How to Build Community in Your Online Classroom
Advice from Experienced Online Instructors
Last March, as teachers mashed their course content into an online format, they could at least count on the community they had been building in person for months. This fall teachers will be facing a new challenge: how to build a community among students who may never have been in the same place at the same time.
The two of us have spent years teaching classics online — everything from the nuts and bolts of Latin grammar to critical theory — and we’re happy to report that it can be done: students can get to know each other and become a cohesive community. They can get eager to hear each others’ ideas and can feel safe offering their own. They can start to share stresses, share successes, and build a real sense of camaraderie. But it doesn’t happen fast, and it doesn’t happen automatically.
In fact, creating horizontal bonds between students is one of the hardest parts of online teaching, but as the best way to foster real student engagement, it’s also one of the most crucial. Ultimately, an engaged community means the difference between a spirited seminar where students try out ideas and learn from each other, and one where every student is just secretly scrolling through a BirdsWithArms subreddit.
We both teach now at an online high school, but we both originally taught in higher ed, and our main points will be applicable to classes at all levels — even college classes (particularly smaller ones). In what follows, we draw on our experience teaching small, synchronous classes to offer suggestions for building community. Although our advice will be most useful for those types of classrooms, many of these tools and principles scale up.
General Principles
Each learning community has its own needs, goals, and constraints, especially in relation to tech availability, internet connection quality, and amount of time with students. Even so, our hope is that we’ll still have useful material here, or at least material that you can make useful by adapting it to your own teaching and technological circumstances.
Embrace multitasking
While the prospect of education in cyberspace may feel like a cold, barren endeavor, our experience has been that the online classroom can be thrilling and the setting for a surprising degree of intimacy with (and among) our students. One session might include: verbal explanation of a topic at the same time as the pre-prepared Powerpoint visual narrative at the same time as spontaneous annotations on the slides at the same time as a flowing text chat filled with student questions and asides at the same time as the use of shorthand icons for hand raising, agreement, laughter, disagreement, at the same time as students trying out sample exercises on screen, and so on. Pundits might bemoan our and subsequent generations’ lack of attention span or need for constant stimuli (and certainly as classicists we value the ability to focus fully on one text in minute detail), but facing that thirst for multitasking and using it to our advantage can help to create an immersive classroom experience that will strengthen student and faculty presence, engagement, and academic communal bonds.
Choose community over content
Community building will take conscious effort on your part, and it’ll take time. It’s not enough to assign students long-term group projects outside of classroom time and sit back and wait for spontaneous friendships to blossom. Interpersonal interaction should be at the forefront of your course design and a deliberate goal of each synchronous session. Let’s be clear: you will cover less content. It’s worth the trade-off, since an engaged class will learn more material better in the end, but you have to accept the fact that you’re going to get through less in a day than you’re used to.
Integrate community building in your activities
You can mitigate this loss of time by working some community building into all of your activities. For instance, when I send students out into breakout rooms, I usually have them start by answering a quick introductory question about themselves, whether related to course content (“Which character from the Odyssey would you be?”) or not (“What did you eat for breakfast?”). It gives students a moment to share a bit of their personality and learn something about each other as humans.
In Latin classes, to give another example, I like to start with a quick check-in (Ut valētis?). Students respond in chat, choosing an adverb from a list on a slide, and you’ll mostly see bene or satis bene. Sometimes a student will write optimē/pessimē, and I stop to ask “Is it anything in particular, or just a good (or bad) day?” The students have an out if they don’t want to be specific (“Just a good day”), but they can share if they want, something like “I just built the world’s largest lego trebuchet” (this actually happened). It can feel like a waste of time, but this kind of sharing builds the relationships that form a foundation for when your class requires more intellectual risk-taking.
Change your scheduling habits
In addition to making the best use of your precious minutes through careful preparation and structured activities, allow less formal breathing room time in your course schedule, even if you feel like you don’t have it. Students have lost those snippets of time, those stolen moments that surround and weave through and enhance in-person academic interactions: the wave in the hallway as they come to class, the quick chat about some dumb pop cultural event, the gesundheit when someone sneezes, the invitation to coffee after class ends. These interactions build community not just because they pertain to non-academic, non-essential, non-productive material, but also because they’re often not under immediate authoritative supervision.
Change your mindset
A significant critique of educational technology (plagiarism detection software, remote proctoring, etc.) is that it presupposes an antagonistic relationship between instructor and student. Accepting that educational technology exists and that we are not escaping it, how do we as educators, as thinkers, as humanists, as classicists reinvent our interaction with tech and harness this virtual space to create collaboration and community instead of punitive measurement?
Embrace Failure
Your tech and your ideas on how to use it will sometimes fail. Lean into the limitations of the medium. Early on in adapting my introductory Latin teaching to our online system, I blithely assumed I could do the same activities as ever. In particular, for the grammar-translation method I have always been a fan of old-fashioned group recitation of charts, vocabulary, passages: a collective of live voices revivifying ancient sounds. When I had my students turn on all of their mics for that first momentous -a -ae -ae -am -ā, I was horrified at the off-tempo reverberating disaster as different students with different degrees of lag and mic volumes and ambient noises clashed.
My first instinct was to apologize for the software and hardware problems, and to treat the tech as a nuisance getting in the way of the hallowed tradition of community building through forced rote memorization. But! My students, particularly younger ones, thought this was the absolute height of classroom hilarity: “We broke the platform!” I have kept that activity ever since, and the inevitable (and gleefully anticipated) breakdown of the tech becomes, itself, an additional bonding moment beyond mind-numbing chants.
Toolkit for Building Community
So that you don’t have to start from scratch in devising ways to use the features of an online classroom to your advantage, we’ve put together some suggestions based on our own classroom practices. Our own experience is in teaching on the platforms from Zoom, Adobe Connect, Saba, Blue Jeans, and even Skype in a pinch, but you’ll probably find similar features in most video conferencing programs.
Breakout Rooms
Breakout rooms allow for students to work in pairs or small groups, just like they would in your brick and mortar classroom. You might fear that breakout rooms online will waste time. Students might not stay on task, chatting about irrelevant things or simply using the absence of a teacher to slyly spend their time having their data mined on TikTok. Fear not. Students do sometimes drift off-task or, more often, finish their task early and then chat. That’s fine. That’s organic community building right there, and you don’t need to squeeze content into every second of class. As for TikTok and the like, we have seen that students are more accountable, rather than less, when they’re in a small group.
Breakouts are also a great way to enhance full-class discussions, especially for discussions that require students to grapple with complex questions and to explore challenging ideas. When you pose a discussion question, don’t just cold-call, but do the old think/pair/share: give the students a few minutes to think and write independently, then a few minutes in pairs or small groups in breakouts to gain confidence in articulating their ideas, and then finally reconvene as a full group for discussion. This also works well with Latin homework, particularly when it involves questions with more than one possible answer.
Group work with a stated goal (a translation, an explicatio, an argument, a paradigm) is certainly great team-building pedagogy; but group work with a set of open-ended suggestions and no immediate obligation or measure of productivity can be as well. Every class of mine gets a periodic “choose your own adventure” breakout room day, normally at the start or at the end of a week when student attention and energies may be wavering: I provide material and frameworks for a potential academic shape (see figure), and the protective confines of the classroom space, but hand over completely their own agency in how to spend that time. It’s just the students, interacting horizontally, and the material, without the mediation and interference of the instructor or performative expectations.
Will this spark a spontaneous joy of learning and community? Not necessarily, or at least not immediately, but you are signaling to the students that you are investing time into that set of relationships.
Text Chat Box
Unlike breakout rooms, the text chat box is like nothing from the world of in-person classroom teaching, and new online teachers sometimes find it awkward. But once you get used to it, the idea of teaching without a chat box is like the thought of ice-skating with a blindfold on. Managing a chat box isn’t a hard skill, although it does take some practice. Just make sure to glance over at it occasionally to make sure you’re not missing questions or ideas. If a student types a long message, don’t be afraid to stop what you’re saying for a moment and let the class know you need a moment to read and (if necessary) respond to the message.
I used to tell students to keep comments to a minimum and keep them strictly relevant, until I realized it’s better to just let it flow: a voluble chat box will build an engaged community. It can be a bit dicey (though fun) to let the chat box become a second discussion parallel to what the instructor or students are saying on mic; when it does get too unwieldy, I make use of the visual aspect of text chat to announce and type out a “line of Latinity,” under which students are instructed to bring comments back to the subject matter. But more often you’ll find students using it to chime in and respond to each other.
The chat box is especially good at drawing out students who are reluctant participators, or who are hesitant to put themselves forward. Even the most reticent students can’t seem to resist sharing their thoughts in the chat box, and from time to time you can ask them to expand on mic about a comment they made in chat. It can give a real shot of confidence to a reluctant student if you offer their idea some positive framing (“X just offered an interesting idea in chat, could you come on mic and expand on that a little?”).
Polls
Like the chat box, it’s hard for us to imagine going back to a physical classroom where you don’t have polls. Sure, you could ask a question and just have students raise their hands, but then they’ll be swayed by seeing what other students are voting for. Some teaching platforms have a polling option built in (like Zoom and Adobe Connect), but you can also use an external program. Polls can be great for a quick check on how well students understand what you’ve just gone over, and it can also be fun to do polls if you have several possible activities and want to give students a choice. In a physical classroom, the loudest voices tend to win out, but a poll actually lets you see what most students would prefer.
Mic
The chat box is great because it sets a low bar for engagement, but you’ll want to try to get every student on mic at least once per class. If students are reluctant to put themselves forward, use the chat box to draw them out or use breakout rooms to give them space to develop their ideas.
If students are eager and you see a crowd of raised hands, try taking your discussion to the next level by staying out of it yourself. Online teaching can sometimes get into a ping-pong pattern: teacher asks question and student A answers, teacher responds and asks another question, student B answers, teacher responds and asks another question. It’s hard to avoid this pattern, but it keeps students from actually engaging with each other. If you have lots of raised hands, tell your students to “baton the mic” (as one of our colleagues puts it): when one person is done speaking, the next in line responds without the teacher intervening.
As a teacher, it’s hard to let go, step back, and not give your own commentary on every student utterance, but it builds a richer discussion and more sophisticated speaking skills among your students to let them learn to respond directly to each other and have the responsibility for moving the conversation forward.
Camera
It’s great if you can have all students on camera, but for most teachers that won’t be possible. Having everyone on camera can help keep them accountable, and it’s also just hard to have a discussion when no one can see each others’ faces.
But keeping everyone on camera can’t always happen. If you’re teaching on Zoom, participants can only see a few faces unless they happen to have an external monitor, which gives an unfair advantage to wealthier students. If you’re teaching on Adobe Connect, the multiple videos can cause lag because they eat up so much bandwidth. And even if your connection can handle all the video feeds, there probably won’t be room on the screen for more than 15 or so students, so it would require a very small class size.
If you aren’t able to have everyone on camera all the time, you should look for opportunities to let students go on camera. When you do so, stay up on camera yourself: it can be scary to be up there alone, and students will appreciate your kind nods as they speak. (And for students who don’t know when to stop speaking, you can wave a hand or get their attention with a gesture.)
Dead Space
The types of activities that will bring students on mic and camera — answering question prompts; giving presentations; translating sentences or passages; acting as instructors for a particular unit — are not in themselves cutting edge pedagogy. In a virtual classroom, however, you do have to be mindful of those moments of dead space while students turn on their camera, inevitably have to reset their mics, forget to plug in their headphones — as well as the natural inclination to zone out when someone else is doing work. Those precious seconds can intensify the siren call of Youtube or Reddit just a browser tab away.
So to keep students from drifting in those moments, it’s useful to have an additional layer of activity and interaction happening at the same time: if one student is tackling a sentence or passage, ask other students to private text chat you their interpretation or to answer grammatical and interpretive questions you’ve already included on the slide in preparation for this classroom activity (see figure), or set the expectation of a certain number of comments in text chat in response to their classmate’s presentation. And as juvenile as it may seem, encourage them to use the “applause” or “laughter” buttons of your videoconferencing software, for that little endorphin kick at seeing robotic icons of appreciation.
Slides
Taking the time outside of class to design your slides with a watchful eye towards community building will give solid visual scaffolding for student interaction and engagement to flow organically during the synchronous portion. If you do have slides with (e.g.) Latin exercises, make sure every student in the class has something to do. So if a slide has ten exercises and you have twelve students, make sure each student has a task. For example, having ten students do one exercise apiece, one student write the Latin numbers for each exercise (ūnum, duo, tria, etc.), and one student write the Roman numerals for each (I, II, III, etc.). For practicing paradigms, I create slides with multiple iterations of the charts so that multiple students can work simultaneously on the board, which would be chaotic in a brick and mortar classroom (see figure).
Whiteboard
However, you don’t need to wear yourself out designing a long and elaborate deck of slides for every single class period. Alternating between pre-prepared slides and spontaneous scribbling on the whiteboard functionality of your teaching platform (or an external one if it’s not built in) will keep the class rhythm active and engaging. That practiced confidence in jumping between formats smoothly will allow for a quicker response to student needs or interests and for greater control over the direction of the class session. One of our colleagues almost entirely eschews Powerpoints and usually just puts up a blank slide or whiteboard, then models note-taking as the discussion takes shape. It looks like lazy-teacher mode (and it certainly does save time on prep!), but it also makes sure that you don’t out-pace your students by moving faster than they can write in their own notes.
Learning Management System (LMS)
Your LMS (Canvas, Moodle, Blackboard, e.g.) is not necessarily a locus of community interaction, but it will mitigate the loss of time that community-building necessitates in the synchronous classroom if you move course material to asynchronous formats whenever possible, to something approaching a flipped classroom model.
A clearly designed course website on your LMS will head off questions and confusions that may take over that valuable synchronous class time. For instance, any time you know you’ll be talking for more than five minutes, consider making a recording and have the students watch it outside of class. In fact, class time should be almost entirely dedicated to interactive learning: it’s the best way to build community and the best use of your time. (But be kind to your students, and take account of that time in how you assign homework; and be kind to yourself, just bang that lecture out, don’t do multiple takes and try to get it perfect.) When introducing a major project, assignment, or upcoming exam information, spend only a few minutes on the basics and direct students to a designated information page on your course site to browse after class time.
Discussion boards
Most LMSs include a discussion board functionality, but you can also use other educational discussion forum sites if yours does not. Discussion boards are not exclusive to online classes: I certainly used them in brick and mortar college courses to ask students to post about the course material, but my pedagogical goal was primarily to ensure that students had done the reading, rather than to foster cross-communication among students (after all, we had the in-person classroom for that).
There are myriad ways to use discussion boards, but for fully online teaching it’s a great idea to build in student interaction here as well as in the synchronous sessions; a set of frequent low-stakes discussion board activities with a horizontal component will keep up student engagement with each other outside of the “live” classes. When I teach Cicero or Caesar, I ask students to decipher each other’s attempts at stylistic imitation (anyone who has taught prose comp would likely recognize the value in this, in the name of educational enrichment of course); for literary topics, I might ask them to expand or refute each other’s posts on secondary literature.
As humanists, as classicists, it will hopefully be a rewarding project to explore online education with a view to creating a culture of exchange, growth, and careful development of thought. The fact that classrooms are now in a virtual space should not take away from the joys and complexities of an academic community.
This is a stressful time for faculty and students, and we are all operating within a larger educational, professional, and market culture that values and expects immediate results and measurable quantitative progress. As a teacher, you may have an instinctive drive to use every minute of in-person class time productively in goal-oriented activity, in particular if you only have a small synchronous component. But we have found that it makes for a richer classroom experience to take the time to bring those pedagogical relationships back to their roots of interpersonal exchange — both instructor-student and horizontally between students.
After all, a class is more than its content; it’s a place to build an intellectual community, and in these times of social distance and isolation, we need that shared community more than ever.
Anna Pisarello and Tom Hendrickson teach Latin and English at Stanford Online High School. Our own pedagogical practices owe more than we can adequately express to our many outstanding colleagues, both past and present, especially Katie Balsley, Caedmon Haas, Anne Hruska, John Lanier, and Kristina Zarlengo. For more on the nuts and bolts of building an effective online classroom, see our school’s resource page.
