Pandemic Teaching: A Survival Guide for College Faculty: Lion Tamers Guide to Teaching, #1

Pandemic Teaching: A Survival Guide for College Faculty

By Kevin Patton

Lion Tamers Guide to Teaching

Publisher: Lion Den Inc

© 2020 Kevin Patton. All rights reserved. You may not copy or redistribute this work in any form without express written permission of the copyright holder. Publisher: Lion Den Inc.

Revised April 19, 2020

About the author

Kevin Patton is an award-winning college professor who has taught at secondary, college, university, and graduate levels in the biological sciences, with an emphasis in human anatomy and physiology. After taking an early retirement from full-time teaching, he continues to teach part-time in online undergraduate courses and in a graduate program that trains college faculty. He is the author of several popular textbooks and manuals. Kevin is also a well-known blogger and podcaster in teaching and learning. He says that his love for teaching goes back to his youth, when he was an apprentice lion tamer —and he still loves engaging even the most challenging of students!

Lion tamers guide to teaching

Lion Tamers Guide to Teaching is a collection of resources for teachers to improve teaching effectiveness as well as rapport with students. Series editor Kevin Patton says that all I really need to know about teaching I learned as a lion tamer, because his early experience as a wild animal trainer and apprentice lion tamer taught him not only the core principles of learning science—it taught him how to gain the trust of students and form the kind of empathetic and compassionate bond that promotes learning.

Why a survival guide?

Introduction

Since you’ve opened this book, you probably already know why you are looking for help during this unexpected challenge as a teacher. You want some ideas. You want some support. You want to survive this. But to clarify my intent, let me share a few introductory points.

Effective teaching in the absence of formal training

As college faculty, very few of us are trained thoroughly in the art and science of teaching. Our training was mostly focused on our scholarly discipline—not on teaching practice. Therefore, it’s often hard enough to get our teaching to be effective when conditions are ideal. But during the disruption of a pandemic, we face even greater challenges. We’re just not trained well enough in teaching practice to be able to do this confidently. This book will help you quickly set priorities and meet those challenges.

Advice from a veteran educator

Besides having formal training in teaching practice, plus nearly four decades of successful college teaching both on-campus and fully remote—and sometimes a hybrid of those two extremes—I’m also an experienced mentor of college faculty. That is, I’ve made a study of what works in college teaching and I regularly interact with current and future faculty in developing the mindset and skills needed to engage students effectively to help them learn for the long term.

I’ve been there. Sort of. This is my first pandemic, of course, but I’ve already had to quickly move from decades of on-campus teaching to fully remote teaching. I’ve made a lot of mistakes. However, eventually I picked myself up, dusted myself off, and powered through all those fumbling first tries to become successful. Sharing the results of my failure and triumphs may help you during your transition without having to suffer the trials and errors first-hand.

I teach human anatomy and physiology (A&P) and much of the content of this book is derived from my blog, website, and podcast for A&P faculty called The A&P Professor® at theAPprofessor.org. Therefore, my examples tend to come from that experience. But these are just examples—the principles and practices apply just as easily to the course you teach.

There is no box

This book isn’t about inside the box strategies, nor is it about outside the box strategies. There is no box right now.

Some of what I have to say flies in the face of what you may be used to, what your intuition is telling you is the right way to proceed, and what many of your administrators and educational technology staff may be advising. But I ask you to trust me that as earnest and helpful these folks are trying to be, they have not necessarily been down the road themselves. They’ve not made the mistakes I’ve made. Besides, they’re often thinking of what can work in a well-planned, pre-pandemic world that simply does not exist right now. I’m just asking you to keep an open mind with no boxes.

Do one thing for me as you explore my advice. Think about the advice you give your students. Don’t they balk at your advice to study regularly rather than cram at the last minute? Don’t they often fail to trust your experience in such things and instead go with what they feel must be right—what all the other students seem to be doing—and use the worst strategies for self-learning? Yeah, we all experience that. I’m asking to not be like that. Be open to my advice, even if it feels wrong at first.

My purpose here is to give you some strategies and tips to get you started—not to dictate exactly what you should do in your own course. I hope to spark ideas, not guide you step by step. If you find even one thing in any section of this book that sparks an idea for your teaching, or is helpful in any way, that's a win. My faculty trainees know that Kevin's Law of Professional Development states, "If I learn just one useful thing in a professional development experience, it’s worth it."

Feel free to either read this book or raid this book. That’s how our students use their textbook, right? Sometimes reading a whole chapter and at other times skimming to find specific topics that meet immediate needs. Same here.

Yeah, I guess you’ve already noticed that this book written in an extremely informal style. Like I’m sitting across from you at the café and chatting with you. One reason is that some of it is based on content from my podcast, which is delivered in my own quirky conversational style—often derived directly from a transcript of a spoken audio segment. But it’s also partly because I’m putting this book together hurriedly. Because, well, it’s an emergency! If I had a couple of years to polish it, it’d be super sleek and shiny smooth. Probably. Possibly. But we need this this information now, so there’s no time for polishing.

First things first

It had to come sooner or later: a pandemic forcing social distancing measures that include moving face-to-face courses to a remote format with little or no lead time. And now it's time. Yikes!

I’ve long adhered to the practice of being prepared for having to be off campus for up to two or three weeks. In case I get the flu. Or a family member gets sick. Or our campus building catches fire or is hit by a tornado or earthquake. Things happen. We hope they don’t, but it makes sense to have some strategy ready to implement in case they do.

For on-campus courses, I’ve always had a set of either on-campus learning activities that students could do on their own in my absence, or things ready to put online for them do to keep learning, or a combination of both. By doing that, even though I’ve seldom had to use these emergency plans, I’ve developed a mindset to be able to think through this new pandemic shutdown of campuses as soon as I saw it about to be implemented.

Hopefully, you started getting prepared for this in your own ways a few weeks before your campus closed. At least mulled it over a bit. Great! Let’s leverage that into actionable steps we can take now.

In the following pages, I have a lot of tips to consider when you face the situation of quickly converting all or part of your course to a remote format. In the next section, I have a series of tips and strategies to consider. A few of them may seem redundant, but that’s intentional. In teaching and learning, I’ve found that if we come back around to a concept a few different times, from a few different angles, we see it more clearly and learn it more deeply. In later sections, I come back to some of these concepts yet again, but in a broader way, to add some extra layers that you will find useful.

Tips & strategies for moving to remote learning

Don't forget to breathe

It's going to be okay. Folks will expect our best effort in trying, but not perfect results. How could they? We all understand that it's not even Plan B—it's an unplanned emergency fallback. Stay calm—and don't forget to breathe. If you can't calm down, at least act calm when dealing with students. They'll need reassurance and it's up to us to put our calm faces on.

Not only will your students need reassurance—reminders to keep breathing—but they'll be disoriented. Probably more disoriented than you are right now. Yes, it is possible to be more disoriented than you and I are right now. We need to keep things organized in as clear and as simple a manner possible. Likewise, we need to be clear about our