I encourage my students to reach out for help whenever they need it. I end F2F classes with this reminder, end emails with this reminder, and lately, end my Twitch streams with it. I absolutely love it when they come for help. I find that 9 times out of 10, just talking to students about an assignment is enough to clarify most questions. Lately though, it seems like I’ve been communicating quite a bit more than usual with my students about their assignments. Seems reasonable, given the switch to remote learning, but the interesting thing has been that the questions are not about assignments for my class, but other assignments students have for other classes, taught by my colleagues.
I don’t mind helping students with work from other classes, but I do worry about instructing them to do something that differs from what my colleague may have told them. I wish students were comfortable with going to the professor who assigned the work, but I’m aware that they aren’t always receiving feedback that they find helpful. I think that’s a topic for another day though, as it isn’t the reason I set out to write this post. Recently, I jotted down a set of instructions I’ve found myself repeating to students as I counsel them through someone else’s assignment. I thought I’d share.
This Weekly Project Planner GDocs template can be used in F2F and Online courses to scaffold student organization and planning as well as serve as a formative assessment tool.
Like a bazillion other people last week, I participated in a Zoom meeting with my work colleagues. It went fine, even for the less tech savvy in our crowd. WHY HAVEN’T WE BEEN DOING THIS FOR YEARS? As a result, I plan to cut the number of actual F2F meetings I attend from here on out in half. There is no reason to try to find a physical space and common time between a decent number of people when we can just Zoom. If some people want to meet together, so be it. But requiring physical bodies in physical spaces at the same time for routine informational meetings has always seemed ridiculous to me, even more so since the COVID-19 cultural event.
I have really digressed from my reason for writing with that rant, but I feel better and I think I’m ready to roll now.
One thing I noticed as a reoccurring theme in my department meeting last week was faculty who were struggling to know how they could keep students moving on larger class projects with no physical presence to check in, assess how students were progressing with their work and provide feedback. While this is certainly a difficult task to manage with 100+ college students when you see them a few times a week, it seemed to be a challenge many of my colleagues were facing and concerned about in our rapid transition to online learning.
