Laura Cruz from The Pennsylvania State University, Ted Murcray from California Baptist University, and Marina Smitherman from Dalton State College presented at the Lilly Conference Online 2021 a recorded session entitled “Writing about Teaching (Together): Implementing Virtual Writing Communities under COVID-19.” I have now watched several sessions by Cruz and enjoyed all they do for faculty development. In this session, Cruz began with a QR code to a shared GoogleDoc and a warm-up exercise to write about “why are you here?” The writing group met every Friday to write about teaching. They wrote virtually but together with the same video background introduction slide to remind participants to disconnect and just write. Participants shared the new conditions of working from home and challenges of maintaining focus. Cruz shared some research from Eardley, Banister, and Fletcher published in the Journal for Further and Higher Education that came out just before the pandemic that supported writing groups helping with wellbeing. What they did with the next part of the recorded session was show a screen capture of the writing process on the common GoogleDoc with exotic music. It was mesmerizing and emphasized the collaborative nature of the virtual writing community. Cruz then shared the prompt:
If you had two hours a week to write about your teaching, what would you write about?
Laura Cruz, Lilly Conference Online 2021
I would write about what worked and my feeling or interpretations about how sessions went. I would also likely brainstorm about what to do next time or what to improve. I would hope to have ideas for case studies, activities, and studies that we could work on. Cruz mentioned that they provided structured writing time, offered mini sessions and writing coaches, and shared background reading resources (models, SoTL resources, & writing examples). This all sounds similar to the writing retreats we used to have in the Hunt Library as part of the Office of Faculty Development Writing Retreats. I loved them because I could focus on writing. Cruz also spoke about the relatively low maintenance required to run virtual writing communities. Again, using fun music, they played a screen cast of the common GoogleDoc showing responses from participants to prompts like what would you describe as the benefits of the writing groups. Another prompt, Cruz shared, was “Over the past year, what were the moments where you felt most connected to other people?” I thought the sessions with the NC State Libraries, Office of Faculty Development, and DELTA were the moments I felt most connected talking about course design and student engagement and support.
Cruz played another video of the contributions to the GoogleDoc with jazzy piano music. I have to remember this. Another prompt following the same structure previously used in this recording (video –> reflection) was “What aspects of your teaching and learning practice from this year will you carry over into the next academic year?” I think I will carry over some of the online asynchronous activities including parts of some case studies and forum posts/e-quests. I will also hopefully carry over some of the structure I am learning from Quality Matters (QM). I enjoyed this session and agree with Cruz: thinking with others in a space, even a virtual space, over sustained periods of time (weeks to months) does lead to some magical connections and energy. I had fun with this session and tried responding to prompts in this post. While my responses will likely change in the next couple of weeks as we enter the fall semester, the idea of working with groups and carving out time for synchronous sessions and accountability is really important. I hope to do just this with the HITS case study groups and some Faculty Mentoring Networks.
