By Matthew Marmet
The COVID-19 pandemic has certainly presented challenges and opportunities across all sectors. The fact that it is going to take eight weeks for me to get a replacement window for my basement is indicative of the supply chain struggles we are currently experiencing. The focus of this piece, though, will be on the world of education, where one of the biggest challenges we faced is what I have come to call the “COVID shift.”
I am not touting myself as
the inventor of some groundbreaking, trademarkable term when I say COVID
shift. I use it simply because it perfectly captures what our institution
experienced. The COVID shift, for us, meant a shift from traditional
on-ground delivery of educational materials (pre-COVID shift) to either
completely virtual or hybrid learning environments (post-COVID shift).
Before moving forward, I’d
like to take a walk back in time, to a simpler place where students came to
class not worried about whether they remembered their masks. A time when
group activities and other pedagogical techniques could be easily implemented
to supplement in-class lecture. For me, this was the time of the flipped
classroom, a move away from what my favorite instructional designer
likes to call “straight lecturing.” Instead, class time is spent with
students engaging in other activities and problem-solving tasks, which have
been shown to have a positive impact on student attitudes and performance.
The COVID shift forced us to
un-flip. In-class activities involving group work and close student
interaction were not much of a possibility. With my love for the flipped
classroom, the question I asked myself was: How can I avoid transitioning to a
straight lecture style of teaching in these restricted environments? My
students had been thrust into a less-than-ideal situation, so I put the onus on
myself to help them stay engaged.
What I ended up doing varied
depending on the environment. During the time classes were completely
virtual, I tried to create fun, interesting (and sometimes embarrassing)
demonstrations that I would conduct on camera for the students. Additionally, I
would hold virtual brown bag lunches with my students, where an entire class
session was dedicated to creating a relaxing environment for them. Students
were able to take the time to separate themselves from the minutiae of being
stuck at home with their parents. Interestingly, as a brief aside, I
asked my students during class about the specific issues they were facing
because of the pandemic. Being “stuck at home” was near the top of this
list. Once we were able to graduate to the hybrid environment, I shifted in-class
activities from the group level to the individual level whenever it made sense.
Although most students seemed
engaged at face value during these class sessions, I was curious to know if the
positive academic impacts of student engagement would shine through in the
post-COVID shift environment. This helped to inform a research question
for a study I just presented at the northeast regional ACBSP conference. It
addressed whether there was a significant difference in academic success
between pre-COVID shift students and post-COVID shift students. Naturally, my
hope was that no difference would exist between these two groups. I’ll save the statistical jargon and present
the results of my study in two words: It worked!
With these findings, one
question came to mind: Why did this happen? Our students went through
major changes to how they were used to experiencing college, but still managed
to achieve success. To me, there were factors on both the student side and
the faculty side that came into play. And these two factors were student
resilience and faculty effort, which ultimately lead to student success.
In terms of student
resilience, I’d like to provide an anecdotal quote from a student during one of
our brown bag lunch sessions. They said, “I am afraid to go outside, not
because of getting sick, but because I am worried about getting attacked
because I am Asian.” During a time when the threat of such attacks was very
real, imagine trying to succeed at anything when this is where you are
mentally. But I will tell you that this particular student did succeed,
along with many others for several reasons. First, they were willing to
put in the work. Rather than throw in the towel, they faced the
difficulties of the course and the new learning environments head on. I
think this also speaks to our students’ ability to adapt, which I thanked them
for on numerous occasions across these semesters. And finally, “scrappy”
is the perfect term to describe our students, a lot of whom are first
generation college students who had to fight and claw just to go college in the
first place. They were not about to let this hurdle get in the way of
their continuing education.
From the faculty effort side,
I dove into the qualitative data from students who filled out the SOOT. I
share this data not to brag or boast, but because it is one of my proudest moments
thus far in my short tenure in academia.
In both the pre- and post-COVID shift environments, language like
“genuinely cared about the welfare of the students” and “cared about us as
human beings” was offered.
Please remember I said at the
beginning of this entry that the COVID-19 pandemic has presented us with both
challenges AND opportunities. I think these words speak to
the opportunities we can find in all the current disruption, maybe the most
important of which is the chance to get in touch with the human side of
whatever it is we’re doing. Success matters, but how you get across that
finish line, to me, matters more. Empathy and compassion will always win,
and we might even be surprised with how robust the results are, regardless of the
environment we find ourselves in.
