Enjoying Teaching Fundamentals on Zoom
I’ve had a lot of fun lately teaching fundamentals classes on Zoom.
My current class has about twenty-five people from all over North America. It’s a twelve-week class that meets for two-and-a-half hours each time.
My previous class started in August 2020 and had thirty people from all over the world. As an immigrant from South Africa, I found that satisfying. The international aspect also presented some challenges for people in setting up sessions across time zones.
Getting connected to RC can be challenging, so mostly highly motivated and interested people have made it to the classes.
The Zoom breakout rooms have allowed us to easily do mini-sessions and break out by constituency. I have created a nice set of PowerPoint slides, for people who prefer to learn by reading. We also use the GroupMe chat application for announcements, class reminders, notifications, and sharing the slides. That gives folks a central place with a history where they can go to see reading assignments, and so on.
My support team is about six experienced people from my ongoing class, with one or two key people. We meet weekly to prepare for the next class, work on session assignments, and address any issues that have come up in class. We’ve divided the class into subgroups, so everyone has a contact person for questions and support between classes.
To encourage Co-Counseling sessions between classes, we assign people to two- or three-ways and share their contact information so they can schedule their sessions. Lately we’ve also been allowing time in class for people to schedule. We’ll see how that experiment goes.
So far, the classes seem to be going quite well. Some students from the 2020 fundamentals class joined my ongoing class but are also re-taking fundamentals in the 2021 class. I imagine they feel they missed something the first time around.
Austin, Texas, USA
Reprinted from the e-mail discussion list for RC teachers
(Present Time 205, October 2021)