Blog 1 - Catlin Tucker's Blog 

Building Community Online

Dr. Catlin Tucker’s recent blog post about building relationships within an online learning community is very timely for me, as I just began a new section of my 6^th grade Spanish exploratory class which includes only online learners. Prior to this, most of my classes have been concurrent; that is, I am teaching both in-person and online students at the same time. I am interested in ways to connect all of my learners, no matter how they attend class. Dr. Tucker suggests that as educators, we have a responsibility “to help students to develop their social presence or the ability to assert their social and emotional selves online” (2021). I have honestly not thought much about this, but as I am incorporating more and more online teaching and resources, I wholeheartedly agree with this. 

A bit of investigating showed me that “social presence” is a concept that appears in quite a bit of research, even before COVID forced many of us towards an increase in online teaching and learning. I think I could be more intentional about helping students to develop this presence online. There are many ways to do this; the blog post highlights three. She suggests first setting agreements as a class. I am often hesitant to do this, because I teach a group for only 7 weeks and then they move on, and I feel like every second of our class time is too precious. I also often worry that when students set agreements in every class, they sort of become “numb” to hearing many of the same ideas over and over. I may try Dr. Tucker’s suggestion with my next exploratory section as an experiment.

The second idea is to initiate conversations at the start of class to help build community. Dr. Tucker shares an awesome slide deck that includes a variety of quick, fun check-in questions to use at the beginning of class with students. This is something I’ll have to ponder and decide if it fits my class goals. I normally begin class with a pair or group verbal bell-ringer, which activates some previous learning in Spanish that we will build on. I’m not sure if I would incorporate these community-building ideas instead, or do both a bell-ringer and one of these activities, or alternate days … what do you think?

Finally, Dr. Tucker shares a resource for a dialogic interview format, which is a very powerful tool that can help students to have deep and meaningful conversations and develop relationships with one another. If you have been looking for ideas to help your students build relationships with you and each other, this is a blog post you’ll want to check out!