Editor’s note: We would like to thank Dale Grauman at College of DuPage, Glen Ellyn (Illinois), for providing this piece. To contact the author, please email Dale Grauman. If you would like to share your writing center’s experience during COVID-19, please submit via WLN.
Dale Grauman
Writing, Reading, Speech Assistance (WRSA) at the College of DuPage (COD) is normally a bustling learning community. Located in the western suburbs of Chicago, COD is the largest community college in Illinois, boasting the highest undergraduate enrollment of any college or university in Chicagoland and the second highest in all Illinois. Our team of 23 coaches sees up to 500 students each week, assisting them as they write for college, prepare and rehearse oral presentations, learn new reading and note-taking strategies, prepare for placement tests, or practice conversational English. Though we have long offered a robust menu of online services, most of our work is usually done one-on-one, face-to-face, faces 24 or so inches apart, breathing the same air, occasionally coughing.
The coronavirus has, of course, compelled us to adapt. All of our work has migrated online, as has practically all instruction at COD. Student appointments dropped off precipitously after we moved online, and they dipped again as we entered our usual lull during the summer. But although the pandemic has presented us with many challenges, it has also brought an unexpected success story: the resurgence of our embedded coaching program.
In 2014 WRSA began experimenting with putting coaches directly into classrooms. Our coaches and their faculty collaborators invented these “embedded” coaching relationships on the fly, and each pair ended up inventing something different. One coach offered weekly supplementary writing lessons outside of class, and the instructor agreed to offer students extra credit to attend. Another coach went to another class several times a semester for revision workshops where she and the instructor would help students to respond to peer feedback on their drafts. Other coaches attended classes once a week.
The coach who attended revision workshops felt that she was helping a lot of students in a relatively short period of time; however, embedded coaches generally felt that they spent a lot of time preparing for very few contact hours with students. In particular, the coach who developed weekly extra credit writing lessons spent hours preparing each lesson, but almost no students showed up. We hoped to see bigger returns over time—that students from those courses would become WRSA regulars—but with one or two exceptions, that hope never panned out. It became difficult to justify spending so many prep hours to do so little of the work central to our mission, and the program eventually fizzled, ending in 2019 when our most successful embedded coach moved on to other projects.
Then the coronavirus changed everything. Suddenly, every writing class at COD had become an online asynchronous class, and many instructors were scrambling to figure out how to deliver their courses online. One writing instructor contacted WRSA and asked for embedded coaches to help out in the new online environment. We decided to give it another shot, but this time, due to remote learning, WRSA coaches were added to the course Blackboard shell.
Participation through the learning management system proved to be a game changer. After success with one instructor, we solicited others to trial the program. We have developed a (still-evolving) set of online embedded coaching best practices that seem to be satisfying for instructors, students, and coaches alike. Instructors add the embedded coaches to the courses on Blackboard, and the coaches post on class discussion boards, host open video chats a couple hours a week, respond to student emails, and send out weekly course announcements with reminders or tips for success on upcoming assignments. Embedded coaches also share information about each course with our other coaches so that our entire staff is well-prepared if a student from one of these courses makes an appointment with a different WRSA coach. And indeed, they have been making more appointments with us, in part because our embedded coaches have been promoting our services and referring students to WRSA. One instructor’s two particularly active classes accounted for 20% of our appointments during a four-week stretch from May into June.
WRSA will remain online this fall, and we are expanding the embedded coaching program to include virtual synchronous classes including English, Speech, and ESL Writing. Our embedded coaching team has grown to 10 coaches, many more than we have ever had. We are also collecting data about student contacts to better understand what makes for a successful embedded coach. Eventually, the pandemic will subside, but embedded coaching in online classrooms looks like it is here to stay.
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