Polishing your Pedagogy on Zoom

Recently, my President, Roger Brown, shared in a post this sarcastic video of a music teacher writing a song on “How to Teach Online”. I do feel the pain of my colleagues who are lecturing music production or voice lessons. Teaching vocal techniques or music ensembles online are possible but far more complex than Economics or pivot tables for Excel. I definitely believe in the capacity of my colleagues to improvise (they are amazing musicians), I also had to - without being a professional musician!

Before talking about the future, let’s review the past two months

I have taught on Zoom since mid-March and have accumulated a total of 120 hours of practice. I am not an expert as I started from scratch. I had only seven days to adapt to this new situation of teaching online. This rapid change created some concerns among my colleagues whose primary fear was “I am still going to be able to do my job properly”? 

The answer to that question has triggered a larger debate among academic leaders, especially in terms of business disruption: “are colleges or universities able to maintain a face-to-face model”? While some of them consider that the future of higher education is purely online, others have emphasized the importance of learning onsite, or explored scenarios with several strategic groups of schools to serve different audiences or anticipate the influence of tech companies over schools.

All these thoughts are extremely useful to draft long-term scenarios for academic institutions like mine, Berklee College of Music, but one element is totally absent in this picture: the Pedagogy. Quoting Roger Brown “students deserved more than video chats... we can’t continue with this limited Zoom-driven teaching style and expect great learning outcomes or satisfied students”.

In this post, I explain how Zoom can beat a video chat and become a virtual workshop. My goal is to share some tips with my peers and fuel the debate about the future of education (from a practitioners’ point of view), especially as it seems that competence teaching online will become another core skill for academics to add to their portfolio of skills. These reflections have been greatly inspired by Prof. Bill Schiano’s seminar (taught online).

As a teacher, you know better 

As teachers, we know what to teach but we don’t necessarily know how to do it online. A recent survey made of students concluded that online courses are about the teacher, not about the content. A good “face-to-face” teacher will remain a good “online” teacher. Therefore, we all should feel confident in delivering what needs to be done. That is why this article is about “polishing” not about telling you what to do. As a teacher, you know better than anyone.

We can’t deliver as much, focus on what’s essential

In the past two months I have learned to set realistic goals. It is challenging to teach online as we have to think about several things synchronously. Bill Schiano is very clear about setting the right expectations: “perfection isn’t the goal, being impeccable is almost unfeasible as teaching online is far more challenging than face-to-face”. Like in the traditional classroom, there are lows, moments when the lecturer or the students lack energy. The classic example is the silence you hear when you ask a question orally. One second online feels like a minute when you are waiting for the answer. My tip here is to use the chatroom to ask questions but also to take notes of students' answers. For example I use the slides shared on Zoom to summarize students' answers to an open question I raised. 

This is not the time for pride, it is students’ time

Romanticizing our traditional classroom interactions is a classical bias. I have also seen some articles that are lamenting students online cheating. The whole challenge for me is to engage students. If we are not ourselves engaged as teachers, students won’t be engaged. Empathy with the situation faced by my students is a no-brainer here. Welcoming each of them individually at the beginning of the session, asking how they feel in a private chat or in a separate video call are essential actions. We know that they are facing difficult personal situations, in some cases far from their home. Bill Schiano summarized this mindset perfectly: “we should keep the focus on them (the students); this is not the time for pride but the time to help the students engage in productive discussion”.

Acceptance of losing control and trusting the class

Something fundamental I learned in the method taught by Harvard Business School is to trust students in their appetite for learning and their capacity to ask great questions. This requires us to lose control over the discussion and channel the learning points. This is even more challenging on Zoom. One thing I did was to give them more responsibility. For example I asked them to take notes collectively in a shared document or to present assignments in front of their peers. I make them co-host on Zoom. I proposed to some students to moderate discussions. Running a poll on Zoom or using warm or cold calls in the chatroom are also possible. I usually send a private message to the student to tell him/her that I would like to know his/her answer to the question I raise. Using the assignments made by students is a good excuse to trigger students participation, especially for those who are shy or passive. This semester I will organize a peer evaluation for some assignments to give them more responsibility. Student’s satisfaction relies on treating them like adults. 

Partner for hands-on projects or use cases

The biggest opportunity in teaching online is to host guest speakers who would not have been able to come by plane or by train on our campus. Therefore I have invited companies from the music industry (managers, labels, musicians, distributors) to work with my students on real projects (see here for examples). This is even more important given the possibility to realize a remote internship. If you don’t have the time to develop such a partnership, you can use case studies from the Case Center. Short writing assignments - based on compact cases - submitted by students, without being graded, are also useful to engage students. I have also used online simulations (especially this one). Zoom allows you to break participants into rooms that you can “visit” to mentor students or take questions. I did a role play, a negotiation exercise and a networking game with a high level of engagement from students. Intimate conversations and discussions are usually more effective in Zoom rooms. I learned that I did not have to be directly involved in that discussion. I had to let them speak together (remember that paragraph above about losing control!). Group reporting of the role play or about the room discussion is a good way to wrap up the session.  

Recap

Teaching online is much more time consuming than teaching in a traditional classroom. In this post I propose a few ideas to focus on what is essential in higher education: student engagement. The main points of my “polishing” strategy are recapped in the Table below. 

Thanks for reading. I hope these tips will spark comments.