Tag Archives: classroom management

Having Back Channel Support in an Online Video Class

I don’t think this is a word, but I’m going to use it anyway: Backchanneller.

There are many educators using tools like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Adobe Connect for the first time. These educators are learning that it is very hard to be presenting with these tools and also pay attention to the chat, and what is happening in the digital room, while also delivering instructions or a lesson. One thing that can make this easier is to have a back channel helper, or a backchanneller.

People who run Twitter Chats understand this. They use a team of people to help welcome people to the chat, retweet, and like good responses, while the main moderator pushes out the questions and engages with individual tweets. A single moderator struggles to do it all.

For video-based classes and lessons the teacher/presenter will often struggle with:

  • Following the chat
  • Picking out good questions
  • Helping to orient latecomers
  • Finding the person with their mic on, causing a distraction
  • Keeping the chat on topic, or at least monitor the chat for people causing a distraction.

It’s hard to do these things while also trying to be engaging and/or creating an interactive lesson.

The primary role of the backchanneller is to monitor what’s happening in the chat in the background, and to assist the teacher/presenter. These are the main roles:

  • Look for good questions
  • Respond to simple questions
  • Choosing the right time to interrupt, if the question warrants it… and avoiding questions that would interrupt or derail the lesson, or that can wait for an appropriate pause in the lesson.

There are other things the backchanneller can do, as mentioned above, but the moderation of the chat is key.

It’s hard to run a lesson and watch a chat conversation at the same time. It’s easy to unintentionally let the chat take over the lesson. Having a backchanneller, who can be a student, who understands the responsibility of the role, can help a lesson go considerably better. A backchanneller reduces the cognitive load on the teacher/presenter and lets them focus on the intent of the lesson or presentation.

It’s great when a participant, a student, can take on the role of backchanneller. It’s empowering. Explicitly explaining the importance of this role, and reflecting on the person’s effectiveness can also be a useful thing to do, to help the audience or class understand the value of this useful teaching assistant. And that’s the ultimate role of a backchanneller, an assistant, someone who monitors and manages a conversation stream while the teacher pays attention to the lesson or presentation.

“Start off hard”

Yesterday on Twitter, I read this tweet by a first year teacher, Ms. Beatty:

Recently got the advice of, “Start off hard, you can always get softer,” in terms of student relationships at the beginning of the year. What do you make of that? Is it good advice? Or misguided?

This was my response:

Start with (your personal) high expectations. This can be hard to start, but it’s not starting off intentionally hard… If you don’t share your high expectations early, it gets harder later.
I think these two things get confused and purpose gets lost in the message.

I understand why advice like ‘Start off hard’ would persist in education. A lot of new teachers come in wanting the students to like them, and wanting students to have a wonderful time in their class. So, these new teachers might go overboard being accommodating in ways that potentially, in the long run, hinder their ability to push students to be their best. You might say that they ‘start off being too soft’, and so the ‘go in hard’ advice becomes the counterpoint.

But what’s the purpose or intention of ‘going in hard’? What is it that is being achieved? Is it a need to manage behaviour? Is it control of the class? Is it that you need to assert dominance?

If that’s not it, then what is it you are trying to achieve… And how else can you achieve that? If you are going into a new class to be especially ‘hard’, what does that look like?

Turn that around now and think of ways that students can buy into your (high) expectations, rather than complying to your hard rules and heavy hand. Can they help create class rules and expectations? Can you share your expectations in a positive way?

Once these class rules or expectations are created, then sticking to them isn’t being hard. What’s hard is doing this fairly.

Students will make mistakes… how is this handled? Has this been determined?

Teachers will make mistakes… such as not being fair – giving one student a break, but not another, or breaking the rules ‘because I’m the teacher and I can’.

I think the hard part of the new school year is:

1. Clearly establishing expectations (hopefully with student input).

2. Being consistent with those expectations.

I also think these can be done without being intentionally hard on kids.