya to access course content and participate in activities in a way that works best for her situation, and increase her ability to be successful. You may have students in a course you are teaching this semester who are in situations similar to Tanya’s, and are having to navigate barriers such as internet connectivity issues, availability of computers and technology, health matters, the demands of work and family, and more.

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and the Peralta Equity rubrics provide guidance for designing and evaluating your courses for equity, inclusion, and access. UDL Guidelines and the UDL Progression Rubric can help instructors create more inclusive and accessible learning experiences. UDL asks us to anticipate our students’ needs instead of putting the burden on the student to request an exception. We can provide options or pathways that benefit everyone, including those who may need accommodation, thereby potentially lessening the need for individual accommodations. For example, captioning tools may benefit students who may have a hearing impairment, but can also benefit English language learners who process information differently as well as those who must attend class in a space that is not private.

The Peralta Community College system’s Peralta Equity rubric was developed to close gaps in learning outcomes in online courses and promote more inclusive and accessible online learning experiences. The rubric consists of the following areas:

addressing students’ access to technology and different types of support (both academic and non-academic);
increasing the visibility of the instructor’s commitment to inclusion;
addressing common forms of bias (e.g., image and representation bias, interaction bias); and
helping students make connections (e.g., between course topics and their lives; with the other students).

Drawing from these two frameworks, we offer some recommended strategies as well as some simple things you can do right now to make your courses more equitable and accessible.

Get a sense of who your students are and what they may need. A good way to do this is administer an anonymous survey at the beginning of the semester that asks students about their needs and well-being. The ‘Who is in the Class? Form’ is a good example of a survey with questions related to factors that may impact the students’ learning experience such as internet connectivity, disability and health concerns, work and family obligations.
Offer low tech alternatives: Students may not have the same access to stable internet connectivity, computers and other technology tools. It is important to keep this in mind as you assign readings and activities. See this article for low-tech ways for teaching online.
Use low-cost or open source instructional materials, where possible: The increasing cost of commercial textbooks can be a barrier to students. Consider low-cost or open source high quality educational materials. Visit Temple University Library OER page for guidance.
Be flexible and provide students with options: Consider ways to adapt your course to meet the needs of your students. CAT’s Agile Pedagogy resource page offers some guidance for being flexible in your teaching.
Design for accessibility: Take advantage of the accessibility options (e.g. automatic captioning in Zoom) available in the technology used for online teaching. While typically designed to accommodate people with disabilities, these accessibility features provide great options for everyone. ‘Accessible Teaching in the Time of Covid-19’ highlights accessibility features in educational technology tools.

If you feel overwhelmed by the prospect of applying these frameworks to your courses, we recommend a simple approach where you think about one thing you could try from either rubric. Consider Tobin and Behling’s (2018) Plus One strategy from “Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education.” Pick one strategy to implement in a course you are currently teaching.

Good teaching means honoring and recognizing the full diversity of our students, and the accessibility mindset offers us a way to design learning experiences that benefit all learners. The principles and strategies shared here can help you create more equitable, inclusive, and accessible classrooms that help all students succeed. If you would like to learn more or think through how you can use these approaches in your own teaching practice, please make an appointment for a one-on-one consultation with one of our faculty developers or Ed Tech specialists at the CAT.

References:

Addy, T. M., Dube, D., Mitchell, K., & SoRelle, M. (2021). What Inclusive Instructors Do: Principles and Practices for Excellence in College Teaching. Stylus Publishing, LLC.

Gannon, K. M. (2020). Radical Hope: A Teaching Manifesto. West Virginia University Press.

Tobin, T. J., & Behling, T. K. (2018). Reach Everyone, Teach Everyone: Universal Design for Learning in Higher Education. West Virginia University Press.

Hleziphi Naomie Nyanungo, Ph.D. is the Director of Educational Technology at the Center for the Advancement of Teaching

Linda Hasunuma, Ph.D. is the Assistant Director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching

Pulling Back the Curtain: Sharing Pedagogical Concepts with Students

Geoff Keston

Imagine you’ve given students an exercise, say, think-pair-share, when someone asks, “Why are we doing this? Can’t you just teach things instead?” Could you, off the top of your head, explain the pedagogical theory? If so, how would you do it?

Pedagogical concepts enrich our teaching, but let’s consider whether they’d work even better if we explained the reasoning behind them to students. A good starting place for exploring this question is remembering what we want from students—that they engage with material, summon their creativity, work hard to solve problems on their own, and transfer learning to other domains. Toward each of these goals, knowing at least something about your pedagogical motivation helps students.

And as the coronavirus has pushed us and our students into new territory, openness about our teaching choices might be more important than ever. We’re trying novel techniques and need students’ input about what works. And after years of learning in-person, students need our help to develop new habits and find fresh sources of motivation.

But how can we share our pedagogical reasoning? One simple way is to discuss it casually, avoiding theory in favor of stories. For example, when explaining why I have students give presentations in a Technical Communication course at Temple University, I described the commonplace experience of thinking you understand something until you try to explain it out loud. I also said—not-too-scientifically—that talking out loud to a group “uses different parts of our brains” than does writing. After their presentations, I had students work on the next revision of their papers for a few minutes, with the goal of adding content that they may not have thought of before. This non-technical explanation and the short exercise helped the class see for themselves how presenting sharpened their thinking about their research topics and encouraged them to apply new perspectives to their papers.

Another way to share pedagogical reasoning is to make it a part of a course’s content. This was the approach taken by LaVaque-Manty and Evans (2013), who, in college writing-based courses in two different disciplines, taught explicitly about metacognition, “thinking about thinking.” They used technical language, included the concept in the syllabus, and gave assignments to have students put the idea into practice. This approach elevates a pedagogical idea from a technique used for learning another skill into a valuable skill in itself: students learn how historians, writers, engineers, and scientists think about questions in their fields and how they use reflection in the real work they do as professionals. (For a similar case study of a college class, see Hall et al. (2013).)

Two thoughts about “pulling back the curtain” on your teaching techniques are useful. First, while you’ve talked out loud about your core discipline many times, you probably lack practice in putting pedagogical concepts into words. When I first talked to students about metacognition, it felt like my first day ever teaching. I knew my topic, but didn’t have a feel for explaining it. In past semesters I had assigned metacognitive self-analysis exercises but hadn’t used the technical term, hadn’t explained my own thought process behind giving the assignments. With this hazard in mind, it is good to rehearse even when you are taking the casual approach. Your presentation may be loose and informal, but the behind-the-scenes work takes time and practice.

Second, understanding the science of teaching and learning will be new to students. They might resist the topic, thinking it is merely extra work. And even if they embrace the idea in principle, the concepts and terminology are likely to be unfamiliar because previous instructors didn’t explain their own pedagogy.

In online learning in particular, both you and your students are figuring out new ways to teach and to learn. Making pedagogy a subject of class conversation will help to make this a shared journey. Some of the pedagogical reasoning behind online teaching that you might share with students includes:

why Zoom attendance is required (see the literature on the Community of Inquiry model, for example, especially regarding social presence in online learning),
what the goals of breakout room activities are (for example, peer instruction ).

And in some cases you could—with caution—invite discussion about what works well with an online learning technique and what doesn’t, allowing students to help shape the activity. With pedagogical reasoning already a part of open classroom discussion, students will have more vocabulary to talk about these issues and will feel freer sharing their thoughts. One candidate for such discussion and experimentation is the use of discussion boards in an LMS.

Whether using an informal approach or integrating it into course content, sharing pedagogy with students might still seem radical and burdensome. If it does, keep in mind that we all share our teaching philosophy on the first day of the semester, when we hand out the syllabus. The course calendar and instructional goals give students our pedagogical plan and philosophy. Let’s go deeper and keep the conversation going after day one.

References

Hall, E. A., Danielewicz, J., & Ware, J. (2013). Designs for writing: A metacognitive strategy for iterative drafting and revising. In Using reflection and metacognition to improve student learning (pp. 147–174). Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing.

LaVaque-Manty, M., & Evans, E. M. (2013). Implementing metacognitive interventions in disciplinary writing classes. In Using reflection and metacognition to improve student learning (pp. 122–146). Sterling, VA: Stylus Publishing.

Geoff Keston is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of technical communication at Temple University. Please share your thoughts on talking to students about pedagogy: gkeston@temple.edu.

Using Course-Level Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs) to Structure a Final Portfolio Assignment

Helen Bittel

This assignment grew out of a recent overhaul of my British Literature II survey course using backwards design to shift emphasis from coverage of material to student learning. It also aims to better engage the increasing number of nonmajors taking the course for General Education credit, students for whom the purpose and value of studying literature is often not self-evident.

In this final portfolio assignment, students first take each of the four Student Learning Outcomes (SLOs), choose one or two artifacts demonstrating their competency, and write a paragraph explaining how the artifact shows their achievement of the outcome. The artifacts can come from either graded work (low- or higher-stakes assignments) or from in-class work (small group activity answers, exit tickets, personal course notes). Then, they write longer answers to two additional questions: one “big picture” question that the SLOs were designed to help them answer and another question about their own individual learning.

[Editor’s note: A wide variety of online solutions are available for the creation of digital learning portfolios, starting with a simple Google Doc or Microsoft Word file. For more sophisticated options, instructors may want to consider asking students to build portfolios using Google Sites or Wix.com.)

Student responses were strongly positive across varied majors and skill levels; they reported feeling less stress and more control than with a traditional final exam, presentation, or literary analysis paper. Nobody who followed the instructions earned a poor grade, nobody plagiarized, and nearly everyone successfully connected their individual efforts to our shared goals. They were also relatively easy to grade, since for each item, I only needed to evaluate two criteria.

In addition, the SLO-driven final portfolio:

Implicitly requires students to review everything they did over the semester—in class and at home— in light of what they now know and can do and to demonstrate cumulative learning
Levels the playing field, in terms of majors and nonmajors. The portfolio requires less knowledge of disciplinary conventions than traditional assessments, and working directly with SLOs is familiar to many pre-professional majors.
Fosters metacognition, a habit of mind that supports learning well beyond a single course.
Gives students significant choice in how they demonstrate their learning and unique perspective, and thus ownership of the project
Makes visible both how course activities are connected to each other through the SLOs and how the work of the course is connected to the big picture of college learning

Helen Bittel is Director of Center for Transformational Teaching and Learning and Associate Professor of English at Marywood University.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA. Public domain image courtesy Steven Johnson.

3 Tips for a More Inclusive Syllabus

Simuelle Myers

When creating a syllabus, it is important to make sure that course goals and expectations are clear. However the syllabus can also be a place to get students excited to learn and to signal that your course is an inclusive environment. The following tips provide three simple ways to create a more inclusive syllabus and start your course off more positively from day one.

Start with a Welcoming Message

Why is this course interesting? What skills can students hope to gain? How does this course relate to their everyday lives? The answer to these questions can spark students’ interest and prepares them to explore the content of your course. Before jumping into the technicalities of grades and policies, create a welcome message or expand your course description to include reasons that students should look forward to engaging with course content, and you as the instructor. For students who may be new to college or nervous about your course, this can help to alleviate some concerns before the course even begins

Bonus tip: consider what aspects of your course or field that you found the most interesting, this can be a great place to draw inspiration for communicating its value to students.

Use Student-Centered Language

Instead of writing course goals as if they were simply for the professor or the course catalogue, write them for the students. Statements such as “at the end of this course you will be able to” can communicate the importance of the student in the learning process. It also implies an expectation of engagement, and speaks to each person in the class directly as opposed to referring to everyone in the course under the general category of “student”.

Bonus tip: When writing your syllabus, imagine that you are speaking directly to one student and describing what their journey through the course will look like.

Create an Inclusive Teaching Statement

Also known as a diversity and inclusion statement or a respect for diversity statement, an inclusive teaching statement signals explicitly that your course is inclusive of all students. An inclusive teaching statement should express the course climate you strive to create and invite students to be active participants. Many statements also encourage students to reach out to the faculty member if they have any concerns about the class and invite suggestions students may have to make the class better. See a few examples here.

Bonus tip: Students with disabilities pay close attention to how the disability statement is presented. If you are using a standard disability statement, consider expanding this to include language that lets students know that your goal is to support them.

Remember, a syllabus can be more than a contract! Instead, consider how it can be an important tool to communicate the value of inclusion, diversity and student success and add a positive start to your semester.

Simuelle Myers formerly served as Assistant Director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching. She is now Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer for Delaware County Community College.

International Education Week: Teaching Students Abroad

Stephanie Fiore

This fall, some of the international students in your classes may be located abroad in their native countries because travel restrictions have prevented them from coming to campus. Your international students are an asset to your class, bringing important diversity of experiences, cultural perspectives and learning methods. They are also eager to participate in the classes at Temple University despite the situation that has prevented them from coming to Philadelphia. Thinking intentionally about the barriers they may face and the contributions they may add to class can help all your students gain from this complex situation. Communication with your international students is key in helping them overcome challenges these conditions may pose to their learning. Here are some issues you may encounter and suggested strategies to overcome them.

Time Differences

If your students are in a different country or some US states, they may be in another time zone, sometimes as much as 13 hours different from Philadelphia time. This difference may hinder their ability to feel engaged in your class, especially if you hold synchronous class sessions that meet when it is the middle of the night for them. How can you help them participate and engage with your class community?

Strategies That Can Help:

Make sure you ask your students at the beginning of the semester if they are in a different time zone. We recommend administering a short ‘get to know you’ survey to the entire class in which you ask students where they are currently located.
Solicit students’ ideas for how to participate effectively in class.
Record your synchronous Zoom classes to allow students to access your class content at a time that makes more sense for them. This strategy will also allow all of your students with technological access or illness issues to access your course content asynchronously.
Make sure to have all of your course materials (syllabus, assignments, required and additional reading) available in Canvas so that students can access them at any time.
If you are doing active learning activities during your class time, offer an alternative way to complete work for your students in a different time zone. This alternative may look different than the in-class work but should accomplish the same goals.
Consider time differences when setting deadlines for assignments or when setting up times for exams. If a specific deadline is important, make sure all of your students understand ahead of time how to plan, and check in individually with your international students to ensure deadlines make sense for them.
If assigning group projects, determine if you can form a group of students who live in similar time zones in order to facilitate more seamless collaboration. If students in different time zones must work together, encourage them to use effective collaboration tools (such as Teams or Canvas Collaborations) in order to communicate without having to have in-person meetings.
If you have scheduled virtual office hours, provide alternatives that are convenient for students in different time zones, or provide an asynchronous way for them to reach you.

Inability to Access Technology

Internet connectivity and access to technology tools could be an issue for some students both in the US and abroad. Stable high-speed internet and access to equipment such as webcams or laptops may not be available to some students, which makes it difficult for them to participate fully in remote synchronous class sessions. For other students, the issue is not internet connectivity but internet restrictions. China, for example, has restricted access to websites and applications that include Zoom and all Google applications (including Gmail) that are widely used for teaching, as well as YouTube, Twitter, Dropbox, Skype and more.

Strategies That Can Help:

Remind students, especially new ones, to complete the TUID Photo Verification process in Portal Next Steps. Having a verified photo on file will allow IT Help Desk to provide expedient assistance.
You can test to see if particular domains are blocked in China using a site like Comparitech. First, however, a simple conversation with your students to identify any barriers to learning they face can reveal sticking points and additional insights you might not otherwise have known.
Zoom may not work in certain countries, which may make it impossible for students to attend your Zoom session and to watch your Zoom recordings. Teams, a collaboration software with similar capabilities, will also work in most countries and is available to the Temple community. However, remember that the most important thing, particularly during this time, is to make sure students can reach your course goals, not that they all reach those goals in the exact same way. Talk to your students with these issues and brainstorm together how to help them.
Some websites, social media, and streaming platforms are also blocked in other countries, and some sensitive content may also be blocked. Ask students to review class material and let you know which ones they cannot access. In some cases, you may be able to download content and post it directly to Canvas. Post videos to open directly in Canvas rather than requiring students to download videos.
If students need alternative methods for receiving and delivering materials and class assignments, consider whether email will help. ITS is working to migrate overseas students’ email accounts from Gmail to Outlook 365 in order to allow them access to email. Regardless, it is essential to communicate with them through your Canvas course announcements and messages.
Students with slow bandwidth or limited allowance of bandwidth are likely to experience slow logins, page loads and forced terminations. For synchronous online sessions, allow students to participate without video, which will increase their bandwidth, and remind them to be present through chat or voice participation.
In certain cases, students may be able to join Zoom by phone if they are having connectivity issues. Be sure to provide the complete information for the Zoom session, including how to connect to your Zoom session by phone. Note that this may not be possible in some international sites, and the phone call may have a fee attached. Check with your students if calling into your class is a possibility.
Think about bandwidth when selecting course materials such as videos. Students with low or limited bandwidth, whether in the US or abroad, may not have easy access to this material, so consider alternative ways to deliver any essential video content (audio transcription, outline, key points).
Check the technology needs for your assignments and assessments. For instance, if you use a proctoring solution that requires a webcam and a laptop, find out if your students have access to that equipment. If not, consider offering alternative assessments for those students or, better yet, provide alternatives for the entire class.

Sensitive Topics

Students may be in countries or communities where certain topics are not safe to discuss. Depending on the country, students may be reluctant to engage in conversation about topics that may be sensitive to their government or community for fear of retribution.

Strategies That Can Help:

In the first week of class, invite students to review topics on the course syllabus and flag any topics that could potentially be sensitive.
Remember that even writing to you about flagged content can prove unsafe, and students may also be reluctant to discuss any barriers publicly in class. Invite your students to speak with you privately (at a time that works for their time zone) to discuss any issues they might anticipate.
Work with your students to find creative alternatives that allow students to engage with the class content without compromising their safety. You can still, of course, teach the content you were planning to teach in the class, but perhaps your student can write about less controversial topics that will not jeopardize their safety.

The essential key to helping your international students abroad or students in another time zone is communication. Talk to students and work together to find solutions.

We invite you to engage this week with International Education Week activities being held right here at Temple University. Check out the Global Reach, Global Teach website for information on all the events happening this week. For your convenience, we’ve listed a few faculty events below. Check out also the International Collaboration Program that allows you to invite guests from our campuses abroad to your classrooms.

References:

Cox, Michelle. 2020. Guidance for Faculty: Getting and Staying Connected With Int’l Students. John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines, Cornell University. Retrieved from: https://knight.as.cornell.edu/guidance-faculty-getting-staying-connected-intl-students

The Writing Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. 2020. Teaching International Students Remotely [Blog post]. (n.d). Retrieved from https://writingcenter.unc.edu/faculty-resources/teaching-international-students-remotely/

Stephanie Fiore, Ph.D., is Assistant Vice Provost at Temple University and Senior Director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching.

Developing Globally Competent Students

Stephanie Fiore

A number of years back, I participated in a Globalization Teaching Circle (later renamed the Marco Polo Collaborative) with a cohort of thoughtful colleagues who were interested in enhancing our students’ global competencies. We asked ourselves, what does it mean to have globally competent students? We represented very different disciplinary backgrounds – from political science to music to architecture and everything in between – and the discussions were energizing and productive. Together, we developed a framework of Global Learning Goals that would help us define and guide our vision, one that I believe is even more important today.

Marco Polo Collaborative Global Learning GoalsWe want to prepare students to comprehend, communicate, and participate responsibly in a globalized world.Knowledge (influences attitudes and shapes practices)Acquires basic knowledge of the world. Demonstrates knowledge of the beliefs, values perspectives, practices and products of other culturesUnderstands our interconnectedness, the way we influence and are influenced, including knowledge of contemporary and historic global issues, processes, trends, and systemsUnderstands one’s own culture, assumptions and attitudes within a global comparative contextUnderstands that alternate perceptions and behaviors may be based in cultural differences, but that cultures and attitudes are neither static nor monolithicAttitudes (structures practices and influences apprehension of knowledge) Willingness to consider the beliefs, values, perspectives, practices of other cultures as worthy of study and thoughtWillingness to negotiate tensions between homogeneity and hybridity, individual and community, and structure and agencyDevelops a sense of responsibility that extends beyond self to community, country and worldAppreciates the language, art, religion, philosophy and material culture of different culturesPractices (enables new knowledge and development of attitudes) Uses knowledge, diverse, cultural frames of reference, and alternate perspectives to think critically and solve problems.Engages with people in other culturesActively seeks exposure to other culturesUses foreign language skills and/or knowledge of other cultures to extend access to information, experiences, and understanding

I share this framework as a way to help you think about how to help develop globally competent students. But, of course, the big question is, how do you operationalize this in your classrooms? Ask yourselves: how you can bring in voices and perspectives from other cultures? Can you look at the issues you discuss with more than one lens? In what ways can you help students stand in the shoes of those different from themselves? Can you provide access to other worldviews on contemporary issues and problems? Can you introduce case studies, literature, research that enable students to engage with international perspectives? Think about one opportunity you can add to your class this semester, then add another next semester – incremental changes are key to reworking curricula with the goal of developing globally competent students.

An easy way to start is to engage this week with International Education Week activities being held right here at Temple University. Check out the Global Reach, Global Teach website for information on all the events happening this week. For your convenience, we’ve listed a few faculty events below. Check out also the International Collaboration Program that allows you to invite guests from our campuses abroad to your classrooms.

Stephanie Fiore, PhD, is an Assistant Vice Provost at Temple University and Senior Director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching.

Teaching Through Emotional Fatigue: Strategies for Student Well-Being

Kyle Vitale, Linda Hasunuma, Cliff Rouder & Janie Egan

Student mental well-being has been significantly impacted by COVID-19 and the public health measures implemented to mitigate it. The prevalence of mental health symptoms is high among college students nationally, as it was prior to the pandemic too. According to an Active Minds survey, nearly 75% of student respondents indicated that their mental health has worsened since the pandemic began. Students reported feeling stress and anxiety, disappointment and sadness, loneliness and isolation, among other concerns.

As the pandemic continues, it is also reasonable to assume that mental health concerns will persist. Most of us are spending more time in front of screens than ever before, and it can be exhausting. This, on top of the stressors of COVID-19, the 2020 presidential election, collective efforts for racial justice, and any other issues that students and their families are facing may result in emotional fatigue, leading students to “check out,” e.g. avoid the camera, miss assignments, or skip class. Sarah Cavanagh also reminds us that anxiety appears to disrupt student performance by hijacking part of one’s working memory, leaving fewer cognitive resources to direct to the problem at hand (The Spark of Learning, 184).

Students may deeply appreciate when instructors acknowledge that this context has an impact on academic performance. Huston and DiPietro (2017) found that after major national crises or tragedies, students found it meaningful when faculty acknowledged the crisis or event–even if faculty are not experts on a particular issue. The most recent Active Minds survey also indicates that students are adapting in some key ways like being supportive of others’ mental wellness and feeling optimistic about the future.

Here are seven strategies that can support your students’ well-being and performance:

Talk openly about self-care strategies. You don’t need to be an expert, but acknowledging that we are all trying to do our best to take care of ourselves may help students feel less alone in the struggle to find balance. Self-care is about regularly prioritizing our well-being. A basic framework to start with is to build routines around sleep / rest, food, movement, and “you” time (things that help you feel like yourself). For instance, at the beginning of class, ask students to share in the chat box one way that they are taking care of themselves, or one thing that’s helping them feel good about themselves this week. Just as it helps students to encourage self-care, we can also model these practices for students, which in turn ensures that we are taking care of ourselves.
Encourage students to access support resources. Normalize help-seeking behaviors and direct students to the university’s virtual services. Check out the campus resource guide in the Student Safety Nest Guide to Support Student Well-Being. The Wellness Resource Center has a schedule of programs to provide students with information and skill-building around mental well-being, as well as alcohol and other drug education, interpersonal violence prevention and sexual health. There are also two recorded programs available for students to access any time. Additionally, Tuttleman Counseling Services is providing comprehensive virtual mental health services to students, including a variety of group opportunities and the Resiliency Resource Center Online. They’ve also created a kit to help students cope with election stress.
Be flexible with due dates and instructional methods. If you check in frequently with your students, then you’ll be better able to assess how students are progressing toward completing assignments and projects or assess their readiness to take an exam. Is it possible to move that exam date or project due date back one class period without compromising essential components of the class? Let’s not abandon the high standards and expectations we have for our students, but rather let’s adopt and promote the message that says you are here to help them meet these standards and expectations with compassion and trust. In addition to due dates, you might revisit your instructional methods themselves. Consider carefully a balance of synchronous class time — e.g. time spent with students practicing skills and discussing concepts — with asynchronous activities — e.g. reading, discussion posts, recorded lectures — that reduce time spent in Zoom sessions.
Consider your Zoom camera practices. A variety of factors can lead students to feel uncomfortable with their cameras on, including insecure housing, a need for privacy, poor internet connection, social or virtual fatigue, and more. Forcing these students to be in sight can further exacerbate existing emotional fatigue, whereas being empathetic to alternatives can provide needed rest. Consider a policy that strongly encourages cameras on, invites accomodation for valid exceptions (which need not always be shared), and uses approaches that engage all students regardless of camera. For those students who are regularly on camera, invite them to turn their cameras off periodically, suggest that they move their screens further away, and remind them that they can hide their self-view. For long class sessions, build in some short breaks so students can walk away from Zoom completely.
Build in additional check-ins. As multiple stress points assail us all, students will appreciate additional check-ins. Consider opening your next class with the question, “so, how’s everybody doing?”, or reach out individually via email. Remind students of your office hours and offer yourself as a safe individual to discuss stress or workload. Students will also appreciate “landing strips”: moments in class to pause and summarize content, poll student comprehension, and offer extra time to sit and grapple with a particularly difficult concept. At this point in 2020, assume burnout and an immense cognitive load. This extra time recognizes that students may need additional support than might be typical. Consider other strategies too for checking in with your students.
Watch for warning signs. If you see a change in behavior (a student who is consistently attending class suddenly stops attending, written work shows troubling themes, erratic behavior in class, sudden emotional outbursts in class), consider speaking with the student privately and, if warranted, referring them to appropriate campus resources (the Care Team, for instance, is available for faculty who may have concerns about students). For immediate help, you can contact Tuttleman Counseling Service or the Temple University Police Department.

These strategies are good teaching for any and all seasons, and we hope you consider adopting or keeping them once the various dust storms settle. That said, they are particularly appropriate now as we all experience emotional fatigue, and showing care for your students will help them find the intrinsic motivation to finish out this term with strength and courage.

Kyle Vitale is Associate Director of Temple University’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching (CAT). Linda Hasunuma is Assistant Director of the CAT. Cliff Rouder is Pedagogy and Design Specialist at the CAT. Janie Egan is Mental Well-Being Program Coordinator for Temple’s Wellness Resource Center.

Best Practices for Zoom Breakout Rooms

Jeff Rients

The breakout room features available in Zoom meetings allow us to craft learning experiences for our students that incorporate small group work. This allows students to test out new ideas and compare their learning to that of their peers. Importantly, this work blossoms in the lower-stakes environment of the small group, because individual students do not feel the same level of scrutiny and social pressure they face in front of their peers and the instructor.

Although breakout rooms are functionally analogous to small group work in the traditional classroom, they differ in some substantial ways. Perhaps the most important difference is that it is impossible to overhear what is happening in other small groups. Although the host of a Zoom meeting can visit each breakout room, you don’t receive any clues regarding student progress (or lack thereof) in the other rooms. Your ability to “read the room” is reduced in comparison to patrolling the room during in-person small group activities. Here are some strategies you can use for better oversight and overall improvement of your breakout room activities:

Clarify instructions

Sometimes breakout room activities don’t work out as planned because the students arrive at their room and don’t know what to do. Whenever possible give written instructions that you share via the File tool in the Chat window. You can also put these instructions on a slide and review them orally before sending students to the breakout rooms. This gives students a chance to review the task and ask questions before they leave the main meeting. If your activity has a hard time limit (and most activities should) include that on the instruction sheet and use the timer option when you set up the breakout rooms.

Keep lines of communication open

Remind students that they can use the Ask for Help button in the breakout room to reach out to you. You may also want to remind students that they can leave their breakout room and come back to the main room to ask a question. You can also use the Broadcast a Message to All tool to send short reminders or clarifications out to all rooms. (But keep in mind that such messages don’t stay up for long, so you may wish to broadcast important information more than once.) And don’t forget that both the host and co-hosts can visit any room they want, though co-hosts must be manually placed in a breakout room by the host first before they are able to move among the other rooms.. You could even appoint some students as co-hosts with the task of checking in on the breakout rooms.

Encourage accountability

Perhaps the easiest thing you can do to energize students in breakout rooms is to create activities that require some sort of reporting out to the instructor and/or the rest of the class. The simplest approach would be to call on students after the activity, asking them to share their results. (This technique works best when you warn the students ahead of time that you are going to do this; you can also put this fact in the instructions you share.) Another approach is to create a worksheet that each student must complete and hand in via the Canvas Assignment tool, with a deadline set for the end of the Zoom session. Or you can build the activity around a Canvas Quiz that the students work on together while in the breakout rooms.

Vary activities

Sometimes student participation wanes simply because they are used to the routine of the classroom. A new breakout room activity that requires different skills for success or that poses a new challenge can re-activate disengaged students.

Temple instructors needing additional assistance with breakout rooms or other educational technology issues are invited to visit our Virtual Drop-In Ed Tech Lab, a Zoom room that is open 8:30am-5pm Monday through Friday. There you’ll find our ed tech specialists ready to help you, with no appointment needed. Alternatively, you can make an appointment for a one-on-one consultation with a member of either our pedagogy or ed tech teams. We’re here to help you!

Jeff Rients is Senior Teaching and Learning Specialist at Temple’s Center for the Advancement of Teaching.

Make a Plan to Handle Hot Moments

Stephanie Fiore

Unexpected “hot moments” in a class can arise anytime and can be stressful for faculty and students. When unexpected conflict and incivility occur, faculty often feel unsure how to handle the situation, so planning some strategies now can help you feel better prepared to navigate these moments. This is especially important in our particular moment with a major election around the corner, social justice conversations a part of everyday life, and COVID-19 making all of us tired and less able to cope with stress. Here are some strategies to help you bring these moments to a more productive conclusion:

Know your own triggers. If you think in advance about the strong feelings you might have on certain issues, you will cope better in the moment. Practice some small moves (deep breathing, counting, an emotional center) that you can deploy in the moment.

De-escalate the situation. Whether it happens through planned course discussion or through casual student conversation, if tensions start to rise in your classroom, it is important to first lower the boiling point.

When conflict arises, you may address the issue immediately if you feel prepared, or tell the class that you are tabling that conversation until the next class meeting. You may wish to defer the conversation to provide the space you need to strategize your approach or calm your own strong feelings.
Before opening up discussion, refer the class back to the guidelines for civil conversation you created together.
Assist students in clarifying comments that have sparked conflict. Students are often not practiced in articulating perspectives with which they may be grappling, or responding effectively when their views are challenged. Try asking: “What do you mean when you say X?” or “I heard Y. Is that what you meant to say?”
If the conversation is primarily between two students or a small group, inviting others who have not yet spoken to voice an opinion can direct dialogue back to the entire group and grant you greater control as the facilitator.
Validate thoughtful contributions to the conversation, even if they are challenging or contrary. Remind students that their questions and thoughts are important and worth sharing and listening to.
Discourage comments that seek to devalue a point of view. Acknowledge, when appropriate, that a widely-held view has been raised: “Many people share this perspective. What might their reasons be?” followed by “Why might others disagree or object to this position?”
If there is a student or group of students who seem particularly disturbed by the situation, arrange a time to meet with them separately as soon as you can after the incident. This will give the student(s) an opportunity to share with you context that may not immediately be apparent to you.

Use It As a Teaching Moment: Remember that your role as an instructor is important in these moments as you can teach students the importance of reflection, listening carefully to all voices, and critical thinking. Here are some simple activities that can turn “hot moments” into teaching moments:

Quick Write – Pose a question or prompt to your students and give them a few minutes to construct an answer. Or ask students to write down their feelings and opinions about the topic at hand. This creates a reflective break that gets the entire class involved and gives students time to sort their emotions and thoughts.
Think, Pair, Share – Students take time to think about a question or prompt and then are put into pairs or small groups to explain their answers. Finally, the entire class comes together to share what groups have discussed.
Circle of Voices – After being given a moment to reflect, each student in the room or group is given a few minutes to share his or her answer without interruption. The key is, nobody can reply to another answer until everyone has spoken. Once the “circle” is complete, the floor is open for discussion.
Fact Finding – Help students sort out facts, opinion, evidence, and questions about the topic by having students list what they know, what is in question, and what they need more information on. Then make a plan with students to find out what they need to know.

Follow up: Talk outside of class with the students most directly involved in the moment, to show your commitment to their success in the course and to help them learn from the experience. If you feel that a student has crossed a line in a conversation, take some time to discuss the incident with them about ways to manage these kinds of conversations in the future.

With some advance planning and strategies ready in your teaching toolbelt, “hot moments” won’t have to be quite so stressful for you or for your students, and you might succeed in deepening their learning.

Adapted from University of Michigan, Center for Research on Teaching & Learning: Responding to Difficult Moments, Vanderbilt University, Center for Teaching: Handling Difficult Dialogues, Lee Warren, Derek Bok Center, Harvard, Managing Hot Moments in the Classroom

Next topic in the Teaching, Learning, Justice and Inclusion blog series:

November 9: Supporting Students in a Time of Anxiety

Stephanie Fiore, PhD, is an Assistant Vice Provost at Temple University and Senior Director of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching.