Reflect, Revise, Relax, and Revel: Looking Back While Moving Forward
Great courses and significant levels of student engagement and learning don’t happen by accident. Often, they are borne out of great course ideas that just don’t go as well the first time around as we’d planned or hoped: many successful teachers will tell you that it takes a third iteration before the course truly aligns with their initial vision.
So how do the courses that “flopped” become fantastic? The secret is not really a secret at all! Reflect on the first iteration of your course and make revisions before the second offering. This is especially important if you're new to teaching online, and will allow you to relax and revel as you strategically reinforce and refine your approaches.
Reflect
As the teaching and learning landscape seems to be shifting daily in response to a global pandemic, and many of us feel we’re scrambling to salvage our students’ current courses by moving them online, the thought of being “reflective” might seem like luxury. However, most Canadian universities have already committed to offering all courses online for the spring and summer terms, and this could be our new normal for some time. For this reason, it’s critical that we start taking note of what is and is not working. While not exhaustive, here is a list of questions you can consider asking yourself at the end of the day or week. Because many of us feel mentally, physically, and emotionally overloaded, make notes on your syllabus, or start a document or spreadsheet and briefly jot down your answers so that you can decrease the current demands on your brain and easily revisit them later on.
What worked well today/this week?
What did I struggle with? What did my students struggle with (this could be anything that impacted learning and teaching-- directly related to the course or coping with factors outside of the course)?
I pivoted “in the moment” to improve student learning (i.e. you moved away from your original plan to be responsive to student needs). What made me decide to make that change? Did the adjustment work? Would I do it again? Would I make a different change from the original plan?
What was I feeling “in class” today/this week? What were my students feeling?
What do I need to learn more about for my students and I to be successful next class/next course? Can I learn this by reading articles, blogs, tweets? From my colleagues? From the teams at the Centre for Learning and Teaching or Academic Technology Services?
Did we meet our essential learning outcomes?
What decisions did I make, and why?
What goals did I set for my students and myself, and what did we accomplish? What can we celebrate today/this week?
Do I need to get some informal, formative feedback from my students to better answer any of the questions above?
Revise
Depending on your answers to the reflection questions, you may want to reinforce decisions/strategies, or make changes to your course, for the next class or the next week. Some changes you may decide to leave for the next iteration of the course.
Quickly adapt your plan based on challenges that emerged from your reflections:
What do you need to do now to ensure your current students’ success in the course, as well as maintain their well-being and your own?
What needs to be done before you teach the course again?
What would you like to do in the future, when things are less chaotic and less urgent?
What changes do you have the capacity to make? What is sustainable? Can you make these changes incrementally?
Relax
All this reflection has enabled you to “iron out” many of the wrinkles you first encountered and reinforce good decisions you’ve already made. Based on what you’ve learned, you feel more confident about the next term. You’ve becoming more familiar with technology, learned more about online pedagogy (good teaching practices in person are good teaching practices online!), figured out a few (new?) strategies to engage and connect with your students, and identified sources of support (including your colleagues who’ve been online teaching in TBP [Terms Before Pandemic]). You’ve got this!
Revel
You and your students have made it through the unimaginable and the unpredictable. You’ve made adjustments to your activities, assessments and expectations, that are fair and compassionate. Your students have ‘succeeded’ as well as you all could have hoped (success can vary depending on different contexts). You’re designing the next iteration of your course, or applying what you learned to a new course and based on your first two “Rs” (Reflect and Revise), you know it’s going to be great…and the one after that, even better. Revel in what you and your students have accomplished together, and in what you and your future students will co-create.