It’s Not A Classroom — It’s A Production Studio

Photo by Mwesigwa Joel on Unsplash

The coronavirus has necessitated a rethinking of the modern secondary American classroom into more of production studio with a live studio audience.

Whether we like it or not as educators we are in a battle for our students’ attention against an onslaught of perfectly calibrated dopamine algorithm AI bots on social media like TikToK (has anyone else started scrolling on TikTok on Monday only to look up and realize it’s Thursday?!)

A better model for how to engage students during these times of simultaneous hybrid in-person and remote learning might be late night TV hosts like Jimmy Fallon, or Trevor Noah: they’re engaging, witty, funny, and most importantly, engage with the audience.

Here might be some advice on how to engage your students more actively — especially in hybrid situations (oh no not another high school teacher self righteously offering unsolicited advice — yep I am):

1. Camera’s On: It is really easy to bulldoze through the start of your lessons in-person and just hope everyone hops on and catches up virtually but even taking 60 seconds to make sure everyone is on the same starting line can help.
2. Faces On: I have seen so many wonderful ceiling fans and tops of students’ faces lately. But I want to see the WHOLE FACE. But, the very angle than the iPad or laptop camera is set up at usually isn’t conducive to letting me see a student’s entire face on virtual classrooms.
3. Camera’s On/Off Issues: If you are using Google Meet and your students are using an iPad to do their work, Google Meet will shut off the live camera feed when your student switch over to another application to type notes or read. So, it might not be that your students are bouncing off early, they’re just typing and working within the confines of Google Meet’s functionality.
4. Define Participation: How do you evaluate the quality of online hybrid participation compared to in person participation? I like keeping it simple. I tell students you need to show up, camera on, and speak/ask questions at least once a class period.
5. Small Group Discussions: Break Out Room functionality on Zoom and Google Meet are wonderful but Google does charge districts a decent amount to use it. If your district hasn’t paid for it, a simple workout around can be to have students at home answer your questions in the Google Chat Box inside Google Meet. It’s also nice to use this as a running record of who participated and who didn’t.

Can you imagine a talk show host who completely ignored their live studio audience? Or a talk show host who completely ignored their viewers at home? Whether or not teachers like it, we now are in the edutainment space and are in the content production business.

Naturally, it is always easier to default to paying more attention to the person physically in front of you, but if you have a disproportionately large number of students who are virtual it is unethical to let them passively sit at home.