A common tension between instructor and student in the world of synchronous online learning is whether or not student cameras will be on or off during class. Students may want to hide themselves for many potential reasons, such as: embarrassment in sharing their living circumstances; lack of internet bandwidth for video; lack of agency as to how one’s image might be consumed by others (think screenshots shared on social media). For some students, not being able to control who sees them in their living environment can feel genuinely unsafe. Not being clear on the why of a camera-on policy only exacerbates this feeling. Teachers, on the other hand, feel demoralized at the thought of teaching to a screen full of silent blank rectangles. With no visual feedback from facial expressions, we find it difficult to gauge comprehension or boredom.
Using Zoom Technology – Beyond Cameras On or Off
While there’s no such thing as a perfect solution, there are more options in Zoom available to your learning community besides just the On/Off switch for Video. I’ll discuss a few of these features and how/why I’ve used them in my classroom. Your mileage may vary — You’ll need to consider your own classroom culture and lesson plans.
Obscuring Backgrounds
One nifty feature of Zoom is that it allows students to blur everything except themselves in what their camera shares. If a student is embarrassed about the state of their living quarters or wanting to preserve the privacy of folks who live with them, they can blur their background.
There are some limitations to this feature, as it requires computing power from their device. From an equity standpoint, this requirement might exclude those very students who are not keen to share their circumstances/spaces.
A gotcha specific to me as a movement teacher is that the blur feature is optimized for people right in front of their devices. When I have students several feet away, with the entirety of their bodies in view, the blur feature often gets “confused” and will blur students’ limbs!
Gallery, Speaker, Spotlight Views in Zoom Instruction – It’s all about Context!
Something I noticed is that many shy students will share video when placed into a breakout room. Students perceive the inherent power imbalance of a small group discussion amongst peers when some participants are invisible, and will turn their cameras on to avoid this dynamic when it’s within their power to do so.
Understanding that students are savvy to interpersonal dynamics with technology, it is worthwhile to loop them into the reasons behind camera protocols, and to give a critical eye to each instructional activity and consider setting some well thought out classroom norms for each. Ultimately, for a student, it may be the why of technological choices that will matter more than the technology itself.
I’ll offer some examples from my class along with my reasons for setting the screen norms for each mode:
Standard Led Flow or Lecture: Speaker Mode
I generally ask students to be in Speaker View mode whenever I lead a yoga flow. This means the students only see me and not each other. The idea here is that students understand why it is important for ME as the instructor to see THEM during a movement class. That said, there is little value to students viewing each other in Gallery View mode when I am simply lecturing or leading a sequence. At best, seeing each other is distracting. At worst, Gallery View encourages students to compare their bodies to others. Yoga might be a student’s one precious chance all day to be fully in their body. Sensing or imagining someone else’s idle gaze on them can erase that benefit.
By contrast, there is a potential benefit for students to all be in Speaker View during a led flow. Understanding that only the instructor is seeing them while their own gaze (drishti in yoga) is directed elsewhere can be an uncommon opportunity to be “seen” in a focused way without need for reciprocation by someone whose sole job is to be present for them in that way. It is tragically rare for people to feel seen by others, especially over Zoom.
Tag Team Instructor Led Flow: Multiple Spotlight Mode
A relatively recent feature added to Zoom is the teacher’s ability to dynamically set a subset of windows to be highlighted for all participants. Use of this feature implies benevolent intention on the part of the instructor as to who and what should be visible at any given time.
I use this feature when I give verbal cues, while my teaching assistant demonstrates the poses I am cuing. In this case, the two of us are simultaneously spotlighted. This is similar to Speaker mode, except that the instructors are accepting even more ownership for curating the learning environment for their students.
Group Discussions, Breakout Rooms, Communal Movement Practice: Gallery Mode
There are times when students are expressly asked to participate more actively, and more often than not, they are willing to rise to the challenge if there’s a clearly shared reason for why. Often, it is an apparently arbitrary authority that can feel the most threatening to a student’s sense of agency.
It is fairly obvious why it is valuable for students to be visible when there’s a group discussion (especially a breakout room sized discussion) in progress, so I’ll share my special case for Gallery View I use in my yoga class. I occasionally lead a “Moon Salutation” sequence and ask everyone to be Gallery mode. The “Moon Salutation” is a relatively straightforward flow that can be followed simply by watching (no verbal cues needed), where the focus is not so much on the specifics of form, but rather on a group moving in synchrony. The students see a large crowd moving in sync with them. There is a refreshing anonymity to moving with so many other little rectangles, because everyone is too small on screen to be closely scrutinized (everyone stands several feet away from their device), but big enough that it’s possible to see that one is moving together with others.
Yoga is an embodied practice, and it is sometimes helpful to perceive one’s own body as part of a larger corpus. Mirror neurons are active during a group movement exercise, allowing us as social animals to sense the safety of being part of a herd.
…but It All Hinges on Why
As with any learning experience, it is helpful for the students to understand the “why” so there’s buy-in. Especially when trying to be trauma aware, we strive to create a sense of safety for our students (anxiety turns off learning optimization in our brains), and a key way to enhance a sense of safety is to avoid the appearance of arbitrary decisions on the part of the instructor. Agreed upon norms allow for both a sense of agency and predictability.
I’ve given examples from my own yoga class, but ultimately there are no hard and fast rules — every teacher’s context will be unique. As teachers, we need to be thoughtful about examining our pedagogical goals and be prepared to discuss our choices with transparency so that students can be co-conspirators in their own learning — with students helping serve their own learning process during each activity.
So let’s stay on top of the newest technologies… but understand their human ramifications when applying them to our learning environments.