The Non-Academic Lessons I’m Planning on Teaching My Students This Week

As thousands of teachers and professors begin teaching their students online this week or have started already, I believe they will be teaching lessons and modeling behaviors that go far beyond the subject matter. I believe they are going to be teaching intangible, valuable lessons that students will remember long after some of the subject matter knowledge has faded.

Every teacher has the potential to serve as more than just a conveyor of knowledge, they all have the potential to be a role model, leader and influencer.

In the next few weeks, I believe teachers and professors will be modeling and teaching students many non-academic lessons. Here are the few I plan on teaching:

• Adaptability and Flexibility—Teachers, professors and even trainers have had to turn on a dime. The faculty at Bloomsburg University literally had one week to prepare and few had ever taught on line before. Since the notification, the majority of the faculty have been working frantically, non-stop to transform their prepared face-to-face lessons to online lessons. Figuring out how to modify assignments, adjust in-class activities, engage students online and use the technology for the first time. In our department, we’ve taken a face-to-face conference that was to be held in mid-April and transformed it to an online conference. Changing the agenda, arranging with outside speakers, and developing new schedules. Teachers, professors and others have shown a remarkable ability to adapt to the current situation and to be flexible in terms of how they are delivering instruction. We now have to help our students be flexible and teach them how to adapt their learning approach given this new reality. We can teach them because we, ourselves, have adapted, we are modeling that behavior of being flexible and of quickly adapting. Behavior our students will need in the next few weeks.
• Resilience and Grit—In the case of teachers and professors, we are often much older than the students we teach and, therefore, have seen and experienced the ups and downs of life, often we’ve experienced death first hand, seen our country go through tough times and ridden the roller coaster of the stock market. Based on our life experiences, we can help students understand that in difficult and tough times people can persevere and continue on their life’s journey. Not without modifications and adaptations but they can continue. They don’t have to be paralyzed. In the summer of 1997, my father had inoperable pancreatic cancer, the doctors operated anyway. He was in a comma for several months before we took him off life support. The family stood around and watched him pass. It was painful and sad. I miss him. It was the same year my youngest son was born. There is much I want to ask my Dad. But I can’t. In spite of that loss, I get up every day and go to work, my sons turned out to be wonderful and I continue my life’s journey, a little sadder but there is no good or productive alternative to “not moving on” we can teach our students to face adversity with courage, strength and knowledge. We can teach them that they can be resilient when life throws them curve-balls like the virus, we can model and explain how we got over our pain and how they can cope with what is happening.
• Perspective—If you watch the news too much and look at Facebook for more than 15-minutes, you get a pretty grim perspective. It’s grim, but it’s only one, myopic perspective. When you are in the middle of a crisis, it seems like the crisis will never end, that you’ll never get over the pain. But time does heal, it doesn’t cure but it helps. As mentioned earlier, we are typically older than our students and we can give them some perspective. I teach graduate students and many people go back to graduate school to further their careers and to get better jobs so the financial situation weighs heavily on their minds. In terms of their financial prospects, I’ve seen the crash of 1987, Black Monday, impact my parent’s financial situation with them needing to pay for two more years of college for me—I worked in the cafeteria and was a resident advisor to help pay to finish school. I was teaching students in 2000 when the bottom fell out of the market—one semester students were getting signing bonuses and the next, no jobs, not one. We scrambled to eventually place all those students. For students, it might be their entire world but we can offer a bigger perspective, a sense that things will return to some semblance of normal at some point and that in the history of civilization, humankind finds a way. We can teach students to see the larger perspective of what is happening and place their personal experience into the boarder context of human experience.
• Sense of Normality and Community—This is important. We, as teachers and professors, are providing, to many students a sense of community and normalcy. Life is up-ended, no hanging out at a Starbucks or clubbing with friends, most students are at home (yes, there are always the exceptions of kids on spring break, etc.). But we provide a stable experience, a continuity of “the past”. While everything else might be in chaos, their education is continuing. Now some argue that they have bigger things to worry about than their education in times like this but I argue that continuing education provides two key messages. The first is that it creates a community and interactions outside the confines of a home and fosters mental health because of the exchange of ideas, concerns, fears and information with peers and an instructor. It’s a sense of normal in an un-normal situation. Second, it’s a sign that there will be a future. Traditionally, formal education is a way for many to get ahead in life, to forge a future and to seek opportunities. If you take that away, you send the message that they have no need to prepare for the future. Continuing education means that you are helping the students to continue into the future. We need to stress a sense of community and a sense of future for our students. Educators offer students a way forward, a chance to contribute productively to society and a way to seek opportunities. Continuing to teach at the regular time provides the message that they still need to be educated and still need to move forward in a structured manner not too different from what they know.
• Coping with Fear—Having a sense of having a future doesn’t mean there isn’t fear. And many teachers and professors are just as fearful as our students. No one knows exactly what’s going to happen or how much damage to our economy there will be. However, we can’t be paralyzed by fear. Last year, my wife spent 3-nights in the neurological ICU. We had been to the emergency room three times in one weekend because she had the worst headache of her life and they couldn’t figure out what was wrong. To say I was fearful would be an understatement (she’s better now, it was Shingles in her eye--get your shingles shot). It’s okay to be afraid. It’s just not okay to let fear paralyze you. We have to acknowledge the fear of our students and ourselves. We have to acknowledge that while we are still engaged in instruction, it’s not the same and there are obstacles ahead but we must teach our students that fear is something that can be coped with, something that makes us uncomfortable and uncertain but not something that should freeze us in our tracks and make us feel hopeless. We can teach our students how to stay focused in a time of fear, how to acknowledge and understand fear but not let it consume us. We do this by our act of teaching in this uncertain time and admitting our own fears and how we deal with those fears.
• Hope—Make no mistake, these are dark times for the country. The economy is devastated, the loss of lives will be great and, in the end, we’ll all know someone who has died from the terrible COVID-19. It’s not hard to give up hope of ever having a “normal life” again or of even having a decent future. But providing hope is exactly what educators do. As Malcolm X said, “Education is the passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to those who prepare for it today.” We, in these tough times, are providing a passport to our students. It might be a passport to the next grade level or it might be a passport to graduate school or to some other place that they might not even know they want to travel. But education is a passport to the future, to hope. Now, we can’t give false hope, we need to be realistic. No rose-colored glasses but we can provide a message that there is a future. There will be a country, a community, schools and a society after this horrible experience. There will be a future. It might look different, it might change us in ways we can’t yet imagine but, there will be a future. There is hope for tomorrow. Our very act of providing online instruction reinforces the message that there will be a future.

These are the messages I want to convey to my students, then I'll then worry about the subject matter. We as educators play a small but important role in providing perspective, helping others deal with fear, building resilience and grit, helping students adapt and providing hope.

What non-academic lessons are you planning on teaching your students this week?

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Bio

Karl Kapp, Ed.D. has been teaching online in the field of Instructional Technology for over 20 years as a professor and as a practitioner at Bloomsburg University in Bloomsburg, PA. During that time, he's shared his knowledge and insights through teaching online and face-to-face, books, LinkedIn Learning courses, peer reviewed articles, and keynote sessions at industry and academic events. Follow him on Twitter @kkapp