Teaching FAQs for FAS Faculty and Teaching Fellows (Last update: May 20, 2020)

Yes. Instructors are strongly encouraged to review their syllabi to identify those elements that must change, such as participation, policies, assignments, assessments, and deadlines. Communicate these changes clearly to your students and detail any new expectations.  Especially with deadlines, please be as accommodating as possible, waiving penalties for delayed work or participation challenges.  We are in an exceptional situation, and you have the authority to grant accommodations up to the end of term; please do not request Dean’s Excuses from the residential college deans.

Please see the message above titled “Faculty Office Use for Teaching Purposes (March 23, 2020).”

If your class requires fully synchronous participation, you must offer it at its regularly scheduled time. Changing this time creates conflicts with other classes that students may be taking, and it makes it difficult for students in different time zones to attend; it may also exacerbate difficulties for students with weak or no internet connections.  Given that many students may be unable to participate, please be lenient with your class participation requirements, especially with respect to grading. Even if interactive discussion is important, consider offering credit to students for participating offline, perhaps by summarizing the discussion or submitting a reaction paper.  If you are using Zoom, please record the sessions so that students may access them asynchronously if necessary.  

Synchronous delivery is best suited to classes that rely heavily on student interaction and participation. Asynchronous delivery is more convenient for students but less able to accommodate student interaction.

If you teach a small class, and every student is able to participate at a new class time without other class conflicts, then you may reschedule it.  However, if even one student has a conflict, the original time should be honored.

Undergraduates and graduate students have different needs in relation to archives. For many undergraduate classes that send students into archives, it is appropriate to redesign assignments so that they can be completed using archives remotely or not at all. Students working on senior essays will need guidance about how best to complete their essays if their archival work has not yet concluded. Scan and Deliver services have ceased until at least 3/31, so students will need to work with materials at hand (and some students may not have access to their notes because they were left on campus – we are in the course of making arrangements to deliver these to students when possible).  Be sure your students are aware of the vast amount of material already digitized and available here.  Please provide generous extensions of your deadlines. 

We need to recognize that graduate student archival research will be slowed, in some cases substantially. The Graduate School urges programs to be flexible in extending registrations and is considering further accommodations for students whose research and writing is delayed.

The Poorvu website offers a number of suggestions regarding alternative activities and assignments for students in laboratory classes. Some labs can, for example, be run virtually, and virtual tools can also help.  Other alternatives include both virtual and experiential components. If, for example, a lab includes the collection and analysis of data, you might instruct students remotely on how the data would be collected and then provide raw data sets for their remote analysis. 

The program leadership should confer with individual faculty members about possible alternatives. Performance classes can, for example, be run on a virtual stage. Art studios will be inaccessible to undergraduates, and some students will not be able to continue their work. In these cases, each instructor must determine in consultation with the DUS what might constitute an appropriate, remote continuation of the work. This might for example, take the form of a reflection on the work completed thus far.

PI’s should arrange for remote research activities. Non-critical laboratory activity has been suspended campus-wide. Details here. Critical functions required for the continuity of lab research will not be dependent on undergraduate students. Programs might also consider permitting the grading of the senior essay based on data collected before March 10th.

Learn about available resources here:

• Faculty: Library Resources
• Teaching Fellows: Library Resources
• Students: Library Resources

Please consider alternative assessments to the traditional final exam format. You might explicitly reconfigure a final exam as a take-home exam, including using an open book format. In some cases, exams might be replaced by a writing assignment or a problem set. 

The Poorvu Center has developed extensive guidelines regarding maintaining academic integrity; strategies for assessments and the use of an honor code.

Your teaching fellows should be able to perform all of their work remotely. Discussion section leaders should use Zoom to continue to offer sections and office hours. Grader/tutors can grade remotely, using the resources of Canvas, and they may offer their tutoring remotely through Zoom and the Canvas whiteboard feature. It is crucial during this time that you communicate clearly and regularly with your teaching fellows about their responsibilities and how best to fulfill them. They will need guidance on how to do their work. Please continue to meet regularly with them, virtually.

Like teaching fellows, ULAs should be able to perform their work remotely. If your course uses ULAs, you will already have received a set of tips for running successful ULA office hours from Dean Alfred Guy. Please remember that ULAs do not typically work during final exam period, but if you are adjusting your course for remote delivery in such a way that requires the use of ULAs, please contact Pam Schirmeister directly. ULAs will continue to be paid by the hours they work, and we encourage you to maintain their employment.

Instructors have been encouraged to be flexible in the type of assessments they offer, which may, in turn, have changed the structure of a course. Some instructors, for example, may have replaced a planned final exam with multiple, smaller assessments. Instructors may use reading period to accommodate any such changes to a course and student need.  An instructor might, for example, use reading period to permit students to retake quizzes or complete small projects. If, however, a course still requires a timed final exam during exam week, it must take place according to the published schedule.

For the spring term of 2020, Yale College will adopt a policy of universal Pass/Fail, with a provision for instructors to provide narrative commendations. This applies to all courses, including graduate and professional school classes. Transcripts will carry an explanatory note.

Letter grades assigned for first-half courses will remain on the transcript.

If a student has already completed sufficient work in a course to earn a “Pass,” they may be allowed to do so, with the permission of the instructor. 

As usual, if a student is at risk of failing your course, please give them advance feedback, and be in communication with the student’s residential college dean and your director of undergraduate studies. 

Faculty and students are expected to continue remote teaching and learning through the end of term. 

In addition to “Pass” or “Fail,” instructors may submit narratives through the URO grading system, just as they have always done. Narrative commendations are strongly encouraged, but not required. Instructors can prepare these commendations freely at their discretion, with the understanding that students can read them and share them with others. They are intended to provide—to the student and to third parties identified by the student—a qualitative evaluation of the student’s performance in the course.

When you submit your grades to the Registrar’s office, you will use the End of Term Report.  Upon submission, the student will receive an email notification with a prompt to log in to SIS to view the commendation. The commendations do not appear on the student’s transcript in any way. You may submit narrative commendations up through the end of the summer.

It’s reasonable to be more flexible about deadlines for papers, and about the complexity of assignments (such as number and kind of required sources). But courses should not reduce the number of major assignments required. Multiple papers with the opportunity to incorporate previous feedback are the heart of the WR requirement, and this feature should be maintained in WR courses as much as possible.

For two-term senior essays that receive a letter grade for each term at the conclusion of that term, the mark of Pass this term will have no effect on the letter grade that has been recorded for the fall term of the essay. 

For two-term essays in which a SAT or NSAT is assigned for the first term and a letter grade for the second, the normal protocol is that the same letter grade will appear in association with each of the two halves of the course. 

Given the altered circumstances of instruction this term, Yale College recognizes that the two terms of such essay courses may in some cases present an asymmetry that would argue against a single mark for both terms. Accordingly, instructors who report the mark of Pass for the spring term reserve the right to report a letter grade for the fall term if they feel they can calculate one fairly for the first term’s work, including subsequent work completed up to, but not later than, March 7, the beginning of spring break. If this is not done, the default is the mark of Pass in each term. 

Departments may consider relaxing their senior essay deadlines to accommodate the disruptions to students’ literature review, research, and writing.

Yes, but you should do so on the basis of work submitted prior to spring break.

The deadline for course withdrawals without a W  has been extended from the midterm deadline to 5 pm on the last day of finals (currently 6 May).

Students who withdrew from a course earlier this term but who now wish to undo that withdrawal and return to enrollment in the course may do so; if the withdrawal was requested more than a week before the midterm date (6 March) students should consult first with the instructor of the relevant course.

There is a special provision for the Language Requirement (LR).  For non-seniors who withdraw from a language study course this term that would have completed their LR, but who will not be able to take that course in the fall (because it’s not offered), either of two accommodations will be granted: In the fall term, they may complete a course credit in a third language—neither English nor that of the course they dropped—at any level for which they qualify, and this will meet the LR. And so, for example, instead of L1 + L2 + L3 French, L1 + L2 French + Lx Spanish will mee the LR. In the fall term, they may complete a course credit in a culture course in the relevant language (on the model of the partial waiver of the LR). And so, in this example, L1 + L2 French + “France since 1871” (conducted in English) will meet the LR.

To learn more about current one-time academic accommodations for undergraduates, refer to the Yale College COVID-19 FAQ, under “Academic Matters.”

Consider how necessary this is for student learning for the remainder of the course.  If essential, scan the materials for electronic distribution.

We are considering modifying both undergraduate and graduate course evaluations and will provide an update at a future time.

All teaching fellows will continue to be paid for their teaching, irrespective of any alterations to their teaching duties. We do not expect any duties to be cancelled altogether, but if they are, you will continue to be paid.

Yes. The Poorvu Center is providing many services for faculty members and teaching fellows. Please contact Suzanne Young for individual consultations.

Your first line of inquiry should be to the faculty member teaching your course or to the course director.

No. Please do not prepare any materials without first consulting your faculty member. If instructed to prepare materials, please be sure to vet those materials with your faculty member before distributing.

Please arrange for the faculty member to do so via Zoom. While this modality may not be optimal, it nonetheless gives you the opportunity to showcase your abilities to teach remotely. From a professional development standpoint, you may benefit here.