I've started a one-week intensive online course on TESOL (Teaching of English to Speakers of Other Languages) Methods and am having a blast! It's a greatly compressed version of a 15-week course in The New School's MA TESOL program, and specifically designed for our faculty (many of whom teach rather more international students than I do at largely domestically populated Lang), and I was glad to get a place. It's fun for a whole bunch of reasons beyond the obvious benefit of learning TESOL pedagogy. For one thing, it's entirely online - my first experience as a student in such a course. Getting to see how it feels to be on the receiving end of a Zoom + Canvas course is going to be of great help as I develop my own Fall courses... how do you create a sense of community without being able to gather, mingle, etc.? How do you allow students to get to know each other? How do you build and maintain momentum? Indeed, since ours is a course for teachers these questions are front and center, and our instructor is superb in making explicit what she's doing and why at every stage, sometimes as she does it, sometimes afterwards, often interactively. 
Case in point: this was our first class, and while the 17 students plus instructor fit inside a zoom gallery and one or two of us knew one or two others, we were in a room with strangers. "We'll introduce ourselves in a minute," the instructor said as she introduced things, and then, a few minutes later, "we'll introduce ourselves soon..." It took a while, and when it came, it was in the form of a structured "ice breaker." The instructor shared this list of nine questions, had us peruse them and told us that if we were in the 15-week onsite version of the course we would mingle to find people who answered yes to each question. But here and now we were parsed out into zoom breakout rooms of 3-4 and asked to select a task master, choose two of the questions to focus on, and discuss our responses with each other. When the larger group reconvened the task masters introduced the other group members and some of their reflections. Super interesting ... and we didn't even realize it was the ice breaker! Some of what we're learning is TESOL specific, but thinking about a classroom of students with different degrees of linguistic and cultural fluency clearly takes any pedagogy that much further.The instructor then had us pair up (well, zoom paired us up) to consider some questions about the activity, before sharing her answers - see above. It was amazing to realize how many "layered objectives" she had (my favorite: feel time constraints), and how the activity had in fact accomplished them. But the cherry on top was the question why she'd not had us do round robin introductions, like most people in most onsite classes do, or write a self-introduction before class like many online classes do. When one "goes around the room" with students introducing themselves, she told us (and the minute she said it we all realized it was true), nobody's listening. Students are preparing their own introductions, perhaps counting how many others will speak before their turn, and often anxiously comparing what they planned to say or have said with what their classmates are saying. There's little information shared and as good as none remembered.
What we had done instead was better in every way. We got to know a few students, working together - it wasn't easy figuring out who should speak etc but we did, and then we effortlessly came to a consensus, too. As the groups reported out we knew similar bridges had been built between other students, which gave us something to look forward to as we get to know the rest of the class as the course unfolds in the coming sessions. Most important, we came to know each other through this course's material and in lively exchange with each other, with no prior, fixed, stale, careful or self-aggrandizing introductions standing in our way. I know what I'm doing in all my classes from now on!
