What TikTok can teach educators

In 2005, my older cousin returned home from college for the holidays. He couldn’t wait to tell me about this “new thing called Facebook.” Suddenly, internet access from a computer opened a portal to a whole new world of social interaction. Fun conversations in classrooms or at campus parties could become lasting digital relationships, a “social network.”

At the time, Facebook remained collegiate folklore to me. Only students with university email addresses could enter the mythical universe. But, as time passed, Facebook—social media—happened to us, and we haven’t been the same since.

Two decades later, social media is everywhere, all the time. It shapes everything from how we socially interact; to how we sell and buy goods, to how we view ourselves when we look in the mirror. And we are now on the cusp of a major inflection point in the modern history of digital social networks.

The new social media darling, TikTok, is being transformed. In April 2024, former President Joe Biden signed into law a congressional bill that essentially started a 270-day running clock for the owners of ByteDance, the Chinese parent company of TikTok, to barter its rights over the company for continued access to the American consumer market. The clock struck zero in January, and TikTok shut down briefly for U.S. users. On his first day in office President Donald Trump penned an executive order delaying the ban. As of this writing in the week after Trump’s inauguration, TikTok is once again operational in the U.S. but out of reach for downloads in app stores. The biggest platform of today may be gone tomorrow.

The power of TikTok

Whether TikTok is banned in the U.S. or recreated in some other form, its influence is of immense importance to education policy makers. With more than 150 million American users, the Chinese platform has become arguably the most powerful educational tool in the United States. It can teach you pretty much anything: how to cook, how to speak a foreign language, how to renovate a bathroom, how to digest a radical conspiracy theory seeped in political misinformation. The user base skews young, meaning that TikTok is now a core feature of the culture of adolescent America.

We can (and should) debate what kids are learning via TikTok. However, step one is accepting the fact that kids do seem to be learning. This means that policy makers also should be learning from TikTok—not from the content itself but from the app’s structure as a medium for generating youth engagement.

TikTok both offers and represents the essence of modern youth engagement: short-form, algorithmic, entertaining, addictive content. It’s also the exact antithesis of the traditional “banking model” of schooling (Friere, 1968/1970) in which teachers deposit knowledge into students. That model is notorious for cultivating student apathy and boredom. With TikTok, our kids have taken a platform and turned it into their own version of a digital classroom and library with its own lesson plans and pedagogies. In an odd way, TikTok has seemingly solved the student engagement problem.

If we accept this truth, we can start to rebuild policies and initiatives that enhance the educational experience in the traditional classroom without the dangers of a largely unstructured social media platform. How can policy makers do this?

It begins with looking at what TikTok does through the lens of what the relevant academic literature tell us about student engagement.

Culturally relevant teaching and learning

One way to think about TikTok’s success with kids is to conceptualize it as a platform that offers what Gloria Ladson-Billings calls culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP). Ladson-Billings (1995) defines CRP as a teaching practice that “not only addresses student achievement but also helps students to accept and affirm their cultural identity, while developing critical perspectives that challenge inequities that schools (and other institutions) perpetuate.”

It’s tempting to reduce CRP to racial and ethnic matching between teachers and students, but it’s more complicated than that. It’s not just seeing someone who looks like you in the instructor position. It’s sharing the nuances of your cultural identity—vernacular, clandestine references, and experiences with specific cultural moments. On TikTok, kids see themselves in the content, and an algorithm increases the probability that they will continue to see more of the same. Once you show TikTok who you are, it will show you yourself over and over again.

The issue is that what TikTok and social media platforms show kids is often destructive. Poisonous information and hazardous ideas are often launched from virtual profiles. Social media is often a dishonesty cartel. Recent studies have presented us with the negative residual effects of kids’ high engagement on these platforms. Social media has been horrible for kids’ self-esteem (Steinsbekk et al., 2021; Valkenburg et al., 2022). It leads to feelings of inadequacy and a lack of self-worth (Sabik et al., 2020). There is evidence linking social media use to self-harm (Scherr, 2022; Biernesser et al., 2020), even suicide (Luxton et al., 2012; Macrynikola et al., 2021). This is the danger of constant engagement without the oversight of someone who cares about you.

The importance of care

The caring part is where good teachers have stood the test of time. Behind just about every kid from the margins of society who survives school you find a teacher (if not an entire slew of teachers) whose superpower is love. It sounds treacly, but there’s mountains of empirical research that deductively land on the idea.

Economics-based studies of the “value-added” by teachers spit out the importance of teaching experience and instructional strategies—factors directly connected to putting time, effort, and passion into the craft (once accounting for structural factors that rob teachers of the extra time) (Chetty et al., 2014; Darling-Hammond, 2015). Meanwhile, qualitative studies of Black students’ perceptions of their teachers show that the most engaged students describe having communal relationships with teachers (Howard, 2002; Vega et al., 2015; Mahatmya et al., 2016; Doucet, 2017). These teachers, their hearts are in it.

The quest, then, is for educational experiences that generate quality engagement wrapped in the warmth of a teacher’s love. You do this by integrating core features of TikTok—short-form, algorithmic, entertaining (minus the addictive component)—into teaching and instruction. Imagine more lectures disseminated as live, in-class two-minute content pieces. Think about lesson planning being a process through which to discover the entertaining aspect of the concept—finding the “funny” in a lesson on algebra, biology, or literary devices. What if each lesson was considered an opportunity to informally (or even formally) “collect data” on student engagement with the content pieces? What if students had the opportunity to constructively critique teachers’ “content”? Algorithms don’t always have to be paths to destruction.

Learning with and about social media

This is the evolution of culturally responsive pedagogy. It’s taking what we’ve learned from how kids, especially kids of color in working-class communities, turn technology into an academic institution without walls. They learn, critique, collaborate, and commune through TikTok. They splash into new trends, new ideas, and new worlds through TikTok. The cultures teachers need to be pedagogically responsive to are being harvested and spread through TikTok.

The irony, though, is that harnessing the strengths of TikTok in real-life classrooms is arguably our best chance at protecting kids from the harmful aspects of social media. What’s the best way to equip kids with digital media literacy? It’s by strengthening their understanding of how they consume and disseminate information of any kind. It’s by building the reflex of asking the simple but important question: What’s the source?

I think back to what Facebook was compared to what it became. It was an entirely new virtual huddle space that once seemed unimaginable. Then, it grew and morphed to include the worst versions of us. It became a geyser spreading misinformation and a forklift for the dirty work of election tampering. I wonder what we would have done had we known what was happening to us. And, I hope education policy makers look at TikTok and realize steps we can take to have this never happen again.

References

Biernesser, C., Sewall, C. J., Brent, D., Bear, T., Mair, C., & Trauth, J. (2020). Social media use and deliberate self-harm among youth: A systematized narrative review. Children and Youth Services Review, 116, 105054.

Chetty, R., Friedman, J.N., & Rockoff, J.E. (2014). Measuring the impacts of teachers II: Teacher value-added and student outcomes in adulthood. American Economic Review, 104 (9), 2633-2679.

Darling-Hammond, L. (2015). Can value added add value to teacher evaluation? Educational Researcher, 44 (2), 132-137.

Doucet, F. (2017). What does a culturally sustaining learning climate look like? Theory Into Practice, 56 (3), 195-204.

Friere, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the oppressed (M.B. Ramos, trans.). Continuum. (Original work published 1968).

Howard, T. C. (2002). Hearing footsteps in the dark: African American students’ descriptions of effective teachers. Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk, 7 (4), 425-444.

Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32 (3), 465-491.

Luxton, D.D., June, J.D., & Fairall, J.M. (2012). Social media and suicide: A public health perspective. American Journal of Public Health, 102 (S2), S195-S200.

Macrynikola, N., Auad, E., Menjivar, J., & Miranda, R. (2021). Does social media use confer suicide risk? A systematic review of the evidence. Computers in Human Behavior Reports, 3, 100094.

Mahatmya, D., Lohman, B.J., Brown, E.L., & Conway-Turner, J. (2016). The role of race and teachers’ cultural awareness in predicting low-income, Black and Hispanic students’ perceptions of educational attainment. Social Psychology of Education, 19, 427-449.

Sabik, N.J., Falat, J., & Magagnos, J. (2020). When self-worth depends on social media feedback: Associations with psychological well-being. Sex Roles, 82 (7), 411-421.

Scherr, S. (2022). Social media, self-harm, and suicide. Current Opinion in Psychology, 46, 101311.

Valkenburg, P., Beyens, I., Pouwels, J.L., van Driel, I.I., & Keijsers, L. (2021). Social media use and adolescents’ self-esteem: Heading for a person-specific media effects paradigm. Journal of Communication, 71(1), 56-78.

Vega, D., Moore III, J.L., & Miranda, A.H. (2015). In their own words: Perceived barriers to achievement by African American and Latino high school students. American Secondary Education, 36-59.

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This article appears in the Spring 2025 issue of Kappan, Vol. 106, No. 5-6, pp. 58-60.