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Beginning in 2020, CELT began a fruitful collaboration with the P20 Motivation and Learning Lab in the College of Education. Embarking on an ambitious research project examining the pandemic's effects on teaching and learning, the research team collected data from over 100 instructors and 7000 students throughout the 2020-21 academic year. Since then, individuals and teams have been combing through the data and focusing on particular questions or issues related to teaching and learning during and after the pandemic.

One team, comprised of CELT's Mike Wallace and P20 graduate researchers Anastacia Cole and Jaylene Patterson, and undergraduate researcher Mayson Spillman, recently presented at the storied Lilly Conference (Traverse City) on their project, "A Silver Lining: Instructional Successes in College During COVID-19." CELT posed some questions to Anastacia and Mike about their work and what we might take away from it.

What led you to the questions that drive this project?

Mike: When given the opportunity to identify portion of a vast survey that included both instructors and students from a variety of colleges representing an array of disciplines within UK, my passion lies at the intersection of teaching—i.e., the kinds of activities and learning experiences designed by the instructor—and learning—i.e., the actions and experiences students undertake to develop and deepen their knowledge and skills—within a course. As the COVID pandemic persisted, instructors were placed in precarious positions to make the best choice regarding how to effectively teach to facilitate learning within wildly unknown conditions. The two questions from the instructor survey piquing our curiosity were "what challenges are you facing within your course?" and "what aspects of your course are working well both at the start and end of the Fall 2020 semester?" My personal belief was that the challenges instructors were facing within different modalities of teaching would be figured out by other instructors teaching in the same or similar modalities. Ultimately, while teaching during the pandemic was wrought with stress, trauma, social unrest, and uncertainty, it was also a crucible for innovative solutions.

Anastacia: I approached this project with a personal interest in teachers’ experiences of teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic. Before entering my PhD program, I was a high school English Language Arts teacher. My first and only year of teaching happened to coincide with the height of the pandemic, so much of the year was spent teaching either online or in person with social distancing measures in place. The pandemic was pivotal in shaping my experience with teaching, so I spent a lot of time that year reflecting on how the challenges posed by the pandemic had affected my motivation, which in part led me to pursue such questions in my PhD program and projects like this one. With this particular project, I wanted to understand whether and how the conditions created by the pandemic had affected instructors’ confidence (i.e., self-efficacy) for teaching. Furthermore, how can we use insights about instructors’ challenges and successes to give context to the trends we saw in their confidence? Ultimately, our goal was to use our findings to be able to anticipate future challenges and to highlight the strategies that worked for instructors so that instructors and practitioners (like CELT!) can use this information to build instructors’ confidence across learning contexts.

What were some of the issues you had to think through when analyzing the data?

Mike: Our greatest challenge was crafting a code book for the open-ended responses. In reading through the responses, you begin to look for patterns and identify consistent ideas. Some instructors wrote short blurbs while others wrote a detailed paragraph. The language used by instructors from different fields to describe similar concepts often varies, which can make coding items consistently challenging, especially across different coders. We chose to code for each idea found within responses rather than holistically code for one dominant theme per response. While time consuming, this process allowed us to identify the specific types of challenges instructors were facing and/or the aspects of their classes that were working well. All four team members coded all items and we reached consensus for each response during Zoom meetings. As we prepared for the conference, one of us did a deeper exploration around themes for challenges and another for what was working well across instructors for the September 2020 and November 2020 surveys as well as by course modality. We realized that some inconsistencies in coding had arisen for the same instructors between the surveys, so we opted to simplify the code book. As we prepare for writing an article, we will need to re-code a sample of responses to verify that the simplified codebook is valid and reliable.

What does your work suggest as we look ahead to the future of teaching and learning? And, what have you personally taken away from this project?

Mike: Overall, the silver linings based on what was working well within classes during the pandemic were, first, that instructors became more familiar with technology and many discovered new ways to leverage it for student learning. Second, while many challenges were faced, many instructors found creative ways to help students learn across a wide range of instructional modalities. And, third, instructors found ways to be flexible while building relationships and holding students accountable.

Anastacia: What Mike said! I would also add that aside from adapting to their course modalities, the biggest challenges for instructors during this time was creating community in their classrooms (which includes promoting participation and interaction between students and connecting with their students). Many of these challenges that instructors cited already existed pre-pandemic; the pandemic just brought them to the forefront and exacerbated them. However, as we saw in their responses to the prompt about what changes worked well in their courses, instructors found new and creative solutions to make teaching and learning manageable (and sometimes even better!) in this new context. When asked about their challenges, some instructors even offered possible solutions in the same response. I think our findings are encouraging because not only were instructors actively thinking about possible solutions in response to the challenges they brought up, but we can share these instructors’ experiences and insights to inform teaching and learning as we look to the future. As online, hybrid, and technology-enhanced learning becomes more popular, we can also share the challenges and successes of this particular group of instructors from our study as vicarious examples of effective teaching in the face of challenges found in these kinds of courses.

Mike: The project for me was an opportunity to support the graduate student leading this project who is preparing for a career in academia and to get back into contributing to the scholarship of teaching and learning. My personal takeaway is that there is a silver lining to teaching through the pandemic, chief among them is that the UK Teaching Community has leveled up their teaching with technology skills and many are now prepared to teach effectively in new kinds of learning environments.