Learn at Your Own Risk: 9 Strategies for Thriving in a Pandemic and Beyond

Learn at Your Own Risk: 9 Strategies for Thriving in a Pandemic and Beyond

by

Tom Haymes

Print ISBN – 9781626133013

LCCN – 2020949373

Copyright 2020

Published by ATBOSH Media ltd.

Cleveland, Ohio, USA

http://www.ATBOSH.com

Some of the materials in this book were adapted from Tom Haymes’ work previously published on eCampusNews, Current Issues in Education (the STAC Model chapter), and ideaspaces.net. All rights were retained by the author.

Foreword - Exiting the Pandemic: A Model for Education Going Forward

No operation extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main body of the enemy.

– Helmuth von Moltke

There is no question in my mind that my class is better today than it was before the pandemic took us out of the physical world. I began this process several years ago, when I tore down my instruction to its bare bones. I then examined everything I had been doing for almost two decades. I asked myself questions like How does doing X contribute to the goals I’ve set for my students? If I could not answer that question, I discarded the action or adapted it to a different media where it was going to be more effective. It took a year’s worth of work and some semi-patient students, but at the end of my deconstruction process I had a pretty good idea of how to fine tune my pedagogical activities to meet the students where they were. I also had a fairly precise idea of what each tool I was using was doing and whether I needed technology or human interaction to make it do what I wanted it to.

My pedagogy shifted decisively when I started this process of self-examination. A deliberate focus on student-centered learning pushed me from a 1.0 version of my class to a 2.0 version of it. The class became a semester-long project that the students chose for themselves, instead of random chunks of information that I thought would be meaningful to them. When the pandemic hit, it forced me to take a lot of the pieces I had been meaning to digitize and finally put them online, leaving concentrated human interactions to scaffold everything else. The structure of the 2.0 class was largely unaffected, but the pandemic forced me to apply new and better digital tools. This final step made the class stronger than ever. I will not be going back.

My experience stands in stark contrast to that of many of my colleagues. I have seen far too many approaches in dealing with the pandemic that relied upon optimistic expectations instead of antifragile planning to steer educational institutions through the crisis. The one thing that characterizes most of these approaches is that they relied on institutional and technological responses to the challenges of remote learning instead of starting with the kinds of root-level pedagogical explorations that motivated my own class redesign. The result has been, as of this writing in early November 2020, a hodgepodge of approaches that can charitably described as reactive and has led to a degradation of quality in many instances.

Any reasonable observer in March would have recognized that the messiest outcome, a scenario where schools try to open up only to unexpectedly shut down when COVID-19 cases spiked – what Bryan Alexander describes as Toggle Term,¹ – was actually the most optimistic and also the most likely version of what the Fall Semester would look like. And yet, almost no one realistically prepared for that eventuality. The extreme uncertainties of Toggle Term require a profoundly human approach to sustain communities of learning. Instead, we saw many institutions, ranging from school districts to elite universities, implement complex technologies, fail to adapt fundamental instructional practices, and generally increase the isolation of learners, when precisely the opposite was called for.

Why was that? One answer, derived from systems thinking, is that that scenario seemed to require responses that challenged too many paradigms of industrial education. These included funding formulas based on physical attendance, mass high-stakes testing, large lecture halls, residential dormitories, sports, and international visa requirements. Many of those were going to be challenged regardless and were already overdue for some serious rethinking. None of them are central to the mission of learning. All should take a back seat to the needs of students trying to get on with their learning journeys, often in the face of incredible obstacles.

The other critical mistake that has come out of this crisis was the belief that technology will save us all. There is no question but that technology has provided us tremendous affordances and opportunities that allowed us to Band-Aid the system in the spring. However, technology-first systems are incredibly brittle, both from a technical perspective (prone to breakdowns under stress), but also from the perspective of systems of learning. Design teaches us that the most effective solutions are built up through a critical examination of the needs, goals, and capabilities of the user, in this case the teacher and the learner. Understanding what we know about teaching should be a departure point for every technological and organizational (systemic) decision we make. After safety considerations stemming from the pandemic, which are likely to be short- to medium-range in nature, the long-term disruption to both present and future learners must be of paramount concern.

This book is in part a compilation of my reflections on teaching and learning during the pandemic. It is based on my experience of 40 years as a technologist and practical experience teaching government courses at a community college. Many of the conclusions are also a product of the work being done for my forthcoming volume, Discovering Digital Humanity, which outlines a set of principles to inform our relationship with systems of technology. What makes this book different is that it starts and ends with teaching. Its strategies begin with pedagogical concerns and then explore how those pedagogical concerns interact with technology as well as the larger systems of mass education that we have constructed. While some of the explorations touch on altering larger systems so that they are more in tune with 21st Century economic and social realities, this book is designed for the teacher to help him or her to navigate their learners through a universe of shifting sands.

While it uses the 2020 pandemic as a launching point for its deeper explorations, the book is not just meant as a roadmap through the pandemic. It is intended as a launching point for a series of overdue discussions about how we can optimize teaching and learning by taking full advantage of the opportunities that the Digital Age offers us. It is time to realize that we are no longer hostage to the dehumanizing realities of industrial education with its implicit assumptions that students are nothing more than widgets moving down a highly imperfect assembly line. The danger now lies in losing sight of the individual as the pandemic has eaten away at the human glue around the edges, which worked to counter the dehumanizing effects of 500-person lecture halls, standardized testing, and distanced education based on those assumptions. Deep learning responds to the needs of the learner. Institutions should do the same, but the teacher forms the critical nexus through all of this. It is to them that I dedicate this work.

¹ https://bryanalexander.org/future-of-education/higher-education-in-fall-2020-three-pandemic-scenarios/

Introduction: A Crisis Design Primer for Teachers

You have just been through 8 hours of unremitting stress flying your bomber over Germany, being shot at, and just keeping your plane in the air. As you approach your airfield in Southern England, you pull the lever to lower your landing gear and listen for the satisfying chirp of rubber on the runway that indicates you are home. Instead, your senses are greeted with a rending crash as your bomber careens over the asphalt runway. Your belly gunner is probably dead, and your plane is a wreck. The problem? The knob that lowers your flaps is right next to that which raises your landing gear. Instead of slowing your speed and increasing the lift of your wings the nearly identical knob has raised your landing gear.¹

Teaching feels a lot like that sometimes. As someone who spends a lot of time designing for a lot of possible outcomes in my teaching, every semester I have had my share of unexpected belly landings. Over the years, however, I have worked hard to bring to bear a range of experiences and research from a broad spectrum of disciplines to constantly refine the design of my class. Part of this is technological, as I have sought to examine the tools that I can bring to bear on a wide range of circumstances. Part of this is structural, as I have sought to understand how schools and classrooms operate as systems of human interaction. And part of this is instructional, as I have constantly sought to learn and adapt human-centric pedagogical strategies. As a result, when the pandemic swept across the educational landscape, my classes were more prepared than most to weather its disruptions.

In a 2012 book, Nicholas Taleb, the systems theorist responsible for the term black swan, added a new term to our vocabulary. He wrote, Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile.² The pandemic made my instruction even more antifragile as I gamed out and applied the principles outlined in this book to work whether we are meeting fully online, partially online in small groups, or in more traditional hybrid modalities. This book builds on the principles and approaches outlined in my forthcoming volume Discovering Digital Humanity, but that book is a book of ideas. This book is intended first and foremost as a set of practical steps that can be taken to make any class antifragile during the pandemic and beyond. As COVID-19 shut down in-person instruction across education, we must take the time to grasp at the right levers and to design systems so that our students aren’t forced to suffer the consequences of our mistakes. Learning is antifragile. Many of the systems designed around it are not.

This book may have been written in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and its effect on education. However, its underlying principles are the result of decades of work and, more importantly, were always directed toward a larger set of hurdles that have only been exposed by the impact that the crisis has had on our approaches to teaching and learning: the impact that the Digital Age is having, and will have, on our Industrial Age educational models. Some see this as a threatening development, attacking familiar patterns of how we go about our day-to-day tasks as teachers. I have always seen this as a tremendous opportunity to augment our ability to