Nejron Photo/Shutterstock
The headlines from the surveys about what students want to keep in post-pandemic classrooms have focused on student desires for options. Surprise, students want all lectures recorded and made available online! They also want the option of attending classes in person or online.
Neither of those will revolutionize your teaching, and you may or may not want to accommodate these desires, but another part of Zoom classes that students really liked (it was listed third in that survey) was the chat feature. This we should keep, even as we move back to face-to-face teaching.
Zoom chat was something new in our classrooms. All of a sudden there was an immediate way to talk to the professor without having to raise your hand, risk embarrassment, and take bold action to announce your question to the entire class. First, typing in the chat seems like a lower barrier, and second, chats can also be sent privately — only to the teacher. Equally important is that the chat format also makes it easier to ask a vague question, like “I don’t understand.”
In my new book, “Teaching Change: How to Develop Independent Thinkers using Relationships, Resilience, and Reflection,” I look at a lot of research about the difference between how faculty think classroom discussion works and how students think it works. As faculty, this is our happy place, we like school so much, we are still here. We know the rules of engagement and feel comfortable: as with any culture we have internalized how to act in these spaces, the rules feel like “common sense.” This is not the case for most students.
What are the rules for asking a question or raising your hand? As Jay Howard informs us, on average, about 5-8 students (in any size class) do virtually all of the talking. We can say, “raise your hand if you have a question” but that is vague and a bit like saying, “if you don’t feel safe, you can always flag down a police officer.” How I feel about that suggestion depends a lot on context and my prior experience.
Further, faculty forget that homo sapiens are creatures of community. We out-procreated Neanderthals because we are more cooperative, but the flip side of that is that we are also more conformist. Humans are trusting, but also deeply attentive to if the speaker is part of our tribe or a social circle we aspire to join. The determination of our relationship with who is speaking (us or them) precedes our willingness to consider the “facts” coming from that source. (This is also why the first “R” in the title of my book is for relationships: how students perceive your caring about their learning is critical. If you don’t care, or appear to care, then they don’t care.)
Speaking in class, therefore, involves all sorts of social cueing and social risks. This is, of course, especially true for the more socially sensitive adolescents (ages 14-25) and is hardest for any student who already feels marginalized or that they matter less.
Then, boom, there was a chat sidebar. (And its position on the side probably also helped make it seem less threatening.) As many of us were bemoaning the loss of physical classrooms, our online classes became more interactive through chat, polling, and breakout rooms. Our usual tools were missing, so we had to learn to exploit the easy tools that were built into Zoom.
One of the best uses of chat features is the waterfall. When we ask a question in class, we get those same 5-8 students answering every time. And then someone told us we could ask every student to write an answer to the question or put a thought in the chat, but not to hit send. This removes some of the social cueing, priming, and herd mentality (“I was gonna say what she said…”). Then you ask students to hit send all at once and you get a waterfall of ideas — from everyone in the class at once. It works in a class of any size, massively increases participation, and is a simple technology.
Chat was a revolution. We need to keep backchannels as we move back into physical classrooms. There are a lot of websites and software packages that do this (and your campus probably already pays for one, but many are free for small classes). On my website, I provide a list of things you might do (from word-clouds and polls, to group messages, and visual brainstorming) and which tools you might use for each.
A backchannel, of course, can also be distracting: it is one more thing to monitor. There are several ways to approach this.
- Ask a student or a TA to monitor the backchannel. On gosoapbox.com there is a “confusion barometer.” It is a button that any student can anonymously touch on their phone. (When was the last time a student in one of your classes raised their hand just to say, “I’m confused”?) Since it is anonymous, I can ask any student to monitor it and flag me down when confusion gets too high.
- Ask yourself if you talk too much in class. Almost all of us do. We think we waited twenty seconds but it was really two. I force myself to walk from one side of the room to the other after I ask a question. (Counting to six Mississippi also works.) Setting a timer (your phone has one) to check the backchannel every ten minutes, will actually introduce breaks and pauses that will allow students some space to reflect and process.
A classroom observer once told me that I ask “does that make sense” a lot. (Still true, sigh.) “You do know that is a rhetorical question, right?” It had never occurred to me the level of confidence a student would need just to say “no, it doesn’t.” Chat was a revolution.
