Its so interesting for me to read these blogs. It’s a part of my job that I love the most and find most valuable. I’m sure you all don’t agree with me – but I feel strongly that having all of this to look back on at the end of each year and at the end of the course is going to be amazing. As part of the process of reflection practice to have 2-3 years of evidence of professional and personal growth is something not every one has. It will feed well into your CV development.

What I’ve taken away from the blogs so far is that students experienced a lot of anxiety about how the online learning was going to be implemented. The fact that teaching staff who have previously never taught online had only a week to prepare could not have helped this. I had some personal goals to achieve to set up my plan for online learning:

1. For students to know I would do everything within my ability to continue their education

2. For students to have time to improve their theory and consolidate the application of theory to practice in an intensive way – this would hopefully lead to a better clinical experience on return to face to face

3. I wanted to ensure all students had access to a variety of teaching and collaborative resources – I could not only use Zoom

4. It was crucial to me that I offer BOH3 a nurturing space to really take a deep dive into their theory

5. I still wanted to be be able to utilise perio staff to keep them employed and ensure we could do small group activities.

I did a lot of reading on ways to do this and my teaching heroes are all following similar paths – less reliance on Zoom as the primary resource and ensuring the structure and content is available and accessible to all.

I could have gone two ways with week 1 – just do one thing, then gradually introduce a new thing each week OR try it all out, see what worked, what didn’t and use that information to shape the rest of the curriculum until we could be face to face. I chose the latter. I’m sorry for the stress the first week of online learning caused. In the first week of the holidays I was averaging 4 Zoom meetings a day… and believe me it was worth coming up with some alternatives. Video conferencing becomes exhausting and unproductive – I also found myself multitasking which isn’t great… don’t want my students to do this.

I approached the first week of #remotelearning with excitement. But I appreciate that whilst I provided a lot of material explaining what we were going to do… it didn’t go into the minute detail of how or more  importantly why. So the first BOH 1 session was a fair disaster. I loved what I was trying to achieve educationally but it stressed everyone out. I got some lovely feedback from some first years and some brutal recommendations as well. As I like to do… I sought solace in Twitter. I was looking for comfort, reassurance and advice.

I also reached out to a collaborator and mentor Dr. Kate Coleman and my doppelgänger Dr. Byrne for reassurance that it would be worth it persevering. You think I have too many ideas – you need to meet Dr. Coleman… she blows me out of the water.

 

https://www.scholarlyteacher.com/post/growth-minded-pivot-to-online-teaching

I found myself in good hands and the mantra for the rest of the week became #growthmindset. I was determined to try things out – I didn’t want the experimental phase to go beyond a week because I wanted to use the 2 week break to consolidate each specific session, to complete all of the unit outlines, the instructions, the Canvas modules… the admin list goes on.

Excitedly I can report that the OHS 2A and OHP 3 Periodontology is nearly completely built. Prof Darby is collaborating with me to develop co-taught intro to perio lectures for DDS1/BOH1 and the DDS are going to adopt some of the practical sessions that we have planned. Any new content delivered to BOH 1 will be made available to all students. The focus for the second week of the break is all about developing the practical program – seeing how we can bring more cariology into first year and then hopefully getting to a place where we get start to get BOH 2 & 3 working independently on their case work and theory.

We are also finalising the assessment plan & my focus is on low stress, easy to manage assessments but given our clinical focus I’m going to expect evidence of weekly activity so I can follow up and help students out.

I encourage you to also have a #growthmindset in your own adoption of the #remoteteaching and to reach out to me whenever you need help. I know a lot of students and staff have group chats and that they have found a lot of support there. But if you’re struggling to know what to do, with the content, with access or with anything related to my stuff please contact me I want to help and sometimes it is hard if I just get a general list from the class reps.

I hope you are enjoying your break, that you remember what tasks have been set for after the break and that you will email me when you need.

References

https://www.seanmichaelmorris.com/pivot-to-online-a-student-guide/amp/