In Module 1 - Session 4, the TALE Academy focuses on rethinking student engagement to support teaching across learning environments. The shift depends on moving away from models of student engagement that focus on student demonstration (raising hands, participating in class conversations, etc.) and towards a model that focuses on student experiences (persistence, interest, etc.).
The need for this shift became evident during emergency remote teaching: Video conferencing (Google Meets, Zoom, etc.) took the world by storm during the pandemic. It seemed at first to be a panacea for the situation: if we all meet on Zoom, isn’t that the same as if we meet in the office, around the dinner table, or (in this case) in the classroom? But the novelty wore off quickly as we learned such things as you can’t hear simultaneous speakers, you have to mute and unmute to engage in conversations, and looking into one another’s “worlds” could feel, at best, like we were learning new things about one another or, at worse, like a violation of privacy. By fall 2020, teaching via video conference too often felt like running a séance: “Can you hear me? If you can hear me, type ‘yes’ in the chat box.”
Carolyn Tyner, who teaches at Sunset Park Prep in Brooklyn, shared her thoughts on the topic of webcam use in a February 2021 piece for the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) blog “Teacher to Teacher.”
“Some teachers will argue that keeping cameras off allows students to be complacent...Yet, many schools — including mine — have opted not to require students to turn their cameras on. We are attempting to be trauma-informed and respect their privacy, especially in low-income districts where students may be self-conscious about their living situations. At my own school, the heated debate continues among teachers as we struggle with attendance and engagement.
Perhaps the bigger question is: How do we really measure engagement? Attendance and turning in assignments is one thing, but in regular years, these two factors do not prove a student is truly, actively engaging during class time…I wonder: Are students really less engaged during remote learning? Or has remote learning just revealed a lack of engagement that was always there, masked by physical attendance?”
Interestingly, early research coming out of emergency remote teaching during the pandemic both reaffirms Tyner’s questions and points to the fallacy of the idea that appearing on screen during virtual instruction is a demonstration of engagement in the first place. One survey of students attending a college-level biology course confirmed that some students were concerned about their personal appearance and their physical location being seen in the background. Other students cited social norms as playing a role in camera use.
Significantly, the survey results showed that these concerns were disproportionately held by underrepresented minority students.
As with so many other aspects of teaching and learning, emergency remote teaching put a spotlight on pre-existing challenges that require us, as educators, to rethink how we teach. When it comes to student engagement, one way to rethink our work is to focus less on what student engagement looks like and more on what teaching practices are most effective at generating a student’s sense of engagement.
Learn more about this topic and other strategies for teaching across learning environments by enrolling in the TALE Academy today!
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