Abstract:

After two tumultuous years of readjusting personnel, students, schedules, and learning environments, it appears the global learning university is ready to recoup with the earlier status quo and help to create pathways for everyone to rethink this transition. While Tuckman’s 1965 article on "Developmental Sequence in Small Groups" was quite popular in the last century and into the early part of the 21st century, the Covid-19 pandemic period over the past two years reinforced Tuckman’s model. Tuckman’s "Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing" model of group development helped to explain how groups are formed and what could happen from one stage to another in a group’s development, if certain condition are present and other factors such as the actors (stakeholders), events, and business conditions work either together or against each other. For the purpose of this paper, the main focus will be on exploring and examining the transition and pathway of traditional Face-to-Face (F2) instructors and administrative staff as they took on the epic journey of going from their “normal of way of teaching” and fast forward into a new technological, yet somewhat trepid and scary race to move online in order to help with maintaining global education, despite health concerns and many other business, social, political, economic, and transportation factors affecting their traditional norm of teaching life. This was a period in not in just one country – but a global pandemic that touched everyone’s life, and the “new norm” was born and evolved during this time thanks to healthcare workers, service employees, teachers, staff, and many others who had a strong commitment that education was so important it could not be put aside until a further date. Rather, they created their own form of “Crisis Readjustment Best Practices (CRBP)” to transition from one environment to yet another frontier for many. On the other hand, while it should be noted that the early pioneer work of distance education, which lead into the online learning movement was a critical foundation for everyone during this time. Consequently, it should be noted that many veterans online learning instructors, IT and administrative personnel help to work with new traditional teachers and share best practices from learning new Learning Management Systems (LMS) to creating their own new classroom expectations in the remote learning environment to helping many new online instructors to quickly adapt, rather than dwelling on old traditional teaching methodology, they were guided, coached, and mentored during this time to success. Juxtaposed to fast-driving approach, many thought it would last no more than a few weeks or months at most, but that was quickly changed as new numbers were posted daily from global leaders as to where the pandemic was going and how much more needed to be done. Finally, this paper will focus on the educational spirit that grew even stronger during these dark days, along with the bonding of both sides of the educational spectrum where traditional teachers learned to appreciate new technology, teaching methods, and ways of helping their human capital (students) to readapt also and succeed in a brave new world.

Keywords:

Crisis Readjustment Best Practices, Online Learning, Tuckman Model, Pandemic Teaching.