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3Rs Revisited: Reflection, Relationships,

and Resiliency

By Amber J. Godwin, Mae Lane, and Debbie Price

Faculty in universities continue to refine their pedagogical and instructional practices in the
aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Although students have always had needs that exist
beyond curriculum, the lockdown phase of the pandemic brought to light that students, even at
the graduate level, need to be supported in a dimensional way during their learning experiences.
This article outlines the authors’ process to provide a roadmap for those wanting to reach into
this kind of experience to enrich their instruction.

uring the Covid-19 crisis, our team met to discuss the impact of our curriculum
Don our students. We have all taught or currently teach a graduate-level classroom
management course. A few years ago, we had completely revised the course to focus
on how to develop relationships with students and their parents as well as how to
create a positive and inclusive classroom community rather than focus on how to
manage students. But were those changes enough?
When we met, many concerns emerged, but the most pressing area of interest was
that we understood our students needed intentional instruction on the importance of
knowing their students, being able to connect with them, and creating relationships.
In other words, we wanted to make sure that we were instructing our students on
how to humanize and relate to their future students. We hoped in this way to conduct
a kind of re-set to our instruction (Ladson-Billings, 2021) and enrich our students’
experiences.

Literature Review
The Covid-19 experience brought forth many of the wounds that have been
festering in our society for decades. For example, we noticed that our students came
to us with different stories and different experiences in the classroom that impacted
who they were or who they would become as teachers. We also recognized that
students sometimes wanted to adhere only to curriculum without any consideration
for differentiation or the impact that learning certain kinds of content could have
on them. We had also experienced students who had special needs that extended
beyond what could be documented in an IEP or 504 plan, but we wanted to find ways
to create a good relationship with those students to work constructively with them
through the curriculum to ultimately help them achieve their professional goals. We
began our semester with initial concerns that had been more evident in earlier, pre-
Covid semesters: that we as teachers need to pay special attention to positionality
awareness—the understanding that “positionality is a person’s unique and always
partial view of the world which is shaped by social and political contexts” (Kaeser-
Chen et al., 2020, p. 1). We also wanted to support the development of positive
teaching character traits in our students throughout our time together.
We all taught various sections of the same course and had made some
decisions regarding assignments and materials that we believed would strengthen
the experience. We were beginning the process of evaluating those changes when
Covid-19 occurred and everything about how we were interacting with our students

16 The Delta Kappa Gamma Bulletin: International Journal for Professional Educators