Engaging Students Through Integrated Pedagogy: A Case Study From a Year of Pandemic Teaching

The Covid-19 Pandemic – A Catalyst For Innovation?

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted traditional in-person modes of college teaching and challenged the professorate to innovate at a nearly exponential rate. As states began to issue lockdown orders after the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a pandemic, traditional in-person college classes had to switch abruptly to entirely online mode. Many faculty had only a few days to effect this considerable transition. Students struggled with unequal access to online learning platforms. Administrators worked to balance safe learning with the financial fallout from the sudden online conversion. While all were focused on completing the academic 2019 – 2020 year amidst a statewide lockdown mandate, emerging public health data made it indisputably clear that the pandemic was going to remain a significant consideration in the planning for the 2020 – 2021 academic year. The summer months, which traditionally are a period for renewal and rest, provided not only much needed time to plan but also an unsurpassed occasion for innovation and creativity.

A sizeable challenge in the planning process was that the authors’ institution expected that in-person instruction would be retained in as many classes as possible during 2020 – 2021. While in-person instruction proved easier to manage in smaller classes (e.g., less than 10 students), it was taxing in high-demand courses such as General Chemistry because of large course enrollments and space limitations. Another challenge was that the General Chemistry laboratory experience at the authors’ institution is not online, i.e., it is a hands-on experience. Lastly, some students requested and were allowed by the authors’ institution to take all their classes remotely.

Accordingly, the authors collaborated to design a teaching model that had to correspond to the following criteria:

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  Ensure that students are engaged in their learning. The authors could not continue to be the “sage on the stage” in this new model because their teaching experience had challenged the ability of instructor-centered teaching to reach all students.

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  Accommodate social distancing in lecture and laboratory facilities that are not sufficiently large to allow a socially-distanced in-person meeting of an entire course section.

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  Enable future quarantined or sick students to continue making progress in class, as long as their symptoms allowed.

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  Remain flexible in order to adapt to a rapidly evolving situation that was fraught with many unknowns (“pivot” to a fully online mode, if necessary).

Five General Chemistry sections were scheduled before COVID-19 was officially declared a pandemic. These sections were scheduled as traditional, in-person, classes that meet three times a week for 50-minute lectures and once a week for a two-hour lab. In this traditional model, lecture tests are administered in class, and lab work is graded though paper copies of lab worksheets. This original pre-pandemic schedule had to remain in place in the fall of 2020 because the majority of students had already registered for classes before the pandemic’s start. Because enrollment in each section ranged between 18 and 22 students, the traditional model was not going to work with the need to social distance students. While COVID-19 forced the authors to change their teaching quickly and profoundly, the pandemic also provided an opportunity to innovate by designing the integrated pedagogy model presented in this chapter.