My APUSH Digital Wall Space and How I Try to Build Rapport
How I have provided my students with a chance to get to know me better and me with a chance to get to know my students better
I am an APUSH teacher who, at the beginning of every class period since the start of the 2020–2021 academic school year, has placed before his students what I call my Room 404 Wall Space.
The Room 404 Wall Space is an attempt, using Google Slides, to start off the day by sharing with my students the kinds of things that most teachers, in a face-to-face environment, typically write onto their chalkboards or post to their bulletin boards. The daily agenda, for example. Also any all start-of-the-class announcements.
My Room 404 Wall Space is also where I place the below.
- Pics of my actual classroom; the school; me at school wearing a mask the few times I went there, etc.
- Pics of where I live; the family dog, the bioluminescence and/or lunar halo that appears now and then.
- Pics of something fun and interesting I did over the weekend (whale watching, motorcycle riding, an early morning visit to the dockside fish market)
- Pics that the students send me (of their workspace; fun and interesting things that they did on the weekend and/or break; cool things they have cooked or eaten)
- Happy holiday and happy birthday wishes
- Congratulatory notes (singling out various students for super cool things that they have accomplished, the LA Dodgers for their World Series win, etc.)
- Break-send-offs and welcome-back-from-break greetings
- Suggestions (how to email a teacher, how to combat zoom fatigue, etc.)
- Videos of popular songs from the 1960s that my students have selected and that get played at break
Below, a small sampling of the slides that have appeared on my Room 404 Wall Space.
All this I do because I want to give my students a chance to know me better and to give me a chance to know my students better (aka to “build rapport).
Most dictionaries define the word rapport as “the ability to maintain harmonious relationships based on affinity.” In education, it’s what happens when a teacher and class click, connect, interact well, and respond to each other favorably. I believe that rapport is needed for both students and teachers to give it their best AND for teachers and students to work together to avoid burnout.
Yet, it is much harder to build rapport online than it is to build it face to face.
Building rapport online will require more conscientious, disciplined, and strategic work on the teacher’s part.
I also do this because of something I wrote for the PBS Teachers Lounge website in September 2020 and entitled 15 Lessons I’ve Learned From My Exploration of the World of Online Teaching . . . with one of those “lessons” appearing below:
Start every class period with a detailed and well-written description of what you are going to do and why.
This is so important when teaching online. As one parent said to me recently, “A structured, detailed agenda is absolutely critical to maintaining engagement with my daughter, and I would suspect the same is true with all other students…And that’s because the responsibility for learning, in an online setting, appears to shift more to the student, thus, a structured, detailed agenda helps provide clear expectations.”
- The parent makes a good point, one that all teachers should follow. Since hearing from this parent, I surely have come around. I’ve even gone so far as to include in my agenda “notes to self.” Examples include: get a glass of water, login, turn on the camera, conduct audio check, give the class a break, provide a rationale for today’s group work, and take roll.
- As Bloomberg University professor Karl Kapp points out, “When you teach online, you are managing the content, the environment, and the experience, and that’s a lot to manage…(so) creat(ing) a (detailed) checklist or agenda (will) help you and (your students) immensely.”
Other Ways To Build Rapport
Click here to view a 20-minute read that I wrote in November 2020 and entitled Building Rapport In the Online Environment.
I begin this post by asserting that for most teachers the building of rapport in the online environment should prove infinitely harder than the buiilding of rapport in in the face-to-face environment
I then share my findings on how best to build rapport in the era of online teaching.
