by Magen Rodriguez
One year into blended and remote online learning, one teacher at Brooklyn Collaborative HS, an MC school, offers some lessons learned and her own ideas for creating a sense of community online. Building connections with students is one piece of culturally responsive-sustaining education, or CRSE. Interested in learning more about how CRSE & mastery go together? Check out our previous blog. If you’re ready to build your CRSE expertise further, check out MC’s CRSE Growth Plan.
The title is a catchy oxymoron. We all want to zoom toward equity and get it right but it takes time, work, and trials. Becoming an equitable practitioner is a conscious choice. Currently, teacher training programs and teacher performance standards don’t require educators to be equitable! Being equitable requires intentional teaching moves to be culturally responsive. When building responsive communities in the age of virtual teaching, it is a teacher’s goal to bridge the gaps of understanding, communication, and normalcy even when the classroom is on a screen. When the world of virtual instruction swept the globe, Zoom became the platform of choice for many schools, districts, and institutions. Now, as educators have grown fairly confident with digital tools, blue-light blocking glasses, profile pictures, and quick reaction clicks, there is a call for equitable practices on Zoom. Below you will find some ideas you can try with your students as you develop more conscious practices:
“Which character do you identify with today & why?”
Find and use meme check-in grids. The meme gods have lent their special powers of humor to teaching as meme grids are being designed and arranged into ranking grids of emotions and connections. These super-quick grids can grace your slide decks as students join your classes and/or you take attendance. Layer the activity with the chat by having kids explain why they chose that image. Take it one step further and have kids share out loud. Building levels of comfort and offering kids the space to share is powerful. It also builds camaraderie through moments of storytelling. Oh, and don’t forget, adults should be joining in too! A former supervisor once taught me -- “I do. We do. You do.” This starts with sharing our own feelings, an important way to be consciously human with one another. Remember to help students share the air space so everyone can get to know one another more.
Play games WITH students. Kahoot! and Bamboozle are on fire--they offer so many fun interactive games! If you have paraprofessionals, co-teachers, or other staff on your Zooms, ask them to engage with you and the students! Students love competition, and they particularly like to beat adults. Fellow educators and students alike can learn a ton with games facilitated by voices. The voices generate energy but also dialogue! Fellow educators and students alike can learn a ton with games. While you facilitate, take advantage of these moments to engage, talk to your students, and probe deeper. You may be shocked by what you can learn about students when you play games and offer them a place to connect. Using games regularly improves attendance rates as kids are enticed by socializing. Games are a powerful way to build community and comfort. Games don’t need to be just for fun. Build games into your assessment and skill-building practices. I can attest that kids love grammar in disguise.
Dig into cultural connections. On Zoom, or in the classroom, we should acknowledge our students as complex beings with histories. Yes, even our youngest learners have histories! Culturally responsive learning is a conscious practice that goes alongside equity work. They both enhance teaching but also make our teaching more powerful and effective. (To dig deeper into culturally responsive teaching click here.) In a language class, you can ask the very basic, “What languages do you speak?” Challenge and develop your questioning skills by asking, “How does language impact your life?” Your teacher performance evals will love these big questions that incite critical thinking! In a math class, you may ask, “When will you use percentages in life?” To make more of a cultural connection, you may want to ask, “Where do you see percentages in your community?” For an English Language Arts class discussing narration, develop your questioning skills and ask, “How are you the protagonist in your own life’s story?” These questions should be designed to offer kids opportunities to reflect and storytell through their learning.
Be okay with student cameras off. I know this is a bit controversial because some schools and districts have implemented hardcore mandates that require students to have cameras on to participate in virtual instruction. Though the rationale is logical, it is also very traditional and rooted in authoritarian pedagogy. Thinking we have to see faces to know students are there is an issue. With Zoom-fatigue, it makes a teacher feel really awkward, but we need to focus on what’s best for young people. We have to literally break down our walls in the new age of teaching. The reasons students might not turn on their cameras are many and often valid. Ask yourself, how else can I engage and check-in with students regularly? You might prepare a series of social-emotional or content-specific polls for students to engage with throughout your lesson, or encourage voice and chat engagement with name wheels or waterfall responses.
Ask your students for feedback regularly. We are all learning. It is perfectly okay to tell and remind students that we are all in this life-altering experience together. To build humanity and empathy, it’s imperative we take time to check-in and learn from one another in the process. This can be through quick polls that ask to select the most or the least helpful activity of the week. It can be in a Google Form that asks kids to recommend new activities or platforms for learning. We, adults, need to admit that technology comes as second nature to some of our kids. Who better to learn from than the experts themselves? We should listen and adjust our curriculums for our ever-changing student populations and classrooms as we would in brick and mortar.
As virtual learning begins to seem a much longer haul than we all expected, it’s time to make choices and updates to our teaching practices. With so much time for reflection and so much revelation being cast in front of our globalizing eyes, equitable Zoom practices can enhance the experiences of both teaching and learning.
In the name of virtual collaboration, please share your tips and practices.
With a passion for education and focus on social change, Magen Rodriguez is a certified Language Teacher with the NYC Department of Education teaching grades K-12. She tirelessly seeks opportunities as a teacher-leader and advocate for equity and culturally responsive education.
Looking for more on mindsets & motivation during remote learning? Check out MC’s guidance here:
MC Citywide guidance: bit.ly/BelongingMindsetRemoteLearning