Phil Nelson

Like you, perhaps, I felt a lot of tension this past March—how could I give my students what they needed? Here are some reflections on what I came up with, and some things I hope to try in the fall. I’ll argue that the fundamental nut we must crack involves student attention; whatever our good intentions, we must address this issue head-on if we are to be effective. We have all heard many good ideas about elaborate course structures to maintain attention. Here instead are some ideas that focus on how I try to keep human connection front and center.

Any major disruption offers us the chance to rethink our core values. I decided to attend some remote classes given by colleagues at other institutions. I encourage you to do the same, because what I saw was eye-opening, or rather, eye-shutting: Often there is just a white screen with equations appearing from an invisible hand. In the corner there is a thumbnail image of an expressionless face, its gaze averted. Naturally—the professor is concentrating hard on the tablet where (s)he is writing out the equations! Others were busy showing PowerPoint slides and moving their cursor around to make various points. Their gaze was fixed on their second monitor—again, not on “me” (that is, not on their camera). Either way, the user experience is nothing but pure content. Isn’t that our ideal as intellectuals? Well, for me at least, it is absolutely impossible to maintain my attention under such conditions.

Much has changed, but much remains unchanged. What, anyway, is the indispensable core of education? One answer is that it’s what happens when a human wishes to work hard to give beautiful, important, but difficult skills and frameworks to other humans who wish to acquire them, and each side doesn’t want to let the other side down. This certainly motivates me during a normal semester, and perhaps my students as well. The human interaction is what distinguishes this activity from outstanding but one-way content like Khan Academy (or reading a book). Preserving that aspect became a priority for me.

I remind students that attention is the gold or petroleum of the 21st century, that their attention is a commodity bought and sold by giant corporations, and that it’s up to them to grip their attention tightly and nail it for an hour to whatever they believe deserves it, despite the best efforts of those corporations to disrupt it. I admit to them that this is much harder with remote instruction. I can certainly tell them in all humility that I, too, struggle with fragmented attention, but that there are mindful strategies we can all learn.

Beyond commiserating, what can I, as the professor, do to help? Let’s recognize that we are animals, and we evolved to focus our attention on another who is moving around, gesticulating, adding emphasis with vocal tone, sometimes dropping the eraser, and especially making eye contact while asking questions. So I want to prioritize a live activity, where I model doing science. I keep the usual classroom fiction, that I’m inventing the subject right there on the spot; I do some things, step back, look directly at students, and ask “What should I do next?”, maybe even call on one by name. I want to mess up (hopefully not too often), demonstrate how to recover, and get forgiven.

All of this turns out to be possible with available tech. I set up a room with a real (not virtual) whiteboard, where I can do all those human things. I set up a camera that’s several feet from me, not two feet as on a laptop. (Of course, that means I must be wearing trousers!) And I look right at that camera about as often as I once looked at students in a regular class. Yes, obviously, it is not real eye contact. But it still helps—our attentional circuits are so easily fooled.

I would dearly love an arrangement where students were also more aware of one another’s presences. As humans, we are also wired to give attention especially when we’re in a room full of others who are also focusing on the same thing. The electricity—when you know that “Others are Getting It so I had better Keep Up”—is mostly lost in Zoom-world. Nobody gives their best attentional effort without that nudge. What’s the next best thing? This term, I am creating breakout teams (“assigned tables”) where just a few students will work together for discussions and for a project or two, then get reassigned to a new team over and over throughout the term. I hope these teams will work because (a) each member doesn’t want to let the others down, and (b) humans actually enjoy contributing to common goals. I won’t rely on Zoom’s auto-assignment feature, because I want to engineer connections between students with different disciplinary backgrounds. Also, Zoom’s “random” assignments end up with a surprising amount of duplication; I want each student to get acquainted with as many different classmates as possible during the semester.

As to the projects themselves, now more than ever I think it’s important that they not all be exercises I did decades ago; at least some of them should be projects I tried for the first time in the past month. Then I can tell students honestly about the frustrations I faced; I can show then my initial flawed attempt; I can hold out the possibility that with some initiative their team may do better than I did in some respects.

Are these ideas merely hunches, or are they the results of rigorous, peer-reviewed, double-blind research? Answer: They are hunches, of course. If they sound worth trying, you can try them; I’m reporting that they are not very hard to implement. For what it’s worth, multiple students this spring commented that I “cared about” them; perhaps this form of connection was part of what drove that sense.

Technical asides: I record my sessions locally. This approach lets me edit out students’ thumbnail images, addressing privacy concerns they may have and perhaps letting them relax while still being visible to each other in class, knowing that only I will be visible in the recording. When students ask questions, I repeat the question for the recording, which anyway is good practice.

After class, I upload each session to Panopto, which conveniently allows streaming access. However, overseas students may prefer to download the whole episode before watching it; Panopto offers an option to allow this.

It can be done. Human connection is what we offer as an elite institution. I believe this is why universities still exist after many centuries, and might be worth saving. Would I choose to keep working in this mode in a hypothetical post-pandemic world? No way! But while we’re waiting for that day, improved connection can be arranged with a little care, once we realize its importance.

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Phil Nelson is Professor of Physics and Astronomy in SAS. He is the recipient of the 2018 Dennis M. Deturck Award for Innovation in Teaching and the 2001 Ira Abrams Memorial Award for excellence in undergraduate teaching.

This essay continues the series that began in the fall of 1994 as the joint creation of the College of Arts and Sciences, the Center for Teaching and Learning and the Lindback Society for Distinguished Teaching. See https://almanac.upenn.edu/talk-about-teaching-and-learning-archive for previous essays.