Lisa J. Servon

The best courses I’ve ever taken or taught have benefited immensely from connections made among the students, and between the students and me. I know the magic has begun when I arrive at my classroom around Week 4 and find a group of students already there, chattering about current events, the reading, or last night’s episode of The Bachelorette. They begin to lose their stiffness around me, calling me Lisa instead of Professor Servon without too much discomfort. The shift in dynamics tells me they’re ready to begin to trust each other and to be vulnerable in the classroom. And that vulnerability has a deep impact on the learning environment, especially when you’re teaching about topics like race, inequality, and politics.

How could I possibly create the conditions for those kinds of connections to be made in Zoom World? By the time the pandemic hit and the university shut down last spring, my students had already gotten to know each other. But in the fall I faced a screen full of students who were new to Penn and living all over the country. I spent much of the summer rebuilding my courses from the ground up and felt pretty good about the technical aspects of my courses. My biggest worry was how to create community.
I approached the problem like the researcher I am. Even though I was new to online teaching, others had been doing it for decades. How did those teachers deal with this situation? I read books and articles about the virtual classroom, consulted with colleagues, and took courses with the Center for Teaching and Learning. And then I experimented with different strategies, and checked in with the students regularly to find out what they thought was and wasn’t working. Here are some of the strategies I adopted:

• Opening early, closing late. Students connect with each other before and after class. They arrive early to get a good seat, meet about a project, or just to settle in. They also stay after class to ask questions, or maybe they leave with a classmate to get coffee or lunch. I couldn’t do anything about the coffee or lunch, but I could open the Zoom room early and keep it open after class. I experimented with different situations and ultimately landed on opening the room early just for the students, and then staying after class to answer any questions, or to talk about what we’d done in class more informally.
• Flipping the classroom. I thought about the “synchronous” class time I’d have with my students as expensive real estate that should be used primarily for engaged learning. I couldn’t think of a good reason for my students to show up and listen to me give a lecture live that I could record just as easily and that they could watch on their own time. I also knew that Zoom fatigue was real; I had experienced it myself. So I recorded short—never more than 30 minutes but ideally less—lectures and shortened our synchronous time accordingly. During class, we discussed the readings and my lecture, and I put them into breakout rooms with a set of questions so that they could get to know each other better while learning the material. Early in the semester, I popped into a breakout room about five minutes after I had broken them into groups, and found that they hadn’t begun to address the questions. “Sorry Lisa,” one student said sheepishly. “We haven’t even started yet.” From then on I allotted extra time to group work so that they could connect in other ways, and told them explicitly that that was part of what I hoped they’d accomplish.
• Peer review. I have used peer review before but not consistently, and usually only for big assignments. This past semester I had students work in groups of three to review and comment on drafts of their first assignment, which was to observe and write about a public meeting they had attended (virtually, of course). They loved it. Although I had not planned to use peer review for the other assignments, they asked if they could continue the practice. So we did. I switched the groups up every time, but it would be interesting to keep the same groups all semester also. The peer review process both enhanced the learning process and provided them with another opportunity to connect.
• Using Perusall. Perusall is a platform all Penn instructors can use through Canvas that allows students to collaboratively annotate text. I uploaded a reading the second week of the semester and inserted comments and questions into it for the students to react to. I also invited them to insert comments and questions of their own. When I opened up the reading the night before class, I found all kinds of chatter, responses to my questions, reactions to other students’ posts, and links to books, articles, and videos. Community! Perusall enabled them to “talk to” each other about the reading. And it gave me insight into what aspects engaged them the most. In class, I used their comments as a way to draw them into our conversation. “Jake, I found the observation about power and oppression you made in Perusall really intriguing. Can you say more about that?”

Walter Wallace was murdered by police in West Philadelphia about halfway through the fall semester and the students in my Introduction to Housing, Community and Economic Development class were deeply impacted. One woman, who I’ll call Gaby, grew up a few blocks from the shooting and had moved back to the neighborhood. We had a guest speaker in class that week who works for the City of Philadelphia. Suddenly the ideas we talk about in class—the role of public officials, the work we see ourselves doing—became much less abstract. For Gaby, it was deeply personal. She raised her hand, thanked the speaker for joining us, and then spoke powerfully for several minutes about how she felt about the city, about the police, and about the killing. She had had enough. She told us she was organizing a march for the following week. Several students had already joined with her, volunteering to make banners and bring snacks.

When I arrived at Malcolm X Park the following Monday afternoon for the march, it took me a minute to realize that many of the faces partly hidden by masks were the same faces I had been seeing in the rectangles on my laptop screen twice a week since the beginning of the semester. They showed up for Gaby and for each other. My students constantly amaze me, and I won’t take credit for the way they connected. That’s all them. But perhaps the way I set up the course helped create the space for them to come together.

During the final class of the semester I asked the students to name one aspect of the class that they would take away with them. Some of them mentioned a reading they found particularly powerful. Some recalled an assignment that flipped a switch for them. And each and every one of them talked about the community they found with their fellow students.

Lisa J. Servon is the Kevin and Erica Penn Presidential Professor of City and Regional Planning in the Stuart Weitzman School of Design. She is also the department chair of City and Regional Planning.

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.