As educators, we know that school is more than academic and the work of helping young people learn is inseparable from helping them live. We know that what happens between teachers and students is no simple transaction, that our give-and-take with them involves much more than handing out assignments and getting them back. We know how much we get from being with each other and how much we lose when we do school at a distance.
So we do our best to re-create this human connection when we gather remotely. We open our virtual classes with check-ins, letting students take turns telling us how they’re doing. We set up office hours when we can be with students one at a time, helping them solve whatever problems they’re facing — or just listening to them talk about what these hard days are like. We make space and time for the human connections between ourselves and our students as best we can.
What we need to build next are connections among them.
The technologies we use for remote instruction don’t help much, but the problem runs deeper than technology. In schools, we often fall into thinking of education as an exchange that plays out between teachers and students, and we often overlook the many ways our students teach and learn from each other, both in and out of the classroom.
Compare this mindset to the one we bring to our workplaces, where we take for granted the value of “water-cooler” time: the informal interactions we have on the way to the copier, or while returning to our desk from a meeting. These days, many offices include communal kitchens, high-top tables interspersed among the desks, and other spaces intentionally designed to encourage unplanned, in-between encounters. Such interactions don’t just lubricate the system; they also power much of the work we do together.
In most schools, however, we leave little room for this kind of informal exchange: The “passing time” we allow for between classes exists only because students have to get from geometry to English, and not because we see it as an important part of their learning. Because we rarely recognize the value of these interstitial interactions, they don’t “count” for us — and when we try to re-create the experience of school remotely, we largely leave them out.
As we continue to redesign the ways we do school virtually, we need to make sure to build in those essential — but less obvious — parts of being in school that our children miss the most.
While conducting a study of teaching and learning in the pandemic, my team interviewed a high school math teacher who described logging in to his virtual class several minutes early, only to have his students ask him to turn off his microphone so they could keep talking among themselves until class started. It was a simple request — no big deal — but it speaks volumes about the urgent need, right now, for educators not just to reach out to their students individually but also to give them unstructured, informal time to connect with each other.
Another teacher told us about opening each class by calling out excellent student work from the day before and taking a few minutes for peers to give each other encouragement. Other teachers we interviewed were creating Instagram accounts and Facebook pages that had nothing to do with instruction but provided an easy way for students to keep class discussions going, joke around, and stay in touch. Others were making time on Therapeutic Thursdays for students to share a favorite photo and explain why it matters, or setting aside Fridays for their students to play silly games . . . and then delivering lunch from Chick-fil-A to the winners.
As we head further into this forced experiment in remote schooling, we might think even more imaginatively about how to help our students build community among themselves and design with them other ways to get the best parts of what they miss about being in school. We might start by learning what draws them to those places where they’ve been choosing to gather, by understanding what Clay Christensen calls the “job” these spaces do for them.
For example, when my 15-year-old wants to get together with his friends, the place he goes most of the time is Xbox. From what he tells me, the chance to break things apart and blow them up is a big part of the attraction — but so, too, is the chance to spend time with his friends. Charlie’s not looking to “check in,” or even to have a conversation, per se. But there’s something valuable to him about the kind of connection he gets from this shoulder-to-shoulder time, when he and his friends are focusing on something other than being together. And I used to see a similar kind of connection when I’d drop off my 8-year-old at school in the morning: His teacher would set things up so that each of the kids at his table started the day working independently on a task they’d been preassigned. Sitting next to one another, Ben and his classmates would chat around the edges of the schoolwork they were doing — just like adults in a knitting circle, each on their own, and all together.
As we continue to redesign the ways we do school virtually, we need to make sure to build in those essential — but less obvious — parts of being in school that our children miss the most. Something like the watercooler time that many companies built into their offices and have tried to sustain when working remotely. Might we, for example, create virtual learning spaces where “tables” of students work on a shared or similar problem — showing each other what they’re building as they go, asking for help when they need it? In the design world, we often make time for “working alone together” to create a different kind of interaction than we typically have during a meeting — when we’re supposed to be paying attention to each other. Maybe this kind of time would feel less like being in a traditional academic class and more like being in a studio — where each student is focused mostly on their own painting or sculpture, where the energy flows mainly between student and student, and where the teacher is only present around the edges.
Last week, a head of school shared his daughter’s explanation for why so many of her peers had stopped showing up for virtual classes this spring: “It’s so easy not to care,” she said. Our students care about school, he believed, in part because they know school cares about them. And I think he is deeply right: In this moment when so much of school happens remotely, we must make especially sure our students know how much we care, even though we may not be able to put a hand on their desk as we walk by or check in after class to make sure they’re OK. But we must also remember that our students’ experience of being connected doesn’t just come from us. As their teachers, we must also do everything we can to knit our students together into a community, where everyone knows — maybe without anyone ever saying so — that they are cared for.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dan Coleman
DAN COLEMAN is a visiting researcher in innovation practice at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Teaching Systems Lab, and a principal at Big Sky Blue Design.
