Now that students and faculty are adapting to working from home and socially-distanced teaching, we face even more challenges, including exhaustion, anxiety, stress, sleep deprivation, memory, comprehension, and a variety of functions. Designing a syllabus or a course with empathy is a good practice to adopt now and perhaps extend beyond the global health and mental health pandemic.
We may all be facing computer fatigue and mental fatigue—students are experiencing the same. Here are some suggestions for making small changes to increase flexibility in your courses while not lowering academic standards.
Carolyn Thomas and Jennifer Sedell’s 2018 article Improving Student Learning through Faculty Empathy in a Hybrid Course Community claims, “The best college teachers think in terms of how their students will learn rather than what they, as instructors, will teach.” Though the article describes how UC Davis created a hybrid course with both online and in-class components, this initiative provided an environment for faculty to develop empathy that helped faculty identify and clearly state course objectives, create relevant learning modules. These assessments supported academic goals while keeping the student as the focus of the course design and applying empathy. Though the article details different approaches, there are two main takeaways--one is once faculty determined what they wanted their students to learn it forced them to be precise with the course content. Focusing on objectives helps with assignments and assessments. Faculty actively creating the material online developed more empathy for students by putting themselves in their shoes.
There is a disconnect between students seeing the material for the first time and an instructor with expertise in the subject area. The assignments may not align with what the students can do. Developing an empathetic approach may contribute to students’ meeting the learning objectives. One participant’s comment about the experience, “You have to imagine your learner constantly, and you are working through these technologies too.”
Some questions to ask while preparing material:
Some suggest chunking material into smaller, more manageable tasks throughout the course
Faculty Resource Network. (2013, November 22.). Faculty Resource Network at NYU - New York University. (Links to an external site)
For educators: How to build empathy and strengthen your school community — Making caring common. (2018, November 1). Making Caring Common. (Links to an external site)
Improving student learning through faculty empathy in a hybrid course community. (2018, October 22). Association of American Colleges & Universities. (Links to an external site)
Palmer, A (2020, July 27). Designing a syllabus in a global mental health epidemic | Remote teaching resources | AHA. AHA. (Links to an external site)
"We want students to be creative, critical thinkers. We want them to rewrite the rules as life-long learners and critical thinking citizens. It’s a mindset of self-direction and student ownership and it begins by empowering students with voice and choice."
Take any one assignment or task in a course you teach and ask yourself the following questions about that assignment as if you were a student:
If the answer to the first question is no, then it means the assignment is giving students a voice. The answer to the other two questions should be yes to see evidence of student choice and voice.
Student voice and choice is a student-centered learning approach that gives students choice (providing them with options and allowing students to choose what works best for them), and voice (encouraging them to share ideas, design their own project, set goals, and monitor their learning). Giving choices doesn’t have to mean instructors abdicate their responsibility or authority. Instead, it's about sharing control in areas where both options will help students learn and grow. In this way, we get students involved and help them be more responsible for their own learning.
Here are some of the ways students can own the learning process. Remember you can always start small, experimenting with one learning activity or assessment.
A professor at Appalachian State University explains how she implements "pre-class menus" to provide students options for their learning.
If you want to create a choice board for your classroom, keep these 4 things in mind:
Photo by Felicia Buitenwerf on Unsplash
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