Lessons Learned During COVID-19 and the Transition to Online Worship Training
The current health pandemic has forced institutions of higher education to radically shift the ways in which they teach students. These changes have involved the means, methods, and locations by which student learning occurs. One of the defining characteristics of universities that have successfully navigated these changes is creativity.
These times require all of us to engage with our course content, delivery mechanisms, and assessment strategies through our lens of artistic creativity. For many of us, we have had to consider the validity of our task itself. Questions such as:
- What is the purpose of higher education in 2020?
- Why should a student attend my school to study worship?
- Is there even a future for worship leadership in a post-COVID world?
These fearful questions require creative solutions.
First, we must creatively embrace the change in mindset from teaching to student learning. This move has been accelerated by the current health crisis. It requires us to ask better questions and shift our thinking:
- How should I teach this course ▶︎ What should the students learn?
- Beginning with a course outline and textbooks ▶︎ Student Learning Outcomes
- Grading assignments ▶︎ Assessing Student Learning
We have to reimagine the learning process with the student in mind. We have to begin with what we want our students to know, feel, and be able to do. From there we must work backwards to create methods of instruction and assessment to ensure that they can accomplish these goals.
The reality is that the creative process is messy! We need to lean into it as artists and give our students the freedom to explore. The way in which we were trained was already faltering pre-COVID and now it’s time for us to have the courage and creativity to rethink what it could be.
This may mean giving your students multiple ways to satisfy a course requirement. Instead of a formal paper, perhaps it’s a video assignment with accompanying documentation. Rather than utilizing tried and true textbooks, perhaps your reading assignments come from accessible journal articles and other resources (helping with the financial burden that students will face this year).
Will all of this mean more work for you — absolutely! Will students learn more this way — absolutely!
Embrace the process!
Closely related to the lesson of creativity is the need for flexibility. We have all heard the quip, “Blessed are the flexible, for they will not be broken.” This has been especially prescient this academic year. Most of us transitioned to remote instruction in a matter of weeks, regardless of the readiness of our institutions or ourselves. This speed of change has forced us to abandon traditional decision-making structures such as committee meetings, workgroups, and town hall meetings. Instead we had a baptism by fire — often resulting in saying, “let’s never do that again!’
Some of us were forced to do things we had never done before. Things like giving private lessons over FaceTime, Zoom, or WebEx. Many of us had to figure out how to enable students to give juries or recitals virtually instead of in person. Or perhaps it meant learning our LMS such as Blackboard or Moodle. These types of activities have forced us to adapt and to be flexible.
In other areas, we were forced to rethink the entire educational process. How does one have ensembles via web-conferencing software? How do you generate meaningful discussion in a purely synchronous or asynchronous environment?
Just as we discussed reimagining the educational process, we were forced to take the next difficult steps of actually changing what we do and doing what we have always done in new ways. 100 point exams with matching questions, fill in the blanks, and essay questions proved to be quite unruly online — as anyone who has ever tried to create one of those in Blackboard knows well! We have to harness the various institutionally sponsored technical tools and pair them with a hodgepodge of other available solutions to do that very thing we were all called to do at our institution — to teach music students.
If I were forced to only focus on one lesson learned from the current crisis as it pertains to higher education — this is the one that I would choose. The relationships that we have as faculty members with our students, our colleagues, and our administration are paramount to our ongoing success both in times of relative calm and stability and in widespread chaotic environments such as this pandemic.
We quickly realized that our first priority was the health of our students. This resulted in nearly all of our institutions shifting to online education at the end of the spring semester. While we will never know the impact of these decisions, I am confident that lives were saved on our campus because of this difficult choice.
Our students went home quite suddenly and went into immediate lockdown with their family members. In some cases, these students were living at home with at-risk family members, thus multiplying both their risk of infection and the pressure and stress placed upon them. The emphasis on student health shifted from physical needs to emotional support.
These first online engagements forced me to reconsider my approach and ask questions like “what do our students need from us?” I learned that deadlines don’t mean as much when students live with family members who have a positive diagnosis. I learned that students might not attend my WebEx meetings, not because they are lazy, but rather because their small town was all online watching Netflix and their home bandwidth was quite anemic. Large doses of grace and understanding were doled out to students and faculty members alike. Asking my students how I could help and pray for them went a long way in cultivating an environment where they could succeed and still feel cared for and nurtured.
Thirdly, the entire relational dynamic among colleagues changed dramatically. Those of us who were more familiar with online education served as mentors to those faculty who had never activated a Blackboard course. Administrators had to take a much more intentional approach to leadership among the faculty. Lines of communication were opened and actively maintained. Simple acts of compassion and kindness went a long way to reassuring anxious faculty members who were making this dramatic shift.
I remember having a conversation at the beginning of this crisis remarking about how we would have handled this type of crisis 100 years ago. It’s hard to imagine the past months without the modern comforts of video-conferencing, mobile phones, and Netflix. We will skip right past those few weeks of Tiger King and pretend they never happened!
Although I already was aware of the ubiquity of technology in the lives of our students, this crisis has brought the growing divide between faculty and students into sharp relief regarding technology. As many of us spent our spring breaks scouring the internet searching how to position our cameras for private instruction, our students were uploading professionally crafted videos featuring original songs and multiple musicians across different time zones. Quite simply, our institutional technology is no match for what our students use on a regular basis.
What lesson can we learn from this? Technology is here to stay and we can’t ignore it.
Rather than ignoring it or chastising students for using modern technology in the classroom, we must embrace it. There are countless digital tools that can enhance the learning experience. We all have our favorites, but I encourage all of us to meet our students where they live. Let’s use text messaging, instagram, twitter, facebook, Tik Tok…you name it. Let’s get it terribly wrong…laugh about it with our students…and have them come up with ways to use it more effectively. This kind of bridge building goes a long way with students.
At the same time, we have to teach our students how to think theologically about technology. What are the consequences of the shift to online worship, the isolation of ourselves in front of our devices with nearly endless choices of content, and the transition from a word-based culture to an image-based one? This is a perfect time to have our students reflect on what was gained and lost in our worship as we moved to all online environments. They have lived it now. They can speak from their experiences. They need to develop patterns of thinking and filters for processing arguments now as the technological advances will only continue and develop even faster.
We need to embrace modern worship technology and integrate it into our curriculum. Regardless of our personal backgrounds or preferences, we have to prepare our students how to navigate digital tools and utilize them in worship. The mission statement of CBU Worship is “Preparing men and women for a lifetime of service in music and worship leadership for the glory of God, the building up of his church, and the good of the world.” Technology is now a vital tool in their toolboxes and our curriculum has to reflect that reality. It cannot just be relegated to a single technology course on a degree sheet, but instead it needs to be integrated up and down the curriculum.
The next lesson learned in this time is the desperate need for clarity.
Just think about the mixed messages we have all heard the past months:
- Social distancing vs. herd immunity
- Public health vs. economic health
- Masks or no masks
- Flatten the curve vs. we are open for business
My purpose is not to endorse one position or the other. We recognize the need for clarity as we seek to navigate these uncharted waters.
This same lesson applies to our classroom. As we shifted toward remote learning, it quickly became apparent that my assignment instructions were woefully lacking in detail and clarity. For many years I overcame this because I could easily explain or flesh out my intent in the classroom or in hallway conversations. As the physical distance increased between teacher and student, the ability to detect nuance drastically decreased.
Students need as much detail as we can possibly give them. This means things like:
- Detailed assignment descriptions
- Rubrics on how they will be assessed
- Exemplar examples of the assigned work
The more our students understand what was expected of them, the more comfortable they felt in this new environment. This led to greater levels of student learning, success, and ultimately, retention.
Secondly, we learned the value of institution level policies. All of our schools have policies that often sound laborious and mundane, but there has been great comfort in clear and explicit instructions when detailing plans for adaptive instruction. This is especially apparent as we plan for the fall semester.
Trying times have a way of revealing truth. We have learned the overall health of our institutions and music units in these past months. We are keenly aware of the areas that need investments of time, energy, and resources.
What are some of these areas for you?
Have you considered a plan of how to make these investments?
We’ve also learned that there are things that don’t matter as much any more. Suddenly an office doesn’t seem quite as necessary now. What accumulated baggage of higher education and music education specifically needs to go?
A key area of investment is the cultivation of trust. Our students need to trust that we have their best interests at heart. In a time in which there is so much unrest in our country, our students need to feel like they have a voice. This means they need to trust us to listen to their concerns, observations, and suggestions. In light of the past few months, we need to bring students into the decision-making processes more. They see blind spots we don’t know we have.
Likewise, we have to trust our students more than ever. Are they doing their work? How can ensure they aren’t cheating on the Blackboard exams? Trust is a two-way street and we have to invest the time and effort into that enterprise. When we do this, we model for our students what many of them will face as they enter into worship ministry.
The last lesson I want to highlight is that of surprise. There have been countless surprises over the past few months. I’ll just mention of a few of them:
- Underutilized assists of adjunct faculty members
- The speed at which everything can change
- The resilience of our institutions and our students
- The rediscovery of our need for community
I have learned yet again the lesson of James 4:13–17
Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit” — yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.
As we look to the Fall 2020 semester, we are facing the unknown. As I type this, cases are on the rise again in many parts of the country including California. We aren’t certain what instruction will look like this semester, but it’s imperative that we take decisive action.
First, our students, faculty, and community need to be reminded why worship studies is a vital area of study. We have to tell our story — over and over again. The limitations on our worship gatherings have powerfully demonstrated our need for a rich understanding of corporate worship. Our people need leaders who have the skillset to lead in times of uncertainty. They need the theological background to lead their people in ways that are consistent with the Word of God and grounded in godly wisdom. We have to remind them why our institutions are part of their individual story.
Second, we must plan for mixed modalities of instruction. Whether by necessity or creative planning, worship instruction will look different this semester. We need to find creative ways to integrate in-person, synchronous, and asynchronous learning across our classes. We also must be able to pivot to different strategies as the circumstances change. Careful planning will save countless hours of stress and work if the pandemic continues to radically impact our campuses.
Third, we must focus on the “why” of worship studies before we give attention to the “what” and “how” of our instruction. This is closely related to the fourth action point. Our purpose needs to be to maximize the student experience. It’s easy for us to think of curriculum, lesson plans, learning outcomes, enrollment numbers, and the various components of higher education and lose sight of the “why” of what we do — our students. We must become purposefully student-centric in our decision making. Every choice we make must go through the filter of “how will our students respond?”
Lastly, I want to encourage all of us to seize the opportunity and do the hard thing! All of us have initiatives, programmatic changes, and difficult choices that we have put off making in the past. Now is the time of bold leadership and decisive action. As we continue to tell the story of what God is doing in our institutions and focus on preparing students for a lifetime of ministry, we can be confident that God will continue to work in our worship programs.
