Teaching in the Time of Coronavirus

By ELIZABETH FONTAINE HILDEBRAND ’92

Students in Trisha Cowen’s Film History class probably weren’t expecting a 3-year-old guest lecturer this spring, but then again, as with most everything we’ve seen so far in 2020, everyone has learned to expect the unexpected.

When Westminster professors and students settled into their spring semester in January, very little was known about the virus that had begun infecting people in December. It was happening a half a world away and classes carried on as usual. By March, as more information became available about the virus and the disease it caused— COVID-19—a growing concern was taking hold in the U.S. Yet when Westminster students departed for spring break on March 6, they never expected they might not return to campus.

But that’s exactly what happened. Spring break was extended, and what began as a campus closure for a statemandated two weeks eventually turned into the remainder of semester. With Westminster’s campus shuttered, faculty, staff and students were abruptly forced to take on an incredible task: to teach, learn and carry on college business while sheltering from home.

Westminster’s IT department sprang into action to make sure technology was accessible to all. Employees began installing Microsoft Teams onto their computers to stay connected with colleagues while working from home. Student Affairs looked for socially distant ways to safely bring students back to campus to pick up personal items from their dorm rooms.

But instruction was another thing. Teachers ideally receive substantial training before embarking on a remote learning program. Westminster’s professors had only days to shift their entire teaching techniques to an online format. While some professors had online teaching experience, many did not.

Jesse Ligo balancing teaching and farming

Crash courses were given on how to use a little-known online video and audio conferencing platform called Zoom. Professors had to determine what teaching methods would be most productive and beneficial. And how would the lack of face-to-face personal interaction impact their students? With so many fast-moving parts, countless questions and very little time to prepare, teaching in the time of coronavirus brought a level of uncertainly and anxiety for many.

Finding a Balance

While most professors had been working and bonding with their students since January, Cowen, assistant professor of English—fresh off maternity leave after the birth of her second daughter—didn’t return to the classroom until March 2.

“This gave us very little time together before classes moved online,” Cowen said. “I’d barely gotten into the new routine of dropping the kids—and all their belongings—off at day care when social distancing began. A new normal meant trying to teach from home with a 7-week-old baby, a 3-year-old and two grumpy cats.”

Cowen wasn’t alone. Balancing teaching and home life was a common challenge among her colleagues. While many embraced the easiest work commute of their lives and the chance to spend more time with their families, it didn’t come without a host of inconveniences and interruptions. Many were sharing space with their spouses and school-aged children. For those without dedicated home offices, work spaces were carved out of closets, basements, bedrooms and kitchens—or in Dr. Carolyn Cuff’s case, an edge.

“My working spot is a small area on the loft part of the second floor. It is literally an edge. I joked with my students that I haven’t jumped off of it yet,” said Cuff, professor of mathematics.

When home and office meld into one, “distractions abound,” as Professor of History Dr. Russell Martin noted.

“When you’re home and something comes up—a dripping faucet, a door latch that sticks—you can’t so easily ignore it until later, when you’re back from the office,” Martin said.

Professor of Accounting Jesse Ligo, who also owns and operates a 300-acre crop and beef farm when he’s not teaching in the School of Business, said he needed to be accessible for both jobs and found it taxing trying to balance teaching and farming.

“While videoing lessons or doing Zoom meetings, I could hear farm customers driving in the barn lane for a truckload of hay. While planting oats, I could feel my phone vibrating in my pocket with a call from a student about a potential summer internship,” said Ligo.

And of course, teaching from home with children who are unable to go to school, day care or Grandma’s house during the day adds another layer of distraction to an already extraordinary work environment.

“I admit to hiding in the bathtub from my 3-year-old so that I could grade a few papers,” Cowen said, adding that her daughter, Ella, struggles at times with having to share her mother with Westminster.

“I did my best to include her when I could and distract her with new activities when I couldn’t. For example, during a Film History lecture on contemporary film and the diversification of female storylines, I had Ella dress up

like Elsa and teach the students about the animated film Frozen,” Cowen said. “She loved telling them about why Elsa is a powerful woman.”

School of Nursing Director Tricia Ryan managed her workload as a professor and chair while simultaneously serving as a surrogate grade school teacher keen on keeping her fifth-grade son on task with his school work.

“It was quite a challenge, but I recognized early on that creating a schedule was very important,” said Ryan. But even with the challenges and distractions, Ryan said she was grateful for some of the opportunities the quarantine has provided.

“The biggest benefit of working from home is time with my youngest son,” she said. “As he is our last of three kids at home, I am savoring all the time with him that I can get. I like watching him learn and grow.”

Professor of Chemistry Dr. Peter Smith—sheltering at home with his family, which includes two school-aged daughters—admits teaching from home was less than ideal, but he learned to adapt.

“It was challenging to help my own children with their remote learning while I was trying to teach my students,” said Smith. “I don’t really have any private space to lock myself away in, but even if I did, it wouldn’t have been effective. I tried to let my kids know when I was in a very important video meeting, but that didn’t always work. I had to become comfortable with the fact that my kids were going to interrupt my work, which was fine. Many of us were in the same situation and everyone understood and was very gracious.”

To Zoom or Not to Zoom

One of the most important decisions faculty had to make going into remote instruction was how they were going to teach. Would they opt to teach synchronously—classes taking place in real time, usually with video conferencing software, with professors engaging with students simultaneously—or asynchronously—an approach that doesn’t require students to be online at the same time and allows for more self-paced learning using professors’ recorded lectures and lessons?

Living in a rural setting with a slow internet speed, Ligo had little choice but to teach his courses asynchronously. Armed with a white board and his laptop camera, he recorded lessons in his basement and uploaded them to YouTube. Students could view his lessons at their convenience and follow along using Ligo’s handout packets that were scanned and uploaded to D2L—the College’s integrated learning platform that allows instructors to Dr. Trisha Cowen with classroom helpers Mara and Ella

upload course handouts, share website and video links and engage students through discussion boards.

Smith also opted for an asynchronous approach, allowing him to prepare a series of video lectures to be posted to his YouTube channel and later shared through D2L. Since remote learning prohibited students from conducting in-person lab experiments, Smith and his colleagues needed to find a way to provide students with a semblance of lab experience.

“We decided that the most important outcomes for lab instruction are the analysis of data and communication of results. We provided our students with data from previous semesters and supplemented with videos when available. The students then submitted their reports as if they collected the data,” he said.

Many professors relied on Zoom and D2L’s video conferencing tools to allow for a synchronous approach to their classes. For Martin, who had been using the standard D2L features prior to the shuttering of the College, picked up on the platform’s Virtual Classroom feature quickly.

“I tried very hard to keep things on the same routine as I had when I was teaching face-to-face. I also recorded the sessions, so that students who live in other time zones or who have other family or work responsibilities could watch the sessions at their convenience,” he said.

Professor of Education Dr. Charlene Klassen Endrizzi, who has been teaching asynchronous online graduate courses for several years, said using Zoom this semester for a live approach allowed her to stay connected to her students.

“Zoom is wonderful. I needed to see my students and I heard from students that they needed to see me and their

classmates,” she said. “I am so grateful that I had eight weeks of face-to-face teaching from January to March to establish a powerful learning community.”

Professor of Music Dr. Daniel Perttu agreed that Zoom was a useful tool for his Music Theory course, but it didn’t translate as well to the Orchestra course he took on this semester while his colleague and wife Dr. Melinda Crawford Perttu was on sabbatical.

“Online instruction for orchestra was really not ideal. Students turned in recorded performances of orchestra music on their own, but they couldn’t play together—so much of the ‘ensemble’ experience didn’t exist,” he said. And videos circulating of bands and choirs performing together via Zoom were simply not realistic.

“We couldn’t rehearse via Zoom because everyone’s internet connection had a different speed,” Perttu said. “we couldn’t synchronize students’ performances without them prerecording themselves and without us doing some super-sophisticated audio engineering. Any of those videos have had that engineering done to them.”

Regardless of how content was delivered most students did their best to adapt to the chosen models and overcome technological issues.

“The students adjusted well and they were patient with the snafus,” said Martin. “They understood that they were still getting a Westminster education, and that every college and university in the country is dealing with this crisis and this change.”

And although students did their best to adjust to the shift to online learning, Westminster faculty members acknowledged that every student’s situation had varying degrees of difficulty and they did they best to offer support where they could.

Dr. Timothy Cuff, professor of history, said he tried to keep things as normal and “Tim Cuff-like” as possible in his daily teachings.

“Maybe nothing else in their lives is ‘standard’ but at least Dr. Cuff shows up in a white shirt and tie, tells some lousy Dad jokes, and pushes us to think about how history and geography affect our lives,” he said. “I think if I can help give some stability, that is a plus.”

Assistant Professor of Psychology Dr. Deanne Buffalari said some students faced challenges beyond their control—unreliable internet, challenging living conditions, jobs or increased responsibilities at home.

“I was amazed to hear about stories outside of academics—students who had parents working in health Dr. Patrick Krantz’ Environmental Science Class via Zoom. “Kids frequently had their pets with them.”

care that were essentially serving as mother and father to their siblings. Students who started working full time because a parent had lost a job and were trying to balance that with finishing the semester. It helped me realized how lucky I was, and made me even more committed to supporting them as they finished out the term,” she said.

Face to Face

The lack of personal interaction with colleagues and students was a stumbling block for many. Popping into one another’s office for a quick chat or to simply catch up wasn’t possible. Attending students’ extracurricular activities was no longer an option. And because a Westminster education is, at its base, defined by its personal and collaborative experiences, the absence of that human element was frustrating for most.

“Our whole brand is personal interaction,” said Smith, who also serves as chair of the faculty. “It was a struggle to be a professor without the daily personal, informal and formal interactions with my students.”

And those personal, face-to-face interactions allow professors to read the room and interpret body language and facial expressions—none of which are fully possible whether teaching synchronously or asynchronously.

“One of the drawbacks to working at home is that I lacked the milieu of my classroom,” said Krantz. “I couldn’t read the body language of my students, I couldn’t necessarily see their heads bob when an idea hit them, or hear the deep breath or halted sigh of being challenged. I couldn’t use my proximity to increase their attention and concentration, I couldn’t make eye contact to focus them, or kneel beside them to give them confidence. When I

paused for them to answer, or used wait time to motivate them, they thought my Wi-Fi connectivity suddenly dropped.”

“What I learned was that a class is a learning community and that cohesion is very, very difficult to create in an online environment,” said Associate Professor of Spanish Dr. Joel Postema. “And if you think about what language is—the transfer of information from one person to another—we miss a lot when we are not face-to-face. I found myself pointing at my computer screen with my finger or nodding in a student’s direction to try to get them to respond. I was frustrated by not being able to read students’ facial expressions to see if they were following what I was saying or confused.”

Ligo echoed that, adding that watching his students’ faces as he taught and seeing his students interact with each other during class was what he truly missed.

“When we’re all in the classroom, we are on a trip we are all taking together. It is tough to get that camaraderie through a video or a discussion board,” Ligo said.

To achieve some level of personal connectedness, professors maintained online office hours and some even shared their cell phone numbers if students had further questions about a class assignment or just needed to someone to listen or talk via FaceTime. Several professors expressed concerns over their students’ general well-being and mental health.

“I am a news guy, and I encouraged my students to stay up to date with what was happening with the pandemic with an emphasis on following local news. At the same time, I also encouraged them to limit their news intake during the day. Having the TV on cable news all day has the potential of creating a dark and depressing world in our heads,” said Lecturer of Broadcast Communications Brad Weaver.

In the end, whether in person or in cyberspace, Westminster faculty remain focused on singular goal.

“As faculty, we do our job because we care about our students,” said Carolyn Cuff. “Their success is our success. While our remote teaching is not an easy task for either us or our students, we are willing to work at it so that our students will continue to succeed.” S

Student perspectives on quarantine learning

“I prefer in-class learning because it just helps me stay more focused and it fits better with my learning style. But, the biggest benefit of remote learning for me was the flexibility that it brought. Because my classes met asynchronously most of the time, I had a lot of freedom with when I did my work each day. I think flexibility is always helpful, but I think it was especially helpful while working from home never knowing when there might be a distraction.” ~ Danielle Grady ‘20

“The benefits to remote learning, I think, were borne more out of the global situation than anything else. Remote learning was new and scary and thrust on everyone all at once unexpectedly, which contributed to the great understanding and leeway extended to us. At the same time, it was almost a more human experience than traditional in-person teaching. Everyone was more... vulnerable. We all got to see a separate side of each other that we normally would not have glimpsed in a real classroom.” ~ Michael Sholtis ’20

“I have consistently felt ahead on my school work. Without all the extras that go with being on campus, academics are my top priority. I feel very relaxed when approaching upcoming assignments. I speak for everyone when I say this has been frustrating. There are so many fun events and traditions that take place this time of year, and that was taken away from all of us. Even something as little as my internet disconnecting leaves me feeling frustrated because it makes me feel even more disconnected.” ~ Kaylee Brosius ’21

“My biggest struggle since quarantine has been staying disciplined. I thrive and am most productive on a schedule, which is why I love school so much. Being in quarantine has allowed for time to be our own, which is more challenging than it sounds. There are some days where I am good about being disciplined, and there are many other days where I’m not the best at it. It has been a big learning opportunity which has allowed me to learn more about myself and what I need to improve on as a student.” ~ Emma Rudolph ’23