My good friend and colleague, Natalie Gerum over at the Centre for Student Involvement and Careers, is one of the most creative and careful educators I know. When it became clear that we would be teaching online this term, my single first thought was – “How do we build meaningful community in an online forum?”
Natalie is an expert community builder, and we both recognize the (well documented) importance of strong and early relationship building to the academic success of first year students. (For more on this, I suggest a book called “Challenging and Supporting the First Year Student” by Betsy Barefoot, M. Lee Upcraft, and John N. Gardner). (Full disclosure: I’m not actually teaching first year students this year, but I’ve taught first year for decades, and I think first year principles are so ingrained in my teaching that they are there to stay.) So I called Natalie.
In relationship building for education, one of the critically important but often overlooked pieces is what Natalie calls “the in between times”. These are those unscripted times when students walk into a classroom and sit down next to someone. They look around. They roll their eyes when the professor is late. They chat with the person sitting next to them. I whined, “How am I going to do this in Zoom?” And Natalie said… “well, you start your Zoom class. Let the students join, and disappear. Maybe show up 5 minutes late.”
(See? She’s a genius.)
And so I began my term by opening up my Zoom lectures 15 minutes early and I post a PowerPoint slide of something to do. Sometimes it’s colouring (via Zoom annotation), or origami instructions, or a crossword puzzle. I share my computer music and play my extensive collection of 70s songs (so they really have something to talk about). And then I walk away and make coffee. When I come back 20 minutes later, community has happened. They’ve shared recipes on the chat forum. They’ve started a discussion group (without me). They’ve made friends.
Which just goes to support my tried and true teaching truth: sometimes the most important things we can do as educators is get out of their way. (More on this later…)
