Academics

Teaching Insights

SSCD Testimonials on Spring 2020 Teaching

"I did not try to make this quarter feel normal. It was not normal. I provided structure, intellectual solace, and a ready ear."

Erin McFee -- SSCD Teaching Fellow, PhD '19 (Comparative Human Development)

 

This page features reflections on Spring teaching from instructors across the SSCD, arranged by themes and captured in their own words.  Many of these personal accounts illustrate “best practices” that can be found in our new Teaching Resources page; these two sites should be read as complementary.

As we prepare for teaching in the coming academic year, we can draw from the creative insights and lessons of our colleagues in the recently completed Spring term.

    While teaching was stressful and challenging due to the lack of child care and other things, these courses surprisingly turned out to be two of the most rewarding teaching experiences I've had! The remote nature of my new water class was daunting but ultimately allowed me to do a more creative and flexible course than I originally envisioned. I don't know if it was the course topic, structure or lack of other extracurricular activities for students, but they were really engaged and truly went above and beyond. (Sabina Shaikh, ENST)

    I did not try to make this quarter feel normal. It was not normal. I provided structure, intellectual solace, and a ready ear. Classroom conversations covered the materials but also tied nearly every session to what was going on in the world as well; this was not a hard thing to do, given the readings. Student reviews that mentioned ties to current events very much liked that element. Many students took extensive advantage of office hours to talk about things ranging from their parents’ messy divorces to racial discrimination in the campus sororities (it’s appalling, by the way). (PIR)

    I did have a couple of students wander off the reservation a bit, but one that I suspected was abusing the situation later asked me to be his formal mentor and, as it turns out, is truly struggling in a variety of ways. Given how hard it was for me to keep my own train on the tracks at this time with double their age and experience, I think this past quarter was a time for grace, not “forged by fire” - and I am often quite inclined towards the latter. (PIR)

    One frequently-cited key to success in the classroom was to expect the unexpected and prepare for it. In the words of Eike Marten, “No matter how much preparation, there will be students with terrible internet connections, outdated laptops, or not even a laptop, difficulties getting their stuff to work, difficulties participating because they are in a dramatically different time zone, mixing up the time because they are in a different time zone...” Maintaining a spirit of compassion, generosity, and flexibility was seen as critical to the distance enterprise. To again cite Marten, “Generous with the students could mean not making them participate when it’s 3 am their time, or at least not every week, and figuring out an alternative way for them to participate; sharing the PowerPoints from student presentations on Canvas, but also my written introductory notes...creating an audio recording of the sessions, allowing people to participate with just audio if their internet can’t handle video, etc.” (SCS)

     

    The Basics

    Surveying students in advance about their time-zones and technological access and then attempting to trouble-shoot any deficiencies sooner rather than later was recommended as crucial to getting classes off and running. (SCS)

    I hooked up my computer directly to my router with an ethernet cable. This seemed to help the connectivity although mine was not too bad with wireless. (PIR)

    Having a good pair of noise cancelling headphones with a microphone helps! (PIR)

    I tried using one of the inexpensive writing pads as a whiteboard, but found it impossible to write a legibly using it. I just purchased an iPad which definitely works better. (Dave Schabes, PBPL) 

    Definitely practice some lectures prior to week one.  I ran a short intro lecture (15 minutes) before the first week to make sure people had connectivity, and could see and hear me.  This was very valuable.  Especially practice "screensharing" where you go between say, yourself, your slides and your whiteboard.  I would be lecturing away and students start sending me chat messages reminding me that I hadn't switched to my slides. (Dave Schabes, PBPL)

    Due to interruptions in shipping services, a great many students in the Spring experienced issues getting physical copies of the coursebooks delivered in a timely manner. As soon as instructors have a class roster, they should contact students with the book list that they will need for the class.  (CSPT)

    For instructors who are technophobic or otherwise anxious about remote teaching, it can be very useful to write reminders for the actual class sessions on Post-It notes for basics like “are student mics on, have I shared my screen, did I activate the record button” (if one is not doing this automatically for every session), and so forth. (SCS)

    Definitely conduct an early (week 2 or 3) student feedback survey. The results from the one Harris ran convinced me to make a number of changes. (Dave Schabes, PBPL)

    Using Zoom

    In the Zoom sessions, I [used] the waiting room, then I delegated one student to let all the others in from the waiting room, then muted all participants upon entry, then had that one student unmute students in order as they made comments--so that at all times there were two participants un-muted--me and the student who was talking. (PIR)

    Students tend to be very sensitive to the risk of interrupting or talking over one another on Zoom, and the platform itself does not deal well with this phenomenon, which is why it is best for everybody’s mics to be muted when someone else is speaking. Developing a system for keeping a queue of who wishes to speak early on can facilitate free-flowing conversation. For example, using the one-finger/two-finger model to allow students to indicate when they have something to add to the conversation, versus when they have a specific response to what has just been said, could be helpful. (CSPT)

    Students who are able to connect their camera might still experience significant audio interruption. Students who experience audio issues should be encouraged to call in via the Zoom phone connection, which is a reliable and stable alternative. It is worth reiterating these workaround options to students over the course of the quarter, rather than relying on them to return to the syllabus where advice like this is offered initially. (CSPT)

    I found Polls in Zoom better than Breakout Rooms. Students told me the breakout sessions were boring (I gave them short problems to discuss). Polls, while cumbersome to set up in Zoom, seemed to help students consolidate what I'd just presented and helped me see where they were "getting it" or not. I plan to prepare more thoughtful Poll questions as one change for this quarter. (Dave Schabes, PBPL)

    We used the chat function [of Zoom] quite a bit early on, but it dwindled on its own. I think people find it kind of distracting (I do!). It also seems important that everyone be a part of the same conversation. By the end, we used it judiciously for practical things and the occasional joke. (PIR)

    The chat function in Zoom should be used judiciously, as it can be difficult for an instructor to keep an eye out for chat while teaching. The job of monitoring chat, which students can be encouraged to use primarily to signal technical issues, can be assigned to a TA if one is available. (SCS)

    Chat seemed to work much better than the hand-raise function for students asking questions. (Dave Schabes, PBPL)

    While some instructors preferred electronic hand-raising, many found that it was easier to keep track of students’ questions if they simply raised their hands in the old-fashioned way. (SCS)

    Using Panopto

    Panopto worked extremely well to record and present lectures using Powerpoint. (PSYC/MIND)

    To manage screen fatigue, lecturers broke up their lectures into several thematically organized segments (max of 20 min.). Each segment could be ended by providing links to videos of phenomena discussed, online demonstrations of paradigms used, or mini-quizzes or thought questions to answer before proceeding to the next segment of the lecture. One lecturer also used Panopto’s in-video quiz feature to embed quiz questions into her lecture. Students reported the quizzes helped them stay focused while watching, and it has the added benefit that because it is integrated with Canvas and reports scores directly into the gradebook, you can easily see who is and isn’t watching the videos, and when. (PSYC/MIND)

    Other Tools

    The online annotation tool Perusall (https://perusall.com), supported by Canvas, was found to be a useful way to allow instructors and students to collaboratively highlight and comment on PDFs. (SCS)

    Try Kahoot (https://kahoot.com) to embed gamified content into your synchronous class sessions.  A student suggested this, and it worked great. (PSYC/MIND)

    Set up a Slack (http://slack.com) channel for easier communication with and between students. Slack is a platform built to facilitate online communication within organizations, especially coders, but it’s very easy to use. (PIR)

    Borja Sotomayor, in Computer Science, started a podcast in which he interviews software developers about their approach to their work, as a way to bring outside expertise into his course. (CCT)

    David Finkelstein, in Philosophy, uploaded weekly audio lectures as MP3 files to Canvas, allowing students to listen while walking outside, doing the dishes, or sitting with the text. (CCT)

    In an online class with more than 70 students, every session we had 8~10 students "sit in the front row." That is, these students were asked to turn on their video and interact with the instructor and with one another freely during the class. Other students entered their questions or comments in Chat before they were called upon to join the conversation. (Guanglei Hong, CHDV)

    In June-July 2020, I taught six days of Pathways in Human Rights. This course offered the students 2+ hours per day of “synchronous” class and 2+ hours per day of “asynchronous” activities.  The challenges in that course were teaching and building community among students from around the world, none of whom knew each other.  We held synchronous classes at 9 AM Chicago time and pretty consistently had 100% attendance; for the students in China the class was at 10 PM and for West Coast students at 7 AM  We recorded the synchronous classes for any students who could not attend “live.”   The synchronous classes consisted of short live lectures by the instructor with discussion and Q&A in between. At the beginning of the course, I divided the students into 6 permanent Work Groups of 5 students each, based on their time zones of residence (which included all across the US, China, Qatar, and the U.K.).  The Work Groups met 4 times per week to engage in asynchronous activities. The students convened their own Work Groups for their asynchronous classes any time of their choosing before the next “live” class. (Susan Gzesh, HMRT)

    Teach synchronous sessions in small groups of students (about 10); ask everyone to “unmute” and to raise their hand as usual to participate. (PIR)

    I found I taught more slowly than in person; i.e. was able to cover less material. I tried to sum up the remaining material in a post-lecture recording, but students did not like having to watch more video, so I simply cut some material and tried to cover it via more extensive homework questions. (Dave Schabes, PBPL)

    By the end of spring quarter, I started beginning class by posting a question in the chat box. Each student wrote on the question for 7 minutes, and then on the count of three we each posted our responses. Students then wrote for 5 minutes on the post directly following their own. This gave students ready at hand comments for class discussion, and I was able to point at people’s remarks and ask for more explanation. (PIR)

    I made a point of typing up key ideas and discussion questions as simple bullet points, distributing them to the class beforehand (on Canvas) and using the share-screen function to review them during class. (PIR)

    I was not able to run classes totally normally because a number of my students had connection issues. So I would have one normal class discussion each week, and for the second session, the class split up into 3 small groups. Two of the small groups had Zoom discussions which I would drop into, and one small group had their discussion on Canvas. The Canvas small group was for students who had connection issues. I think this approach worked really well. Breaking the class up into small groups also facilitated better discussions than was possible in a large Zoom group. One of the Zoom groups in particular really got along well and had incredible discussions. (PIR)

    I ran my two class sessions each week differently. Tuesday class: students would all post 1-2 discussion questions on Canvas by 8am. They were encouraged to read them before class and draw on them throughout. I’d come in having highlighted some of their questions, and invoked them in our discussions. Students seemed to appreciate this.  Thursday class: students wrote a 200-400 word reading response and posted it by 8 AM. I skimmed all of them before starting class. This was a bit of work, but it meant that most students came well prepared to talk about a few key themes. Students posted these responses to a shared google doc - shared with 2-3 classmates (assigned groups).  Students were asked to read the responses of those in their group before each class. (I switched the groups up half way through the Quarter.) At the beginning of the [second] class, students were automatically shuffled into their designed 3-4 person groups. They spent 10-15 minutes talking with one another about their reading responses and pulling out key themes. I hopped from one group to the other as they did this. We then reconvened and had a whole-class discussion for the remaining time. Students generally liked the Tuesday/Thursday split format. It became clear, though, when I did midterm evals (highly recommended), that they generally preferred the whole-class discussions over the small-group discussions. (PIR)

    Student evaluations suggested that the format that I used for the courses worked well, which was a shorter 50-minute class time, breakout groups, and more intensive discussion posts. (PIR)

    Using breakout rooms on Zoom can reinforce small group interactions. But instructors should be wary of assuming that students are more likely to engage with one another in breakout rooms. Many students report that while these breakout sessions can be helpful in generating conversation, this is not automatic. Indeed, even students who know one another quite well have found themselves in breakout rooms in which nobody has volunteered to start off the conversation. These breakout sessions will be most effective, therefore, when students are given a clear set of questions or tasks to guide their group exercises. It is also helpful for instructors to move through the breakout rooms to answer any questions or help cultivate conversation. (CSPT)

    Mind and most PSYC classes opted to post [recordings of] each lecture at the meeting time of the class but students could view them at any point after that. This not only enabled asynchronous viewing for multiple time zones but allowed students to view the material at their own pace and review it at later points (it probably discouraged note-taking however which is an important skill). (PSYC/MIND)

    [Based on Spring teaching experiences,] I created a "Sample Remote Intro to International Relations" page, which contains the material to a sample asynchronous lecture. The lecture is intended to be brief (~30 min total), is broken up into smaller segments (~5 min each), and contains class questions aimed at engaging the students as they watch the videos. (Paul Poast, PLSC)

    Some classes posted Panopto video of lecture ahead of class time and used the class meeting time to hold live Q&A sessions. These were more effective when a set of questions were prepared and posted in advance. Instructors also found many students preferred to answer via chat and then be called on to expand on their answer in the Zoom room.  (PSYC/MIND)

    Many instructors shortened class time from 80 minutes to an hour, although virtually everyone who did this reported that class conversations routinely exceeded the limit.  One instructor found it useful to occasionally add 20-30-minute optional sessions to the hour to allow those who wanted to leave to do so while allowing students who wished to discuss supplemental material (authors’ biographies and intellectual contexts, for instance) an opportunity to stay longer. (SCS)

    My new class (Water: Economics, Policy and Society - ENST) explored historical and contemporary connections of water and society through topics, data visualizations and analyses, and storytelling. The course featured assigned readings and videos, pre-recorded lectures on the economics of water; [virtual] guest speakers with expertise in landscape planning, water affordability, water law and policy, and environmental journalism; data labs; discussion board forums and threads and Canvas chats. Students participated in two related synchronous sessions per week, the first focused on a water topic and the second applied data to the topic using an interactive data tutorial and lab.

    Sample class week on water pricing

    • Monday: Students would respond to prompts on the Canvas discussion board related to assigned readings, videos or podcasts on water affordability, and an instructor-created prerecorded lecture on water pricing. 
    • Tuesday: A guest speaker with expertise on water affordability joined a class discussion facilitated by assigned student leaders. Students were then given an assignment and Canvas quiz in which they calculated and compared different metrics for water affordability. 
    • Thursday: In the second synchronous session, the teaching assistants and instructor would present the students with a data set on water prices, and walk through an interactive data lab to create visualizations, maps or analyses of water affordability throughout the Chicago region or country. 

    Throughout the quarter, students were assigned weekly as discussion leaders, for which they conducted interviews with the guest speakers, created water data visualizations or led discussion of readings and video material. (Sabina Shaikh, ENST)

     

    Using the first class session to ask students what they want from a seminar class, and how they think discussions should operate, is a useful strategy that a number of instructors used in the Spring. (CSPT)

    To help students extract and organize overarching questions from the week’s topic and lecture/reading material, have students produce a conceptual map of how other students’ discussion board posts fit together. Use these to jointly construct a roadmap for discussion at the beginning of Zoom class. (PSYC/MIND)

    After brief intro to the agenda for the class meeting, begin class with very short and easy breakout room exercise to get students talking with each other and ready to participate in full discussion. (PSYC/MIND)

    Set discussion up as Jeopardy game or use Kahoot. This was a student’s idea and it worked exceptionally well. (PSYC/MIND)

    I didn't innovate so much as adapt a teaching strategy I already use for online discussion. I usually ask students to post short comments on the readings of the day on Canvas. I tell them not to simply summarize the readings but to use the post as an opportunity to communicate with me and their classmates about some aspect of the readings that moved them, provoked them, or otherwise elicited some reaction. I've found reading these posts very helpful in giving me a better sense of how students are thinking about the readings. I often reference their comments in class discussion, and sometimes they lead me to expand or clarify my lectures. I use this strategy in seminar courses with 19 students and in lecture courses with 75. It's time intensive, sure, but well worth it as a reading check for students and a comprehension check for the instructor. Teaching remotely, I've found that having these comments to draw upon was extremely helpful in stimulating discussion. The problem with online teaching is that it's hard to get a sense of the whole class and of how individual students are reacting to ideas (sometimes just by the way they look). Students feel that they're not seen or that they can hide. Having the posts handy allowed me to bring up their points in class and ask them to elaborate. They also get to read other's thoughts, and so online discussion prepares the way for in-class discussion. We often ended up having very good discussions online because we already had a sense from reading the discussion thread on Canvas what positions people were taking. Discussion online spilled over into live discussions, and these became an opportunity to explain, elaborate, and justify. (Marco Garrido, SOCL)

    I had students work on collective googledocs around discussion questions I’d given them, and they each added their contributions in a different color font, which really helped with the challenges of grading group work individually. I think it also made the whole exercise feel less formal because there’s an element of ridiculousness to writing about Tocqueville in hot pink, which is really helpful if you have students who feel paralyzed by the idea of writing something their peers are going to see. (PIR)

    At the beginning of [an intensive summer session, online] course, I divided the students into 6 “permanent” Work Groups of 5 students each, based on their time zones of residence (which included all across the US, China, Qatar, and the U.K.).  The Work Groups met 4 times per week to engage in asynchronous activities. The Work Group met together – at a time of their choosing - to engage in a discussion of selected texts (both readings and short videos).  They could meet on Zoom or another platform.  After the discussion, a “reporter” would write a summary of their discussion, or each student would post a comment on the material, or each student would write a graded assignment. Students really liked engaging in unmoderated, substantive discussions with each other in a small group.  When I asked if they would have liked a grad student or upper-class College student to have functioned as a moderator, they say that they preferred not having any “authority figure” as part of the group as students felt freer to voice their opinions.  They also appreciated getting to better know a small group, saying that their discussions often bridged into personal topics once they completed the academic assignment. (Susan Gzesh, HMRT)

    Use asynchronous group exercises to have students begin conceptual and analytic work before class sessions.  Groups can produce a common document (googledoc, web page, concept map) to track their work and screen share during Zoom meetings. (PIR)

    Use breakout rooms for small group discussions; one option is to base group divisions on discussion posts so students can further develop their initial thoughts on the readings. (PIR)

    My section was a mix of students who generally hadn’t been together all year, and since I didn’t know any of them from before either I think there was a lot less interest in just seeing each other than other sections might have had. I gave my students the option between having “normal” class on Zoom twice a week or doing a mix of asynchronous work Tuesday and Zoom discussion Thursdays. The overwhelming response from my students was that they wanted the asynchronous work (and judging from my evaluations most of them really enjoyed it).  The asynchronous component had 2 parts. I asked them individually to do a close reading before Tuesday, and then Tuesday-Wednesday they would respond to 2-3 discussion questions I’d come up with in groups of 4-5 on Google Docs. Many of them did a really good job responding to each other through the group discussions they did on Google Docs, and having prepared something written from Tuesdays meant that just about every student, even the quietest ones, would have something substantive to say on Thursdays. Sometimes I’d also ask people to elaborate on what they’d written. (PIR)

    To engage students in conversation with one another as opposed to just presenting their own points, and to expose them to a broader array of ideas and analyses than just their own, Mind and PSYC instructors often ask students to post their assignment (weekly questions, critiques, analyses, extensions, or applications of reading and/or lecture material) prior to discussion on a weekly discussion board. Students are then required to post a response to a subset of classmates’ posts (let students choose a few, or alternate weeks between posters and responders) in preparation for discussion. During discussion, students must begin by explaining the post they are responding to and their response to it. Responses can take many forms (specified by instructor as part of the assignment or left to student):

    • Offering further supportive evidence or argument from lecture/reading
    • Providing counter evidence and argument
    • Systematically extending the point of the original post
    • Summarizing and providing relevant info from an additional source, could be a link to an article, video, TED talk, blog, etc

    This is especially effective for helping students who have difficulty joining a freely flowing conversation as it gives them the opportunity to prepare in advance and not have to reply on the fly. (PSYC/MIND)

    The Canvas discussion board was leveraged to great effect by many instructors. Some posted a weekly discussion question or questions and asked students to post responses; others asked students to post questions as well as responses. As it can be quite time-intensive to respond to individual posts, a good solution was for the instructor to send out to the class a weekly thematic summary of student responses. This can also be a useful opportunity to correct misconceptions and answer queries that arose during the week. (SCS)

    One instructor found success with the following CCCQ format for [discussion board] posts: a substantive post includes a compliment to the previous speaker’s post, a comment about the previous response, a connection to something external to the discussion (such as an contemporary event or a comparison with another author), and a question that will prompt further discussion. (SCS)

    Next year I plan to require students to meet for office hours within the first three weeks of the fall quarter. While time consuming, even a short one on one conversation seems to facilitate students’ participation. (PIR)

    Though it was cheesy and time consuming, I often began class asking students to share one piece of good news or to update us on their quarantine hobbies. We shared recipes, recited poems, and played harmonica, piano, and guitar. This goofiness and my willingness to make a fool out of myself contributed to a playful and generous scholarly environment, and it got quieter students talking. (PIR)

    Twice in the first days of our course, we set up random Zoom breakout groups at the end of class, purely for “getting to know you” discussions among the students. (Students had submitted short autobiographies before the course started which we circulated among all students.) We were attempting to recreate the experience of walking out of a classroom together and just meeting each other.  The groups lasted around 30 – 40 minutes and were not moderated by instructors. The students also really liked the option of meeting other students after class in a casual interaction. Once the pace of work picked up [and other discussion structures became more significant], the students didn’t want to do the after-class random groups. They liked the experience and recommended it for any online class. (Susan Gzesh, HMRT)  

    Without going into lots of personal details, be honest and open with students about how difficult and discouraging online teaching can be for instructors too. But in such a way that says: yes, this is hard for all of us, but we can all learn from the challenge, grow, etc. (PIR)

    One option for doing this is to use group office hours early in the quarter to bring together 3-4 students at a time. Although instructors might want to change the composition of these groups over the course of the quarter to allow all students in a class to get to know one another a little bit better, there might be benefits to using these groups to develop little ‘cliques’ within the classroom. Some instructors, for example, have had success using these mini-groups to structure peer-review for paper assignments over the course of the quarter, as well as organizing asynchronous canvas assignments (discussions boards, pre-class reflections, draft review of papers, etc.) in these small groups. By initiating these exercises in group office hours, students can be invited by the instructor to comment on one another’s ideas in office hours as a way to model best practices for peer review assignments. Not only does this enable students to get to know one another quite well, but it also has the effect of boosting their engagement with one another in synchronous class sessions. (CSPT)

    Another aspect of community building that is more difficult over Zoom is cultivating the necessary comfort between student and instructor. While this can develop easily in the classroom through the kind of small talk that happens before or after a class session, Zoom does not afford this in quite the same way. Instructors can replicate some of this work by meeting all students in office hours after the first one or two class sessions. These one-on-one meetings can help instructors to get a sense of each student’s interests and motivations for taking the class, and they can also allow students to become comfortable engaging with their instructor. In addition, these meetings early in the quarter can help familiarize students with office hours and cultivate a culture of attending office hours among all students. (CSPT)

    Assign students to teams that will work together throughout the quarter on assignments that are completed outside of class. For example, we often have students watch an assigned movie together and complete an assignment related to behavioral or psychological phenomenon illustrated in the movie. (PSYC/MIND)

    While a time-intensive option, many instructors required students to attend office hours, either individually or in small groups, several times over the quarter. This can be a good way to check in on students who have been quiet in class. (SCS)

    Classroom conversations covered the materials but also tied nearly every session to what was going on in the world as well; this was not a hard thing to do, given the readings. Student reviews that mentioned ties to current events very much liked that element. Many students took extensive advantage of office hours to talk about things ranging from their parents’ messy divorces to racial discrimination in the campus sororities (it’s appalling, by the way). (PIR)

    While this is not necessarily specific to distance learning, some instructors made changes in their syllabus to reflect the contemporary experience of pandemic. Writings by Jill Lepore, Michel Foucault, Bruno Latour, Steve Epstein, and others were successfully mobilized to heighten students’ engagement with contemporary events. (SCS)

    I re-configured a study abroad course usually conducted in Athens, Greece, for remote learning. First, I introduced a theme, contagion, to organize the material and encourage student reflection on the current moment. (We began with the Great Plague that killed a third of the Athenian population and moved on to Oedipus, the tragedy about plague and miasma staged in the same years.) Second, I structured the three-hour blocks of class time into three discrete activities that combined asynchronous and synchronous work and incorporated multimedia (eg. podcasts, digital exhibits). This made the class fly by and ensured students were alert and well prepared. Third, I made the contemporary a central object of study in the course by pairing classical texts with a contemporary theory, film, or article (i.e. Aristophanes’ Lysistrata paired with Spike Lee’s Chi-raq). This got students to use the past to think in new ways about the present and vice versa. Fourth, I assigned a collaborative digital project as a final, which required that students work in groups and made the remote experience less alienating for them. The final was to design a digital exhibit around a political question. Were I to do the course over, I would try to get students thinking about the multiple meanings of a text by breaking them into groups and asking them to perform the same passage from a work of philosophy or dramatic poetry. I could see this exercise working in every class meeting and/or as a final project.

    I created a mini guest speaker series as part of the course Reproductive Rights as Human Rights. Speakers joined our zoom session on three different occasions. The presented their work for 20 minutes or so. Afterwards we had a Q and A led mostly by the students. We recorded the sessions and posted them on the Human Rights Center website as audio files.  Archiving the guest speaker series enriched the course in two ways: first, it allowed students to revisit conversations and to engage them more closely in their written reflections, and second, it made components of the course topics available to a broader university community. (Amy Krauss, HMRT)

    When it proved impossible to gather students for an experiential class in the Calumet, I adapted the course material to focus on a geographic location of each student's choosing. While learning about the natural and human history of the Calumet, students were exploring their own place while learning about the process and politics of significance designations like National Heritage Areas, historic sites, conversation areas, public parks, etc. Combining approaches across the environmental and social sciences, the course allowed each student to come away with a breadth of information on their particular place and created a website highlighting the "10 Keys" to history and geography of their place. (Mark Bouman, ENST)

    In my Water course, students did two different assignments based on place and personal experience:

    • Campus Water Use: Students analyzed of campus water data to explore how the myriad uses of water at UChicago using data collected by facilities services. Students are invested in campus sustainability and were quite engaged in understanding how the University uses water.
    • Your Water Profile: Students created of their own physical and virtual water profiles thought “personal water tracking.” Students designed their own data collection protocol to calculate their baseline water use at home, their virtual water footprint from consumption choices, and the effects of self-imposed conservation measures over two weeks. Each student produced a visual data story using their own data and analysis. (Sabina Shaikh, ENST)

    Podcasting

    In Humans in the Built Environment (ENST), students designed and created a new podcast series Hidden Gems, sponsored by the Program on Global Environment and Chicago Studies. The podcast, originally intended to explore Chicago spaces and places, was transformed into an exploration of topics related to environmental and urban issues related to the pandemic. The professionally-produced episodes, available on iTunes, Spotify and other media sources, featured high-profile and local business owners, global health experts and UChicago faculty. A website with supporting material, content and photographs was created using research conducted throughout the quarter: https://www.uchicagohiddengems.com/podcast

    Hidden Gems Student Podcast Episodes: Spring 2020

    • Hidden City. What happens to urban space, and our relationship with the natural and built environment, when people have to retreat indoors? How do human interactions evolve to fit the unique social space we now find ourselves in? In this episode, we talk with Environmental & Urban Studies Professors Evan Carver and Emily Talen from the University of Chicago to answer these questions. We then dare to reimagine Chicago’s public space and urban structure based on the lessons of the COVID-19 situation, and finally, reflect on our own personal aspirations for the new, post-pandemic life.
    • Flatten the other Curve. Just as nations around the world have activated extreme measures to “flatten the curve” for coronavirus, some climate change activists have also latched on to the phrase to emphasize how carbon emissions growth must be slowed to prevent catastrophic climate change. Pat Brown is the CEO of Impossible Foods, a company founded with the explicit mission to “Save Meat. And Earth.” In this episode, we will ask: What parallels can we draw between social change for the pandemic versus the climate crisis? And, how can food innovation through plant-based meats mitigate our environmental impacts?
    • Stepping up to the Plate. The pandemic has disrupted food pathways and underscored the importance of equitable access to nutrition, at the same time as more families in the U.S. face food insecurity. In this episode we speak with two inspiring leaders who have dedicated their careers to addressing domestic and global food insecurity. Catherine Bertini and Ertharin Cousin are Distinguished Fellows at the Chicago Council of Global Affairs, and former Executive Directors of the UN World Food Program. We ask them: How have U.S. food banks, schools, and communities responded to the challenges the pandemic has posed in getting food to people? And, how can food supply chains become more resilient to ensure that communities have stable access to nutritious food?
    • Quarantine Production. As the human and economic toll of the COVID-19 pandemic sets in, many Chicago area businesses have come together to produce essential goods for front-line workers, also keeping employees on payroll in the process. In this episode, we speak with Sonat Birnecker Hart, the President and co-founder of KOVAL, a craft distillery that transformed its operations to make, donate, and sell hand sanitizer to fight the spread of COVID-19. We ask: What does it take for businesses to shift production so quickly--and keep employees safe in the process? How has the Chicagoland community, including donors, distillers, and distributors, come togethr to get hand sanitizer to first responders and consumers?

    Course Portfolios

    In Planning for Land and Life, each student progressively created a website highlighting the "10 Keys" to history and geography of the place where they were living and working during the spring term.  Websites were built week-to-week, peer evaluated, and presented to the class and invited guests in a final symposium.  A few examples follow:

    (Mark Bouman, ENST)

    Contributing to Wikipedia

    Petra Goedegebuure, in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, is having students in her course on Anatolian history write or edit a Wikipedia page based on a topic of their interest. (CCT)

    Collaborative Glossary

    Alison James, in Romance Languages and Literatures, is teaching Existentialism and French Literature. She is having students work collaboratively on a Google doc glossary of key terms, complete with quotations to connect the philosophical concepts to the literary texts they will be reading.

    Collaborative "Research Pods"

    In my Human Rights: Migrant, Refugee, Citizen course, by 2d week of the quarter I traditionally divide the class into 4 to 6 presentation groups, assigned to do an in-class, one hour presentation in the last weeks of the course - on one of a set of selected case studies.  (Students get a first choice or second choice case study.) This has proved a very popular aspect of the course. Students divide the tasks according to their disciplinary interests or skills sets (historical background of the problem, human rights and national law applicable, survey of existing advocacy projects by civil society organizations, finding and/or editing video clips, data visualization, etc.). The presentations have been of consistently high quality and allow for a range of student talents and skills to be employed in the final production. Another variation of the [same idea] would be to assign the students to a group given a selected topic or case study, have them meet throughout the quarter to share their research, but with the expectation that each student would produce an individual research paper, based on their own perspective or research question within the larger framework of the topic. (Susan Gzesh, HMRT)

    Data Visualizations and Narratives

    In the final project for Sabina Shaikh's water course, students worked in groups on a water topic of their choice to identify and collect data, create visualizations, conduct analyses, and produce a 10-15 page final visual data story. The formats of the stories were creative and flexible and included policy reports, cost-benefit analyses, narratives, features and speculative fiction on a range of topics including COVID and global water access, water affordability in the Chicago region, and invasive species in the Great Lakes. (Sabina Shaikh, ENST)

     

    I usually grade papers by hand and make a lot of marginal notes, etc., and then have a three or four sentence final comment. This quarter, I graded papers online--obviously--and made no marginal notes but wrote like a 15-line comment. I hated this, but the students seemed to love it. I suspect that when you grade papers by hand, they just don’t look at the marginal comments. Which is appalling, of course. (PIR)

    I required students to meet with me to discuss drafts of their final projects. This made grading their finals incredibly easy. (PIR)

    I checked in with students throughout the quarter (especially through anonymous google polls) to make sure that everything was going well. I found this feedback [on my performance] very helpful. (PIR)

    Whitney Cox, in South Asian Languages and Civilizations, is providing feedback and commentary on students’ translations by recording short videos in Panopto, as a way to foster social presence in his course. (CCT)

    Be more flexible on the papers, including the late policy (but be careful about being too generous). I went with 2 instead of 3 papers.  They were given one “free” extension, with no late penalty.  For the other paper, I’d take 5 percent off if submitted late, but no more than that, no matter how late.  Beware: Some of the students who are already inclined to be somewhat irresponsible will take advantage of your generosity (you can see these patterns when you have students under “normal” circumstances, then under “covid” circumstances).  So be prepared for this, and try to actively combat it.  E.g., reach out to students who haven’t done their papers yet, even though the deadline passed, and encourage them to come to office hours. Set a timeframe for submission with them collaboratively. (PIR)

    In order to avoid cheating, exams had to be reconfigured as take home or open book exams. One instructor used a create-your-own exam assignment (based on Green, 1997), essentially providing students with the higher-order learning objectives for the module and asking them to come up with appropriate short answer and multiple choice questions. While these are very time-consuming to grade, she reported that students learned a lot from them. (PSYC/MIND)

     

Thanks to all instructors who shared their experiences, either directly with the SSCD or through their Core and Program Chairs. Special thanks to Anne Beal, Anne Henly, Daragh Grant, and Jennifer Spruill, who compiled reflections from the Spring 2020 SOSC instructional teams.  Instructors interested in sharing additional insights from their Spring 2020 teaching may submit them to Chris Skrable, Director of Chicago Studies & Experiential Learning in the College.