It was 6:29 PM on a Thursday in March, and every student was still on our Zoom call. Programming had ended half an hour ago, but the chat box was still inundated with messages, and the students—11th and 12th graders, many of whom had never met in person—talked excitedly from behind their profile pictures on Zoom. When my co-teacher and I finally suggested they leave for the night, it felt like we were flicking the lights at the end of a party.
After over a year of working and learning from home, I face near-constant Zoom fatigue. Yet, this group of eight teenagers dutifully logged on to our virtual internship after school four times a week … and stayed late. Why?
A key reason the students keep coming back to The Possible Project (TPP) is that we’ve tapped into one of the many aspects of life that has remained difficult to replicate in a virtual space: low stakes socializing. The importance of informal chatter with people on our social peripheries has only truly become notable in its absence.
What Are Teens Missing?
The sudden loss of opportunities to socialize informally with others has hit all age groups. In a recent piece for The Atlantic, journalist Amanda Mull described the pandemic’s erasure of everything from the “weak ties” adults share with coworkers to the wordless bond we have with the regulars in our exercise class or on our morning commute. Though these relationships lack the depth of our relationships with family and close friends, they are necessary for our personal and professional lives. They provide a sense of community and a social incentive for individuals to perform daily activities. They can even affect one’s ability to find a new job and integrate into new workplaces (Mull, 2021).
Many opportunities for teenagers to engage with their “weak ties” in school and after school have disappeared as well. This is especially concerning given adolescents’ need for increased peer interaction compared to young children or adults (Orben et al., 2020). Last year’s quick shift to virtual school prioritized learning time and eliminated space during and after the school day when students used to catch up with peers or staff: bus rides, passing periods, lunch periods, and down time during class, to name a few. Many extracurriculars and sports seasons were canceled or heavily modified following reports tying COVID-19 transmission to choir practice and wrestling matches (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2021).
Teens have felt the personal and professional implications of this sudden lapse in social time. One high school student in a recent New York Times article, for instance, said she missed being able to greet former teachers in the hallways of her school and had difficulty navigating the college application process, as help is no longer just down the hall (Medina, 2021). Other teens have struggled to make and keep up with friends, citing differences in adherence to health regulations, lack of anything new to talk about, and difficulty with virtual connection as some of the reasons why they’ve felt especially isolated (Engle, 2020). Student athletes whose seasons were canceled have also had to change how they catch the attention of college recruiters, now that they can no longer connect before and after games (Ngo, 2020).
These feelings are a reminder that school is not only a place to learn academic content—it’s a key area of development for students’ social and emotional lives. SEL is important for adolescents’ long-term success into adulthood, in part because it helps them learn to better manage their emotions and maintain supportive relationships with caring adults and peers (Collaborative for Academic Social and Emotional Learning, 2021). Though the full ramifications of the pandemic won’t be known for years, a growing body of research has associated COVID-19 isolation with adverse mental health outcomes, especially in adolescents (C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital, 2021).
Looking ahead, schools, programs, and teachers may feel pressure to focus solely on academic skills to address learning loss. We also need to remember, however, that many teens will be looking to school as the place to (re)establish relationships with each other and with their current and former teachers after more than a year apart. As we begin the next school year, then, we need to prioritize giving teens the space and the means to reconnect with the other students, teachers, and school staff that make them feel part of a supportive community.
What Can Schools and Programs Do?
(Re)Embed Down Time
Every teacher knows the feeling of walking around a classroom one minute into a two-minute Turn and Talk and realizing most students are no longer on-task. Some students are sitting silently. Others are engaged in a fierce conversation with their partner about something irrelevant to the topic at hand. At the beginning of the pandemic, I was amazed at how idle conversation was a non-issue in the virtual space. Then, I grew concerned. Not only were the teens in my class not discussing the prompt they had been assigned, but they weren’t talking to each other at all. Yet, in private weekly surveys, they mentioned wanting to make new friends and have more time to talk with their peers.
In response, my co-teacher and I began to incorporate what we internally called “fake breakouts” into our synchronous Zoom sessions. Following co-creation of norms for appropriate online engagement at the beginning of the term, we gave our students daily opportunities to go into breakout rooms for the virtual equivalent of a Turn and Talk. We posed an innocuous question –an icebreaker or a low-ball content question—and gave students a few minutes without teacher intervention. If students wanted to chat with each other they could, but if they needed a question to spark conversation, they had our prompt. If a student needed assistance or if something was shared in a breakout that they couldn’t handle on their own, they knew they could always click “ask for help” to notify an adult or private message my co-teacher and me once they returned to the main room.
Any time we planned on asking students to report out from their breakouts, we explicitly let them know ahead of time; that way, the students weren’t caught off-guard when we expected them to have remained on task. Over time, the students grew more friendly with each other; in their weekly surveys, they mentioned the breakouts as some of their favorite moments each week. The impact of these small detours from our daily lessons showed in the quality of work students produced when they grew more comfortable talking to their peers.
More often than not after sessions, our students hung back just to chat—with us or with each other – about school, college applications, or anything else that interested them. Though we have the luxury of being an after-school program, schools can replicate this “down time” by giving students breaks between Zoom classes if they are still learning virtually or extending passing periods by several minutes as we ease back into in-person learning.
Use Games to Foster Connection
Another way we’ve managed to replicate informal social time is by playing games. When I say “games,” I’m not referring to gamified elements such as assigning students roles for a project or using a timer to increase the urgency with which students work. I mean true “game night” games, where competition is fierce, but winning doesn’t really matter. Because TPP will remain fully virtual through December 2021, my co-teacher and I have relied on games that have virtual equivalents or are housed on virtual platforms, like Pictionary (skribbl.io), Codenames (codenames.us), and Among Us (for iOS and Android). Picking and playing games gives our students choice, space to collaborate with peers and to learn more about one another, and the chance to make mistakes. We’ve learned that the shyest student in our group is a phenomenal artist and that the kindest kids make the most ruthless competitors. Every week during our regular surveys, at least one student makes sure to mention how much they appreciate our games.
One area for classroom teachers to incorporate free gameplay into their classes, untethered to content, is at the end of a unit. Rewarding students with uncomplicated fun after an extended period of intellectually stimulating work can provide everyone with a chance to decompress before diving into a new unit. Games like Pictionary and Codenames have virtual and in-person versions that are ready-made for physical distancing while still giving students interaction and teamwork.
Make Time for Extracurriculars
As school districts amend plans for the 2021-2022 school year in response to the ongoing pandemic, many extracurricular activities may be affected as well (Goldberg, Perez, Jr., and Payne, 2021). Already, the Hawaii Department of Education has delayed the start of fall sports and mandated that all high school athletes, athletic staff, and volunteers get vaccinated, meaning some students may have to sit out the season if they don’t meet the vaccination deadline (Hawaii Department of Education, 2021).
Yet, there is clear consensus from students that they value this part of life. A survey conducted by Phi Delta Kappa International prior to the start of the 2020-2021 school year found that 55 percent of middle and high school students felt that ensuring access to extracurricular activities was one of the top three most pressing challenges facing schools, as compared to just 10 percent of teachers surveyed (Phi Delta Kappa International, 2020). Recent guidance from the U.S. Department of Education also recommends that schools provide extracurricular opportunities in order to support social, emotional, and mental health (2021). Regardless of what extracurricular offerings might look like next year, schools should make time for all students to engage in some version of them.
Some schools reinstituted modified activities during the 2020-2021 school year by incorporating them into the school day. East Bay Innovation Academy in Oakland, CA, for instance, moved their after-school clubs to Tuesday and Thursday mornings so that students could have more unstructured social time built into their school schedules (Minero, 2020). At TPP, we have partnered with local Boston high schools to offer our traditional out-of-school-time entrepreneurship programming during the school day as an elective course for credit, allowing students to build their own businesses and engage in work they’re passionate about without having to spend additional hours after school on Zoom. Other schools have prioritized after-school clubs and sports that can remain physically distanced, like chess club and track.
The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed just how much we took for granted about the services and benefits that in-person schooling provides. As we enter a third school year impacted by the pandemic, it is therefore imperative that we prioritize students’ social needs alongside their academic ones.
