The surprise silver lining of teaching on Zoom? Diversity & inclusion

(This article is cross-posted on Medium)

Like most other teachers, I’m learning on the fly as I teach four sections of a suddenly-online interpersonal influence course at Yale School of Management (while homeschooling my daughter, etc.). The Zoom experience is messy and hard, but I’m discovering it has real advantages for diversity & inclusion. Here’s what I’ve learned so far.

COLD CALL, COLD CALL, COLD CALL

I don’t cold call much in the classroom but it’s the best way to keep students engaged on Zoom. And Zoom makes it easy to be intentional about diversity & inclusion. (Write down who you call on, because it’s harder to remember.) Every time I open the floor for discussion, there’s a lag as we wait and the energy drops. And then some of the same people speak up again. The cold call lag is shorter & the energy doesn’t drop as much. Plus introverted students are getting to speak up much more in my class than they usually do.

BREAKOUT ROOMS ROCK

We use them multiple times in each session. While the breakout room is open, I write down a cold call list of one student from each room, being mindful of D&I and who hasn’t spoken yet. I dig how this feature mixes students with people they wouldn’t have been sitting with, and they get matched up with new people in each discussion.

POLLS ARE GREAT FOR VIEWPOINT DIVERSITY

Zoom polls are more complicated than breakout rooms to set up, but still not too bad. And in addition to boosting engagement, polls are an easy way to show that the opinions voiced by the most vocal people in class aren’t necessarily shared by the majority. Set up polls either before you start the class or when students are breakout rooms. If you have just a simple yes/no question, though, ask students to turn on Gallery view and wave for yes.

CHAT FEATURE FACILITATES INCLUSION

I opened with a friendly chat prompt & called on a few people with diverse responses. This got engagement going and highlighted how different everyone’s situations and problems are right now. On Day 1, I asked, “How’s your life going right now, on a scale of 1–10?” Some students are already sick or have relatives dying, some are isolated but happy, and some reporting high wellbeing have big problems but are optimistic. On Day 2, I asked where they were Zooming in from. We then heard first-hand how differently the response to the pandemic is playing out across the world. This takes five minutes or less, and starts the session with good vibes. To close out the session, I gave the simple chat prompt, “What’s one thing you’re grateful for right now?” and read a few responses out loud. Then we all smiled & waved goodbye.

CLOSE-UPS ENHANCE INTIMACY

Although I’m fortunate to have my health and a job, my life is hard right now. Normally, I’d try to hide that but this year I really can’t, so I kept it real. My face, close up and sometimes close to tears, saying life is hard for me, hard for some of you, and will get much harder for some of us. I asked them to be mindful to express more warmth than usual because it’s easy to interpret negativity or take things personally in online communication. I asked them to be mindful about inclusivity because people are scared don’t have as much bandwidth as usual for perspective taking and patience. I asked us to all lower the bar for each other. This vulnerability was scary for me, but it was sweet, and multiple students sent me notes of gratitude. We’re in this together.

Solidarity and good vibes to you, fellow teachers. As I promised my students on the first day, this class won’t be pretty — but it will be beautiful.