Lessons from the USMA Faculty Development Workshop in Teaching STEM Courses During COVID-19

Prior to the start of every academic year, the Department of Chemistry and Life Science in the United States Military Academy at West Point conducts a four-week Faculty Development Workshop (FDW). The purpose of FDW is to develop new faculty such that they are prepared to effectively educate students, and a critical hallmark of this program is in-depth feedback and mentorship from senior faculty. With nationwide uncertainty regarding the method of instruction for the upcoming semester, ranging from remote to in-person, and the possibility that schools may need to transition to exclusively remote learning during the semester due to health concerns from Coronavirus disease (COVID-19), this year’s FDW incorporated different modes of instruction. Using classrooms with a maximum capacity of 20 students, new instructors conducted lessons fully remote, in-person with modified classroom paradigms, and through a hybrid approach where half of the students attended class synchronously online and the other half attended class in-person to facilitate social distancing requirements. In the process of preparing new instructors for the upcoming semester and equipping them with tools to teach under varied conditions, numerous lessons were learned on best practices for teaching this fall. In this manuscript, we describe our implementation of FDW and review the aforementioned teaching modalities, with a critical focus on the advantages and disadvantages of each teaching approach during COVID-19 and faculty perceptions on the difficulty and efficacy of each format of instruction.