Muted? Student Voice during Remote Learning

“Go ahead and remain unmuted during our Zoom meetings.”, Tonya Gilchrist informed our cohort. “I find it’s easier for people to share ideas and ask questions that way. But if you have background noise, then please mute yourself”.

At that moment I was confronted with a reality that I hadn’t considered before: what it means to mute someone online: psychology and emotionally. 

For most of us who teach or have a meeting online, muting “participants” is usually the first thing we do when they come online in order to conduct your meeting uninterrupted and distraction-free. We often don’t provide the choice to do so and if noise does creep into your meeting, then you immediately scramble to find its source and mute it, lest your wise words fall on deaf ears.

And so, when Tonya shared this essential housekeeping rule, it got me wondering if remote learning has made us more teacher-centered or student-centered in our pedagogical approaches.

I’m thinking teacher-centered. 

And here’s why.

I have a folder full of schools’ Online Learning Plans/Academic Continuity Plans. Whatever you want to call it, those were designed for learning in a crisis. From Argentina to China, to New York to Vietnam, none of them considered the importance of student conversations when we went online. Globally we worried about teachers disseminating information to their students, providing them with the systems and tools to do that; all the while ensuring that students had access to that information—not to each other. The tools we insisted upon, were ones that made it easier for teachers to assign work and talk with students. Whether we went with Google Meets or Zoom, SeeSaw or Schoology, Google Suite or Microsoft–the focus was on an urgent need to explain the content and cover our standards.

Sure students probably found ways to connect with each other–that’s not the point I’m trying to make. It’s that, we, in education, didn’t think enough about the peer-to-peer interaction when we went online. We have thrown out social constructivism and used more didactic approaches to validate the “quality” of our education. 

And now that we are facing the possibility that the next school year might have a continued online component, we need to re-examine those “emergency learning plans”  and not only think about “the standards” but to think about pedagogy. We cannot just plop our classrooms online without providing students with access to each other’s minds as a core component of learning.

And so it gets me wondering if what makes remote learning so exhausting is the lack of interaction. There’s little exchange of our energy and enthusiasm for learning among our community of learners. How might we re-design the learning experience if we go into Phase 2 of our Academic Continuity Plans? I think we need to be debating the merits of apps and platforms that encourage student voice and collaboration like FlipGrid and Explain Everything instead of using our teachers’ creative energy on BitEmoji Classrooms. We need to stop pining for the past, teaching like we are in crisis, and start developing learning for our future.

I’m wondering what else have you noticed that should be reconsidered in your school’s version of online learning 2.0?   This isn’t a time to bury our heads in the sand but to engage and debate in critical conversations. Please share your ideas!