What is returning to the atom classroom with us?

We teachers did so many things differently over the past 18 months, when our teaching atoms all became bits. Many of us are cautious yet thrilled to be back face-to-face with students, and we recognize that many things we did pedagogically can carry back to our onsite classes. Following are a few thoughts and practices that have come to my mind in the first few weeks back f2f at Drexel.

Optimizing hybrids. As I have mentioned, much of our pandemic teaching slid into an unconventional "hybrid" zone: It was no longer the spatiohybrid of displaced class rooms but instead a chronohybrid of displaced time, mainly through blends of synchronous and asynchronous learning that was still all remote. Refining the articulations between, say, asynchronous conversation and in-class talk has always been a key challenge of hybrid learning, but many of us are now perhaps closer to that "sweet spot" because we had to regularly re-think how we used straightforward technologies such as message boards to enhance synchronous interactions such as Zoom conversations.

Better overall course directions. I'm avoiding just the word "syllabus" here, because I think our course instructions became in all of our course documents and the LMS interfaces that we had to rely on more heavily throughout the remote emergency teaching era. I think teachers have become more comprehensive in how we deliver instructions, use more productive repetition in our messages, and, in many ways, are creating much more user-friendly documents and instruction.

Hard-copy document "hygiene." I'm a big quizzer: I think reading quizzes help the class in so many ways. Normally, I administer and collect paper quizzes. It was always so easy! But after the first day of quizzes this term, I realized this was not a good pandemic practice. Instead, I simply moved the start-of-class, timed quizzes onto Blackboard, much as I had during Zoom instruction.

Recordings. My class is highly participatory, so recordings don't work that well. But I certainly could record, and now Drexel and other places have classes set up for this purpose while also providing some personnel to help create class recordings. Through the grapevine I'm hearing that recording a class is pretty easy, although teachers are figuring out how to overcome things like capturing both a chalk board and lecture clearly or how to pick up student questions effectively. 

In-class "ticker"? I'm still mulling this over, but I was such a fan of the chat in my Zoom classes that I had thought about possibly using a chat "ticker" projected on the wall of my classes to help shyer students participate. In my current onsite class, I was thinking about the same dynamic, although my current group is highly participatory and may not need this nudge.

I primarily want to be in a classroom where my students are safe. I also want them to be happy. I must say that they have stayed safe at least so far this term, and, man, do they appear to be happy, masks and all, in our 200-level course Language Puzzles and Word Games: Issues in Modern Grammar.