Creating a movement

A simple activity to build human connection in your online class

Photo by Claudio Schwarz | @purzlbaum on Unsplash

As so many of us are trying to figure out this online teaching thing, one of the most common question themes I hear is around how to build and maintain human contact online (instructor to student and student to student). While there are many ways that this can be done, there are some that are very time-consuming, others that require a lot of technical expertise, and others that work best with support from assistants or technologies. In this post, I want to share a simple activity that can help to connect your students to each other.

I teach a class session about leadership. Here are the elements of the activity:

1. First, we watch a 3-minute video together through Zoom from Derek Sivers about starting a movement (https://youtu.be/fW8amMCVAJQ).
2. Students go into breakout rooms (in groups of 4 or 5) to come up with their own movement and choose someone in their group to be the leader (the only person in the group allowed to do the action).
3. After five minutes of planning and defining how they will know if they are successful, they rejoin the main room and the leader sends me a private message of their movement idea.
4. Everyone turns on their cameras and they are told to watch each other closely for someone who might be starting a movement. They are encouraged to be the “first follower” to support one of their peers if they see a movement starting.
5. I tell each leader through the private chat when to start and we all watch each other for three minutes, no talking. The key here is that we are really seeing each other, focused on what is happening.

The results are quite powerful. One example of a movement that was started by a group was to put a shoe up to the person’s ear. For students who did not have shoes on, it was fun to watch them jump up, leave the camera and return with a shoe! Another group leader started drinking water and we saw people recognize the movement and run to get their own drink if they did not have one. Other groups had related ideas. It didn’t really matter what movement was started… the impact of the assignment was in how it made students feel. Here is what one student said in their end of course reflection on the most meaningful lessons learned:

The activity that triggered one of the lessons I learned was what we did for the “leaders and first followers” class meeting. We split into groups and thought of a movement one of us could start with the hope that others would follow. As funny as it was to see everyone put their shoes up to their ear, I thought it was pretty powerful that the actions of one person could influence all of us. It was also interesting to see how some people were trying their best to see what the leader was doing, while others were content to join in after a few people already had.

I felt a sense of community and belonging during the activity. Especially in light of the disruptions of the past year, it felt good to see everyone's face…

It was such a simple activity, but it had a lasting impact, where students could easily recall how they felt several weeks later.

My challenge to you is this… is there an activity you could build into your course that could help students feel a sense of community and belonging? Could you help students feel seen, by their peers, by you? It might make all the difference in the world to the student who is feeling alone, cut off, over-stressed, and disconnected in their online course.

If you would like to brainstorm ideas or share your connection activities, please contact me!