What the Best Teachers Do Online

I did a full day this week with faculty at Raritan Valley Community College as the first day of their three days of faculty technology and teaching days.

They were offering a lot of ways to supplement and expand the physical classroom with a learning management system and tools like Twitter, Google Drive, Pinterest, Google tools beyond Google search and YouTube. Some of this is aimed at online and hybrid teachers working on developing online components or flipping their classrooms with resources to do it like those mentioned and screencasting and Khan Academy.

The person who asked me to facilitate the first day said that she wanted to offer a kind of a National Great Teachers Movement retreat that brings teachers from different teaching fields together to explore teaching and learning, innovations and solutions. I was not familiar with that movement, although it goes back to 1969 when David Gottshall started it. It is not about teaching in a specific discipline, but rather on the art of teaching.

What I found appealing about the day - from my point of view - was that I was not being asked to give a talk or a presentation. I wasn't supposed to bring PowerPoint slides. I was to facilitate discussion using the collective wisdom of the group, their experiences and the creativity of the group.

Of course, that's also scary. What if people don't want to talk, share and do activities?


I suspect we all want to renew ourselves professionally and personally, but how much effort are we willing to put towards that?

I was familiar with Ken Bain's What the Best College Teachers Do which also examines what makes a great teacher great. Bain did a 15-year study of a hundred college teachers in a wide variety of fields and universities trying to figure out what the best teachers do.

If there is a short answer to the question, it might be that it actually is not what teachers do, it's what they understand.

He believes that the plans and assignments and lecture notes matter less than the way the best teachers comprehend the subject and value human learning.

I don't think that in the five hours I would have faculty in a room with me, that level of transformation could occur, but I did think we could start people down the path.

But the twist in my day beyond either of those other approaches is that we were talking about being a great teacher online.

Some of the topics we discussed were:

• What is instructor presence in the online classroom? 
• How do we best engage students? How do we, as teachers, stay engaged too?  The best teachers I ever had were engaged in their subject and that's why I was engaged in their class.
• The importance of feedback to students and to teachers.
• What does teaching online offer us a teachers that we don't get in a physical classroom? I like that because most of the time I hear teachers talk about what they can't do online that they can do face-to-face.
• What can we learn from MOOCs? I don't think they will replace college courses or even online courses, but I know they will change how we do online learning and how we teach on and offline.
• We all shared our own best practices of online pedagogy/methodology and of using the technology. We also shared the challenges of teaching online that persist even after doing it for years.

I did have some prepared materials in case the talk slowed down.  But it didn't slow down, so I gave out those materials on academic integrity online, prevention versus detection, and pedagogy compared to andragogy as readings to take away. They are good topics and ones teachers like to discuss, but we had plenty to talk about with the earlier topics.

And that's the way it was supposed to happen.

The Two Updikes

I have been an Updike reader since high school when I started reading John Updike's short stories. I bought all the available collections in used bookstores.

I reread the collected The Maples Stories years later. It has 18 stories from across about 40 years of his career that together make a kind of complete story of one marriage and the American times it spanned. They were released in a paperback version (Too Far to Go) when a television adaptation was done.

It started back in 1956 when John Updike published the story, “Snowing in Greenwich Village,” about a young couple, Joan and Richard Maple, at the beginning of their marriage. For the next couple of decades, he occasionally returned to those characters. Raising children, some happiness, some unhappiness, finally infidelity and estrangement.

I read many of these stories in The New Yorker. I would check the index of new issues at the library to see if he had a new story. I also looked at what poems were in the issue - sometimes he published poems too.

The collection added a later story, “Grandparenting,” that I had never read which takes place long after their divorce.

I started reading his son, David Updike, when his book of stories, Out on the Marsh, came out (1989). It's a good collection that seems to be out of print.

It has to be a tough job being a writer when your father is already about as big as they get in the writing world. David is about my age and did some teaching, so I felt some affinity for him. I liked what I read of a eulogy that he delivered for his father at the New York Public Library’s tribute back in March.

He published several young adult and children's books that I was able to find at bookstores over the years. A Winter Journey, An Autumn Tale, A Spring Story, and The Sounds of Summer make a great seasonal suite for young readers. They follow a boy named Homer and his dog Sophocles through the seasons. Unfortunately, they seem to be seem to be out of print.


His second collection of stories is Old Girlfriends.

"Love Songs from America" might be a somewhat autobiographical tale of an American father bringing his biracial son, Harold, to his wife's Kenyan homeland.

I liked "Adjunct" right from the title since I have been an adjunct instructor. David has taught English and Creative Writing at MIT and Roxbury Community College in Boston.


Old Girlfriends shouldn't be read to be compared with his father's stories, though I imagine most reviewers will point out similarities like the New England settings and themes of marriage, relationships, affairs and such. David's stories seem simple and more about everyday life, but they do deal with family and love and race that his father also explored.

I like that he seems to like his characters, even the ones that he and we probably shouldn't like as much. If writers don't like the characters, readers never will like them.



I know of one book that the two collaborated on - A Helpful Alphabet of Friendly Objects - a picture book for children consisting of 26 short poems on the letters of the alphabet by John Updike with photographs by David Updike.

Engaging Students in an Age of Disengagement

Some studies and the popular media tell us that students are increasingly disengaged in school and that that disengagement increases with every year they spend in school.

And yet, we are also hearing that students live in a very connected, networked world outside of academia where they are more engaged than ever.

I will doing a presentation on May 9th titled "Engaging Students in an Age of Disengagement" at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ as part of their Learning Technology Exposition.

Professors are told that they need to design curriculum to support student success and also create an engaging classroom whether it is face-to-face, online, or in a blended learning environment.

Can educators hijack social media engagement design and tools for academic engagement?
Can we meet student expectations within academic objectives?
Can we (re)design curriculum using pedagogy that encourages engagement?
How does engagement differ F2F, online, in hybrid and MOOC settings.