Professor Petra Bonfert-Taylor on Developing Empathy for Students

Professor Petra Bonfert-Taylor of Dartmouth University emphasizes the importance of developing empathy for your students.

Accounting for students’ well-being

I asked my students how they are doing and I was surprised to hear how many of them said they were stressed, lonely, sad, overwhelmed, worried. I knew many students have concerns right now about food, shelter, watching younger siblings, finding quiet places in their homes, or having internet access, but I was surprised at the number of them that reported these feelings. I think that’s something we have to be very aware of in our teaching.

Emulating in-class group problem sets

I’ve always taught my class in a flipped-classroom style, so I already had lots of class videos. So I got very fortunate in that way, but I had to adjust the in-class portion. Normally in class I give coding problems to my students and then I walk around with learning fellows, and I tried to emulate this.

We used fixed Zoom breakout rooms and I have learning fellows monitor multiple breakout rooms to work with students. We also have a coding window for this class where each student gets their own coding window with the same pre-populated code where they can work independently but we can see what they are doing.