“I’ll see you after spring break when we will discuss how the Allies won World War Two. Enjoy your week off.” The seventeen cadets enrolled in one of my sections of, “History of the Military Art from 1904 to 2013,” at the United States Military Academy took my words as the cue that class – our final one before the 2020 spring break – was dismissed. They got up from their desks and began filing out of our Thayer Hall classroom to head to a lunch formation.

Sunlight – a rarity in the generally windowless Thayer Hall – bathed the now-empty classroom as I packed up the WWII-era radio sets borrowed from the West Point Museum, which I had used to demonstrate the evolution of U.S. communications during the war. In this beautiful moment, the thought struck me: I was having a dream semester in a dream job. As a rotating officer teaching military history at West Point, the process of becoming an effective teacher over the previous year and a half had been an arduous one, full of trial and error. This struggle made the reward all the sweeter. Each of my three spring semester sections of “Mil Art” – including the one that had just departed – were firing on all cylinders, engaging in deep, sophisticated engagement with both the course material and one another.

The date was March 5^th, 2020. COVID-19 was a real concern for everyone, and the disease – not yet declared to be a pandemic – was gaining traction in the headlines as a global threat. Still, the developments of the ensuing seven days, which saw both a designation of COVID-19 as a pandemic by the World Health Organization and the declaration of a national emergency in the U.S., were a huge, unexpected shock. At the end of those seven days, Academy leadership made the wise decision to direct cadets not to return to West Point from their spring break destinations. Instead, the remainder of the semester was to be conducted remotely, in a digital classroom.

My first reaction to this new arrangement was a feeling of loss. As a teacher, I knew that the sweet, face-to-face, peer-driven discussion that makes the West Point classroom so effective would be very difficult to reproduce remotely. As a cadet mentor and an officer a few months away from departing West Point for my next assignment, I felt heartbroken. A near-constant engagement with cadets both in and out of the classroom is a hallmark of the experience of teaching at West Point. The transition to remote learning was to be a fundamental alteration not only to my work life but the life of our family. Prior to the onset of COVID-19, cadets were in our home multiple times a week for mentorship.

And yet, despite all the heartache and challenges of this transition to a digital classroom, three months later I am convinced that the half-semester of remote learning may have done more good than harm for the cadets who participated in it. This thesis is offered with a sincere acknowledgment of the immense and uneven difficulties everyone who participated in remote learning faced. My goal is not to make light of those challenges, but to help us all in “hunting the good stuff” as we reflect on the unprecedented events of the last several months.

The underlying logic behind my belief in this upside is simple: Army doctrine on leadership. The temporary foray into a remote learning environment challenged cadets and instructors alike to rely on – and therefore, strengthen – the “self-development” pillar outlined in ADP 6-22, Army Leadership. Under the leader attribute, “Prepares Self,” the authors of ADP 6-22 articulate a framework for self-development that reads almost exactly like the guidance issued to cadets during their remote-learning experience: “Leader preparation begins with self-awareness about one’s strengths and limitations, followed by focused self-development. Leaders maintain self-discipline, physical fitness, and mental well-being.” The central challenge of remote learning for cadets was to do just that – maintain all the discipline and focus they possessed when under the microscope at West Point in an environment with far less immediate consequences. This is the underlying behavior pattern of self-development: a willingness to remain committed to learning even when some of the tighter behavior controls are removed.

ADP 6-22 also emphasizes that success in the discipline of self-development, despite the individualistic connotations the term carries, is a team effort. As an instructor, I held a distinct role in shaping an environment in which cadets could grow their self-development muscles. This entailed modeling what learning should – and should not – look like. What follows is a brief list of “do’s and don’ts” drawn from this unique half-semester of remote learning at West Point. It is my belief that the lessons discussed below apply not only to instructors in professional military education but leaders attempting to develop a culture of self-development in units across the operational Army.

Do #1: Embrace Creativity

The great tragedy of our modern understanding of creativity is that it is divorced from the root verb, to create. Very few of us fit the mold of those atypical, “out of the box” thinkers. But everyone knows how to make something. One of the keys to successfully navigating the remote learning environment was to believe that each cadet held this universal ability to create and to deliberately tap into their creative instinct to support learning.

Of course, creativity is always imperative in teaching. But the remote environment made it even more essential, in large part because the constraints of communicating via a laptop camera degraded a key pedagogical tool many instructors – myself included – use to stimulate student engagement: charisma. In a non-digital classroom, I possessed a whole menu of non-verbal tools to stimulate student learning – both obvious and subtle. I could move around the room to encourage a cadet to pay closer attention. I could frown or act surprised when a student made a comment I wanted the class to explore more fully. Or, as I discovered during the weeks leading up to spring break, if I really wanted my class to focus on discussion with one another instead of me, I could simply look down at my notebook and jot down continuous observations as they spoke. The effect was near magic – perhaps they were nervous that I was grading their performance, or perhaps they finally felt free enough from my attention to look to one another.

Conversely, it is immensely difficult to “read a room” and engage with it digitally. In our remote classroom, cameras were usually turned off to preserve bandwidth for everyone on the call. This meant that instead of talking to fifteen sets of eyes, I spoke to a laptop screen of colored circle icons with cadet initials in the middle. Even when cameras were turned on, body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice all were much harder to decipher. The digital classroom brought with it a degraded quality of instructor-to-student and student-to-student communication.

Creative projects provided a way around this shortcoming. By pivoting to creative projects, I opened another avenue for fostering that spark of interest – one that discussion and personal interaction reliably promoted in our Thayer Hall classroom – that is so critical to building deep engagement with a subject.

For example, each cadet in my sections of “Mil Art” was required to craft a digital presentation on an object of “material culture” related to the lesson of the day. Material culture is an emerging, interdisciplinary academic discipline that uses objects – artifacts, clothing, art, technology, and so on – to craft original arguments. Cadets dabbled in material culture with consistent and impressive originality which demonstrated that deep engagement I was so keen to create.

One firstie (senior) cadet asked permission to examine, of all things, toilet paper for his material culture project. I was a bit skeptical – how can you relate that to military history in the twentieth century? But I allowed it. Several weeks later he gave his classmate a presentation that blew everyone away. During WWII, U.S. G.I.s received a ration of twenty-two sheets per day, compared to their British counterparts who were issued three. And their German foes? Toilet paper taken from captured German soldiers was “of very coarse quality and not packaged in moisture proof packets as were the American packets.” It is hard to imagine a more visceral, memorable demonstration of the strength of the “arsenal of democracy” – a critical aspect of Allied victory – than this common object. All I had to do was to give permission to explore and express this innate creativity.

Do #2: Incentivize Projects-Based Learning

The material culture project demonstrates another key element of success in remote learning: the importance of projects. In the immediate wake of the transition to remote learning, the team of instructors teaching “Mil Art” faced a significant dilemma: how to conduct examinations. Most cadets left on spring break planning to return a week later, leaving notebooks, supplemental reading material and even laptops in their barracks rooms at West Point. While our cadets were fortunate to have a digital textbook accessible from any computer in the world, the central dilemma remained: how could we test comprehensive knowledge from the entire course when the cadets did not possess their notes from January and February? Our solution was simple: we would test only the material covered in the remote learning environment, thereby decreasing the number of points allocated to the comprehensive term-end exam.

The extra points lopped off the reduced term-end exam were used as an added incentive for the class research paper, which cadets had been working on since the start of the semester. This project entailed tackling the central task of any historian – formulating an original historical argument based on evidence drawn from primary sources. The topic the cadets were asked to research was the 1945 Allied invasion of the island of Luzon. Fortunately, most of the primary source material for this project was already online, allowing most of the cadets to make the transition to the remote environment with relative ease. To adjust for at least some measure of turbulence in the transition to remote learning, the cadets were also given an extra two weeks to work on the project.

The outcome was amazing – the extra time and incentive is given to cadets led them to investigate their projects in greater depth than I had seen in my two years at the Academy. Nearly every project demonstrated that ‘spark’ of true engagement with the primary source material. This depth and engagement allowed these future officers to empathize with military leaders of the Luzon campaign – General Douglas MacArthur, Sixth Army Commander General Walter Krueger, and the commander of the Japanese Fourteenth Area Army, Tomoyuki Yamashita. The point is not just that the cadets produced higher quality work, but that by doing so they were far more likely to have internalized the key mental habits of a historian. These habits – the ability to evaluate arguments, examine the evidence, empathize with people from different backgrounds, and understand multiple perspectives of the same event – are essential for any officers to possess. This was accomplished not by doing more, but by “doing less better.”

Don’t #1: Over-Structure

History as a discipline is uniquely suited for self-development. The entire arc of a historian’s training is a transition from highly structured lectures as an undergraduate to seminars as a graduate student to self-directed research and writing as a professional historian. This model of development undoubtedly played a role in my instinct – as well as the instinct of many of my colleagues – to adopt and refine ‘asynchronous’ models of engaging with our classes.

When I first heard the term ‘asynchronous,’ I had to look it up in a dictionary. I learned that the word is drawn from telecommunications jargon, and refers to signal transmissions from multiple stations in a system. Each of these stations is designed to send transmissions periodically, as needed, rather than in a constant stream or regular interval. This definition paints a perfect picture of the model of asynchronous learning. Rather than attempting to simply transplant the regular time allocated for class meetings – a 75-minute period two to three times per week – into a digital environment, many of us adopted a more flexible model of engagement with our students. The asynchronous model allowed each student to respond to my directions on a less-regimented timeline.

The technology gave a whole menu of options for what this could look like. I could record a ten-minute lecture and post to a group chat for cadets to watch and respond before the end of the day. Cadets could do the same thing for one another. Written answers to discussion questions generated more careful and precise responses than in person and ensured that the “talkative” cadets did not dominate the conversation. I could send out surveys to gather information or direct cadets to work on group projects – like when they spent a week writing a chapter on the events of 2020 for a history textbook of the future. They also were required to engage in a peer review exercise prior to turning in their research papers. The point is that no single component of any digital medium alone was as strong as the various possibilities combined.

The asynchronous model also prevented “technological tunnel vision” – focusing on troubleshooting the flaws of one digital medium instead of employing a vast array of tools. The standard video call, for example, held many drawbacks – such as only displaying four student faces at a time – that were eventually remedied. However, hours of time – both cadet and instructor – could have been wasted in trying to fenagle this medium into an old format of instruction instead of exploring the various other tools the new environment offered.

Finally, and most importantly, this asynchronous model was profoundly sensitive to the wide array of home situations cadets found themselves in during COVID-19. As the New York Times argued in a compelling article early in the crisis, the transition to remote learning proved more difficult for certain students who found themselves facing vastly different home environments than their peers. For example, the Army News Service ran a story on a R.O.T.C. student at the Virginia Military Institute who attended remote classes from a tent on his family farm, pitched in an open field where the only reliable cell service could be found. The same pattern existed with my own students. Some were in comfortable, quiet home offices with parents giving them a wide berth to focus on their studies. Others shared rooms and Wi-Fi connections with multiple siblings also home from college or took breaks to perform household chores or babysit.

Don’t #2: Under-Structure

This wide discrepancy in socioeconomic backgrounds and home environments drives my final tip on remote learning: the need to “peer through the laptop” and figure out which students are struggling to stay afloat. Asynchronous should not be taken to mean laissez-faire instruction. In fact, I found the asynchronous model held the potential of being more taxing on my time and energy, not less. Imagine a telecommunications system composed of fifty substations communicating directly, as needed, with one main station. Without a set of parameters and management, both the main station and the substations are highly susceptible to overload. This makes sense considering doctrine – ADP 6-22 makes clear that successful self-development requires a strong element of selective oversight.

I developed a few tools to execute this oversight, both preventative and reactive. To prevent my cadets from falling behind on their final research paper, I had them submit a “time management contract” in which they committed to completing key steps of the writing process – drafting, revising, and producing a final draft – on certain days. As mentioned before, an ungraded peer review exercise provided another great incentive to get a rough draft complete prior to handing to a peer.

The injection of these elements of ‘preventative’ and ultimately helpful structure were critical to fostering successful remote learning. But equally important was maintaining an awareness, across all the ‘touches’ in an asynchronous environment, of cadet well-being. Care is a key element of any self-development program, something our doctrine makes clear. ADP 6-22 conceives of self-development in a holistic sense, in the maintenance and growth of mental, physical and even spiritual well-being. Self-development, in other words, is not merely a matter of equipping the intellect.

The golden rule of remote learning is to “peer through” the computer screen to check in with students, an imperative made even stronger by the COVID-19 crisis. When a cadet made a small slip up like failing to post on a discussion board or not responding to an email, a yellow flag went off in my brain. The first and most important question I would ask was not, “Why didn’t you post?” but rather, “Is everything ok?”

Yes, these are future commissioned officers who will lead Soldiers in combat. To do that effectively in the future, however, requires navigating the obstacles to success in the present. Stress over academics, conflict with siblings, concern for parents facing lost jobs or at-risk grandparents, or simple isolation all made this semester incredibly challenging for our cadets. In a remote environment, regular touches proved to be essential in sniffing out potential or real obstacles to running on the path of self-development. Any self-development program must do the same.

Conclusion

Leaders must deal with change and uncertainty. To do so effectively requires possessing the mind of a learner, regardless of age or rank. The students and instructors that engaged in this global, half-semester, remote-learning audible ought to be immensely proud of what they have accomplished. They should also reflect upon the upside of this crisis in developing leaders capable of fighting through change.

Self-development fills in all the important gaps not covered by institutional and organizational learning, as it equips leaders with “habits of mind” critical to success – including intellectual curiosity and a love of learning. This is not just high-minded idealism. Curiosity is what drives a young NCO to consult doctrine when creating a small arms range, or a lieutenant to consult the regulation to adjudicate a property issue correctly. Most importantly, leaders who possess the self-development muscle are the most likely to demonstrate the agile and adaptive thinking critical to success on the modern battlefield.

Like any muscle, self-development must be trained. This involves introducing controlled periods in a low structure environment, such as the one every West Point cadet went through this spring. Failing to do so assumes that success in a low structure environment will simply happen after graduation. This assumes too much. An investment in guided self-development prior to graduation – as well as in the operational Army – is the best bet to ensuring this habit grows as a part of our Army culture.

Major Wigton is an active-duty infantry officer currently serving as an assistant professor in the Department of History at West Point.

The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Department of History at West Point, the United States Military Academy, the U.S. Army or the Department of Defense.