Facilitating discussions via Zoom (in a college-level classroom).
Practical suggestions on what to consider while preparing Zoom teaching strategies and facilitating Zoom discussions.
Starting and supporting meaningful discussions in a Zoom classroom is a challenging task. The awkwardness, the silence, the screen fatigue, and the distractions of your private space create a set of obstacles fundamentally different from those of a f2f classroom, and overcoming those obstacles requires new strategies.
While reflecting on the ways of creating a live online discussion I came up with the following strategies or rather the awareness points to take into consideration while facilitating the Zoom discussions.
Confusion of private and public spaces
In the f2f classes, the distinction between private and public is quite clear and while different educators set up different boundaries, the clarity of those boundaries is much more tangible. Every participant, both student and teacher, has the agency to decide how much of your private life you bring into the impartial classroom. In the Zoom environment students and educators are forced to create classrooms out of their bedrooms, kitchens, living rooms, and even garages, balconies, and closets. And not all the participants have a full agency over making these choices or even over opting out of sharing any parts of their private spaces at all.
I found that acknowledging this and giving the students back some of that agency can be a foundation of building a relationship with the class, especially at the beginning of the course. It can include talking about my own environment, giving a tour of my studio, or simply discussing the ways of organizing work stations within the confinement of one’s home. Giving the student the opportunity and, of course, the choice, to share their home set up for work and studying can help establish the private/public boundaries and also would help the educator to understand the situation of the students that may shape the requirements that they are imposing, like have the video camera always on or being at the table of sorts, as sometimes these requirements are not possible to fulfill.
This brings me to my next point:
The flexibility of rules
The f2f classroom becomes an equalizer that makes the uninformative rules of behavior in the said classroom possible. In the Zoom classroom, the lack of such an equalizer suggests the need for much more flexibility of the rules, regulations, and behavioral requirements. While maintaining the goal of creating a high-level learning environment and holding the students accountable for the professional in-class behavior, attendance, ensuring participation and maintaining an expected level of discipline, it is also extremely important to be understanding of the uniqueness of many of the students’ possible situations. As discussed above, some may not have a private space to hold calls from, some may not be comfortable with sharing their specific living situation, some may experience homelessness or be in an abusive household, some may have limited connection, low bandwidth or limited access to devices supporting video, and such circumstances could make the obligatory video participation difficult or even impossible. There may be a number of other reasons preventing a student from participating in a video call, or remaining for the duration of the whole class or meeting other obligatory participation requirements, without the neutrality and the equalizing adjustment of the classroom. This means that our goal as educators is to be able to recognize or at least to keep in mind the possibility of these situations and give students the benefit of the doubt if they are unable to meet the expected rules and guidelines but are willing to participate in a class in alternative ways. Having private conversations with students at the beginning of the course could really help to keep their motivation up and to ensure that a rigid guideline doesn’t become a roadblock in somebody’s education. Sometimes a simple use of virtual background or a camera filter can be a solution, sometimes it can be substituting voice participation with chat participation, etc. The key to finding these solutions is communication with students.
The acknowledgment of awkwardness
Zoom conversations are awkward. The social cues are lost and the eye contact with the person you are talking to is diluted by the grid of faces on everybody’s screens. The pauses seem more uncomfortable and the live conversation is disrupted by lagging connection, accidental mutes, and, in an absence of the many social cues, lack of understanding if the speaker has finished speaking or if somebody is about to start talking. All this makes the Zoom discussions difficult to set up, especially in the classroom where some or all students are not comfortable with public speaking or don’t know each other well. The key step towards facilitating the Zoom discussions is to acknowledge the awkwardness of the Zoom calls and to discuss the aspects that students find particularly uncomfortable and to address them. For example, the students may say that they don’t know when to start speaking or are thrown off by pauses or are worried about taking too much space. The answer to some of these concerns could be to call out students as a discussion facilitator making sure that everybody has a chance to speak out on the issue, it is helpful to carefully observe the students while one of them is speaking and spot reactions and call out those students who seemed to react to what was being said. From that point on with the help of the discussion facilitator, the students are conversing with each other. Additionally, it may be helpful to use the break out rooms in pairs, to motivate the students to have a dialog. The pairs seem to work best so far, especially at the beginning, while the group relationships are still being built, because the silence will force the students to start talking and unlike the larger group of 3 students and more, there is no opportunity for anyone to escape the discussion.
Avoid active listening
Something that many of us do naturally in f2f discussion to ensure building the emotional link and empathetic connection with a person you are conversing with, in case of a Zoom discussion becomes a disruptive practice. Zoom supports a panel discussion, with a one-speaker-at-a-time mode and any sound from another participant, even a sound of acknowledgment and agreement, becomes an interruption, and not a short interruption where it’s easy to quickly pick up the discussion from where it was broken up as in live f2f discussion, in a video call such an interruption becomes a much longer pause while the speaker tries to identify who spoke up and if they are planning to continue speaking or not. At the same time, active listening could transform into non-audio responses like emoji reactions or simply nodding. Establishing and using a set of gestures to indicate a question, a follow-up idea, agreement or disagreement can be a great way of encouraging non-interruptive active listening. To make these non-verbal responses work every participant need to have grid view where all or at least the majority of the participants are visible simultaneously.
Understanding the lag
Depending on the video call platform, type and quality of the participants’ internet connection, geographic location, time zone, the device used, and multiple other reasons there is often some lag in video and audio. So if you call out the students name and they are not responding right away, or they seem to start responding but there’s no sound, it’s important to give it a pause and not repeat the name of the student or the question and allow to sound and video to catch up, it may be a fraction of a second, but if you start repeating the sound eventually just jumbles and people start talking over each other and that halts the discussion more. So as uncomfortable as the Zoom pauses are sometimes it’s important to allow them to happen to make sure the sound and video do catch up and the discussion continues albeit slowly. Overall, pacing yourself, your speech and lecture, as well as questions and calls on students, is one of the main strategies to ensuring the flow of the online discussion.
Writing down thoughts
When you pose a question to a group of students and it is met with silence it is tempting to start elaborating on it or even to start answering it yourself. And I know I tend to do this even in the f2f classroom and it’s something I have to constantly be aware of. I, and I know I’m not alone in this, have to consciously stop myself from trying to fill in the pause and ultimately give students the answer. With the pauses on Zoom being even more awkward, I find myself tempted even more to either start calling on students right away or if that is met with silence too — to start responding to my own questions. The intimidation of the Zoom silence and a grid of staring facing often makes taking your time to reflect on the question more difficult, the solution could be to give students time to write down the answer or their thoughts on the topic being discussed and than share them with the class, this way their time on reflection and deliberation is justified and acknowledged and they also have a little break from being observed and observing. I personally recommend handwriting if possible, to create a break from the screen as well and to diversify the students’ activity.
Alternative forms of engagement
While the video presence is not the most reliable tool to assess and ensure participation, there are alternative ways to maintain students’ engagement. For example, you can insert quick question with yes or no answers, that can be answered via gestures to not disrupt the continuity of the lecture, after a larger portion of the lecture you can use polls about the information that has just been discussed or pose questions that may require typing the answer in the chat. Additionally, it may be a good idea to use supportive platforms for interactive learning, like Kahoot. Making lectures interactive, sectioned into smaller portions, and broken up by activities that ensure the information is retained by the students, can really help to maintain the students’ attention and engagement.
Attention span
Video classes decrease the already limited attention span of many students: continuous staring at a screen makes it easier for the students to loose concentration and their home provides more opportunities to get distracted than a regular classroom. So, as discussed above, breaking down the lecture into the smaller parts and introducing the interactive elements to it would break the monotony of listening and looking at the screen and help students to not zone out. Additional activities to maintain students’ engagement could include writing, researching, mind mapping, sketching, quick assignments, etc. As there is no way of preventing students from having a number of other tabs open, playing games or being on social media while on the Zoom call, the only way to ensure their listening is to introduce a number of activities that would require them to immediately use the new information they are receiving. Overall, I would say lecturing via Zoom needs to be minimized and it works best combined with the asynchronous learning, where a student has the materials to read and/or watch beforehand and the class becomes a space for discussion, diving into details and specific questions and practical application. This way the Zoom fatigue and screen fatigue are minimized and the students’ attention is maintained by the engagement in the various activities.
Breaks
I have seen multiple advice regarding combating the Zoom fatigue with frequent breaks, but I have personally noticed that not all students benefit from having frequent short breaks and would often prefer to keep going and have one or two bigger breaks depending on the duration of the class. Frequent breaks can cause defocusing and disrupt the continuity of the lecture or discussion. I would say it highly depends on the individual group dynamic, the subject being taught, and other possible specifics of the class, but I would suggest checking in with students about what they think would be best for the particular class.
To summarize, the main take away of all the points I’m bringing up here is the need for communication with the students, the flexibility of the rules and guidelines set for the class, and the importance of building the connection and trust with the students, so that the best teaching strategy could be found for a particular group. Yes, it puts more pressure on the educators and requires additional emotional labor that may be hard to perform, especially now at the time of uncertainty, but once you lay down the foundation of the communication and trust, the continuous facilitation of the Zoom class discussions becomes easier and the discussions themselves — more rewarding for both the educators and the students.
Happy teaching!