<br/>The opportunity to teach in a distant setting has been my platform for serving hard-working and dedicated traditional and non-traditional professionals. The distant education platform takes away one of the most influential aspects of communication, face-to-face interaction; however, it does offer a unique platform to honoring our students through effective lecture materials, interactive learning activities, and motivational teaching strategies. Learning science and math in an online accelerated course can be challenging to students due to the great deal of information to process along with the lack of motivation due to the fear of learning science and math in an asynchronous environment, which lacks the real-time class instruction. These challenges have been enhanced since the start of the pandemic due to the range of daily struggles faced by students who are parents, front-line workers and other working professionals. These struggles have been negatively impacting the student’s performance and engagement in the online classroom. The online community has also witnessed an increase in the enrollment of traditional students; which has imposed a different set of expectations for distant educators in the sciences to meet.<br/>Therefore, it has become crucial for us distant educators to focus more on a student-centered learning experience that not only alleviates these challenges; but, also offers a supportive learning environment for emotional stability as a precursor for effective learning. And this can be done effectively by honoring our students through recognizing their efforts and also displaying grace in our teaching as we serve them every day. Despite the remote nature of communication in an online classroom, there are multiple strategies that we can adopt to support the struggling student. These include sending out weekly motivational messages, weekly prayers/special prayer requests, “Just Checking in” messages, progress reports, friendly reminders for weekly tasks and most importantly, a warm listening ear to those who are experiencing loss and grief. The pandemic has been devastating for the world and has impacted our lives one way or another; however, one lesson I learned through it all is that our role as distant educators has tremendously shifted to one that involves mentoring with empathy and displaying kindness in our communication tools with students.

Why is emotional stability essential during the pandemic for the remote learner?

ACS Fall 2021

The official archive and repository for all ACS Meetings & Expositions abstracts and select posters or presentations.