Betsy Gilliland, University of Hawaiʻi Mānoa, Honolulu, USA

During Spring 2020, I taught SLS 312, Techniques in Second Language Teaching: Reading and Writing. I have structured the syllabus of this upper division undergraduate course into two modules, the first focused on reading and the second on writing, with the same assignments in each module. To fulfill general education requirements, SLS 312 also includes instruction in, practice with, and feedback on oral communication. Because the course is about teaching, students have opportunities to practice teaching their peers, designed to be done in face-to-face contexts where the “teachers” could interact in real time with their “students” and receive feedback from observers. The teaching activities: “Swap Shop” and “Microteaching” repeated in the two modules, the Swap Shop midway through the module and Microteaching as a capstone. In both activities, students in the class play the roles of teachers, students, or observers, with teachers implementing learning activities and students acting as learners of a particular age and proficiency level.

Everything went smoothly during our reading module, with students giving their all in the Swap Shop and Microteaching. Then, the university shifted to an all-online format in March (Week 10 of our 16-week semester, the second week of the writing module) due to COVID-19. Some students left Hawaiʻi and returned home to Japan or California. A few kept their part-time jobs or were working “essential” supermarket jobs. Others had no internet at home or limited technology (e.g., smartphones but no laptop). In this reflection, I describe how I migrated the teaching assignments online while maintaining the oral communication focus and my students’ opportunities to learn how to teach.

Technology access and comfort created one challenge for students in demonstrating their teaching knowledge. I turned the Swap Shop into an asynchronous Flipgrid demonstration in which students recorded video presentations talking about writing-focused activities they had chosen (rather than interactively teaching the activity). Their classmates then watched the videos and completed short evaluations. Some students had trouble with the platform, and others clearly did not have time to rehearse, as they were cut off by the 5-minute limit I had set. Nevertheless, they all created dynamic videos either of themselves speaking or of a narrated slideshow.

I wanted the module-final microteaching, however, to remain as a synchronous, interactive process, so that students would get one more chance to receive feedback on their teaching. A few students indicated in a survey that they had led discussions or taught over Zoom before, but the majority stated that this was a new practice for them. I, therefore, gave a mini-lecture on using Zoom tools for teaching (demonstrating how to do breakout rooms, whiteboards, and screen sharing) and provided links to how-to videos for teaching on Zoom. I scheduled the microteaching over three class meetings, with five “teachers'' giving 10-minute lessons per day. Volunteer “students” turned on their video, while observers turned theirs off, so the teachers could see their “students” during the lesson.

Though all my students conducted a lesson during their microteaching, the process was not without some snags. For one, not all students were tech-comfortable enough to enact their lessons smoothly: Some could not screenshare, some screen shares were so tiny we couldn’t see them, and some did not set their Google Docs settings for others to edit so “students” could type. A few “teachers” noted that they did not know how to see participants when screen sharing, so they couldn’t monitor what their students were doing. Some of the teachers were not thinking about online environments when designing lessons and materials, so they produced plans that would have worked in a face-to-face context where they could walk around the classroom and monitor students, but they couldn’t do that online. Finally, some issues were connected to being at home, including teaching from bed or wearing pajamas, poor lighting (especially backlit video), and background noise from the street or their families.

I now recognize some of the challenges of the online transition as something other than just new technology. Many students had left their dorms and moved back to their parents’ homes. While living on campus, they had developed a professional adult identity, but among their childhood surroundings, they may have felt conflicted about who they were—teacher or child—and uncomfortable performing as adults in front of their families. Their budding professionalism was dwarfed by engrained home identities.

Nevertheless, my students reflected that the online microteaching experience was valuable, even if their main takeaway was that they preferred teaching in a classroom. Though I, too, prefer the face-to-face option, I know that it is possible to have synchronous microteaching in Techniques in Second Language Teaching: Reading and Writing, and the students will still learn something about language teaching.