Below, I have written out a guide for “back-to-work”. I wrote the text and asked Gemini (an AI-driven tool) to put my text into a guide that would be easy to read (i.e., it created headings and subheadings).
Once a faculty strike ends, the challenge of “back-to-work” begins. Returning to the classroom after a strike requires strategic planning and empathy. We need to be realistic about our own capacity for work while ensuring fairness and transparency for our students. The goal is to finish the semester strong without rushing or compromising core learning objectives. While the university should have additional guidelines about what remediation looks like, the information below can serve as a starting point so you can begin to think about what aspects of your course you may need to adapt and how best to do so.
1. Reassessing Course Content
When adjusting content, remember that students tend to be critical of just dropping material as they feel they are learning less. We need to focus on what is truly necessary for them to succeed going forward.
- Prioritize Core Competencies: Be mindful of what is necessary for students to know when they leave the course. Peripheral topics are more easily dropped than core competencies.
- Condense, Don’t Just Drop: It may be preferable to keep all the chapters but cover less in each rather than completely dropping a single chapter; however, it may also work better to simply drop a chapter and then be able to go into the normal amount of detail on the remaining chapters.
- Balance Instructional Methods: If you normally include both lecture AND active learning parts of your course, consider whether you can skip either the lecture or the active learning component for certain topics to save time. However, it’s definitely better to cover less material well than to rush through more material poorly.
- Leverage External and Recorded Content:
- Record a lecture or two about material you missed that you don’t want to drop completely but also don’t have time to still lecture on. A 20–30 minute video of the “highlights” would be great, with an emphasis on material that is important for the final exam or for subsequent chapters.
- Look for a high-quality video or article that may cover the same content (e.g., a good documentary, TED talk, or resource provided by the textbook publisher) that you could more easily assign to your students to watch or read.
- Offer Optional Support: Consider holding optional office hours (online or in person) that students can either drop in or sign up to attend. For example, if you had to drop some active learning components from your classes, offer to go through some of those during these optional sessions. While not many students may take you up on that offer, some may find it helpful.
2. Revising Assessment and Grading Schemes
When managing assignments, be realistic about what students can actually accomplish in a condensed format and how much grading you can realistically fit into the time remaining.
- Stagger Deadlines: Extending all deadlines may create too much difficulty if you have to grade a lot of things at once. It’s still a good idea to extend deadlines where you can (especially for auto-graded components like multiple choice quizzes based on chapters), but be mindful of the impact of having them all due, say, the last day of class.
- Focus on Summative Work: Consider dropping formative assignments (i.e., work that is mostly for student practice and reflection, like journals or short quizzes) and focusing on summative ones (i.e., assignments that are crucial to demonstrate knowledge learned). Prioritize summative over formative.
- Reduce Quantity of Assessments: If you had students complete several of one type of assessment (e.g., chapter quizzes, discussion board posts), consider reducing the number that are considered for the final grade. For example, instead of having 8 of 12 podcast reflection grades count, have 6 of 12.
- Respect Completed Work: You could also just say the assignments that would have been due during the strike will not be due anymore. However, be mindful that some students will have continued to complete assignments or submit work during the strike. They may be resentful if they worked hard only to have that work removed or dropped.
- Reweighting for Fairness: Reweight the course so that assessments from before the strike are worth more. For example, if you had a midterm and a final exam and the former was worth less than the latter, maybe swap that. Put more weight on what students completed under “ideal” circumstances and less on what they completed under the post-strike conditions, which are not ideal.
3. Adjusting the Final Exam Format
The final exam should reflect what students were actually able to learn under these compressed conditions, not what they might have memorized under normal circumstances.
- Alter the Format: Consider altering the format of the final exam, especially if it involves a lot of memorizing of content that is now being delivered in a condensed amount of time.
- Reduce Stress: Consider having fewer questions on the final exam, some element of choice (i.e., choose two of the following three questions to answer), or allowing students to bring in a notes sheet (e.g., a single sheet of paper, or an index card) to help reduce the stress of having to remember information they didn’t have as much time to learn in class.
4. Giving Students Agency
Research shows that many students said that the most important part of re-starting classes was having a say in what the rest of the semester would look like.
- Seek Input First: In one study, around 60% of students who experienced a strike would have appreciated either (a) their professor leading a class discussion and then letting the students vote on how to adjust the syllabus or (b) being able to choose an individualized plan (perhaps from two or three possible options) that worked best for them. You may want to ask them open-ended questions in a short quiz or open up a discussion in class when you get back. Questions like:
- “Before you vote on my proposed remediation or give me any suggestions for alternate plans, please share anything you’d like me to know about your experience of the strike or how it impacted you. This is NOT required and you can certainly skip answering it.”
- “Is there anything else you’d like to ask me about the strike or about how to finish out the semester now that the strike is over?”
- Propose and Vote: You may want to propose changes for each aspect of your syllabus (e.g., class content, chapter quizzes, assignments, presentations, projects, final exam) and then have students vote on whether they approve of your proposed suggestions or not. This would let you know that, for example, 85% of students are in favour of extending deadlines for chapter quizzes but only 40% are comfortable with dropping a chapter, which could help you adjust your remediation plan.
- Offer Flexible Grading Schemes: You could also have several grading schemes that students can “choose” from and then use the grading scheme for them that results in the highest grade. This lets students take a more targeted approach to their remaining few weeks and gives them more agency. For example, you could have the original syllabus grading scheme, a grading scheme that emphasizes pre-strike assessment and de-emphasizes post-strike assessments, and a grading scheme with fewer assignments (e.g., students can now drop 2 low grades or there will now only be 6 journals instead of 8).
- Communicate P/NC Option: Let them know the senate approved that “any student who receives a specific letter grade for a paused course can request that it be changed to a P/NC grade.” However, they should be mindful of what this might mean if the course is a requirement for future courses or degrees (e.g., some programs require specific grades, not just a pass).
5. Clear Communication
Communicate clearly to your students by creating a detailed document. Consider creating a document titled “Post-Strike Revised Schedule and Grading Plan” (you could also call this a proposed schedule and grading plan if you intend to seek their input or have them weigh in on the plan) and posting it to your course homepage and emailing it to students so they know where to find information about how the syllabus will be revised and what to expect once classes resume.