Eliminating Fear in the Classroom by Making Human Conversations to Make Room for Real Learning

I consider myself to be a technology cynic, which some would think is odd. According to Mark Prensky, I am a perfect example of what he calls a “digital native,” or someone who was born into the culture of using technology, and as such sees the world differently because of it. I was born in the late 1990s, and growing up I always had access to technology. In school, I can remember using laptops in the classroom as early as elementary school, and by the time I was in high school, everyone had a smartphone.

Until I graduated high school, I was still primarily using word documents and slideshows to complete any assignments I needed to. The only major additions to how we used the internet included learning how to use spreadsheets and academic databases in high school. In my educational spaces, I would describe the ways in which I used technology in school as technotraditionalist: the term Scott Noon uses to describe people who “use technology proficiently to complete traditional classroom tasks.” However, in my personal life, technology was and still is a much more powerful presence.

Growing up, technology felt like both a blessing and a curse. I spent all of my time in high school going on the website Tumblr, “connecting” with people who shared my interests. While at first, I felt like I was getting a lot out of my time on the internet, I quickly began to feel empty and alone. This is why the work of Sherry Turkle resonated so much for me. In her article “The Flight from the Conversation,” Turkle states “We expect more from technology and less from one another and seem increasingly drawn to technologies that provide the illusion of companionship without the demands of relationship.” After reading Turkle’s work, I realized that I consider myself quite cynical when it comes to the future of technology. 

It has been almost 10 years since Turkle’s Ted Talk, and I see the same things still happening today. This year I began my first year teaching during the Covid-19 pandemic, and when I arrived at school many students were fully online, not turning on their cameras or microphones when we were on Zoom calls. In-person students had to sit 6 feet apart and had masks covering their faces, and even they wouldn’t speak out loud- they would only message me on Zoom. No matter what context we were in, students couldn’t see or hear each other. 

Turkle states that “Human relationships are rich; they’re messy and demanding. We have learned the habit of cleaning them up with technology. And the move from conversation to connection is part of this. But it’s a process in which we shortchange ourselves. Worse, it seems that over time we stop caring, we forget that there is a difference.” What is clear to me now is that my students were hiding behind their Zoom chats because they were scared. Scared to be vulnerable, and scared to fail. At their fingertips, they had technology that allowed them to so easily sensor and edit themselves so that they only had to share what they thought I wanted to hear. They didn’t have to worry about being embarrassed if they said something wrong in front of others. In fact, they didn’t have to say anything in front of others at all. But by censoring themselves to me and their peers, they weren’t allowing themselves to have real conversations. And without those conversations and connections, they won’t develop self-confidence or self-love. Turkle also says “...we use conversation with others to learn to converse with ourselves. So our flight from conversation can mean diminished chances to learn skills of self-reflection. These days, social media continually asks us what’s “on our mind,” but we have little motivation to say something truly self-reflective. Self-reflection in conversation requires trust.”

This year, we didn’t just use technology as a tool, it became our environment. We couldn’t escape it. I noticed that this created a vicious cycle: students were editing and filtering themselves, which caused them to miss out on real human conversations, preventing them from building self-confidence, which leads them to continue to filter and edit themselves, and so on.

This leads me to my challenge: How are we able to break this cycle in the classroom? Can technology and real human connections coexist? How can we grapple with a technocentric future without losing human connections?

To find my answer, I needed to clarify what I believe about teaching. I believe that learning happens when: 1. Students are able to ask and explore questions that are important to them; 2. When they are motivated to keep going; 3. When they are able to cultivate enough self-confidence and self-love to no longer fear failure.

My beliefs about how students learn are heavily centered around the works of Mike Wesch and Sugata Mitra. Wesch stated in his Ted Talk that “asking questions, making connections, and taking chances took us down from the trees and into the stars.” I believe that this is where real learning happens.

From there, I found that Mitra’s model for educational self-organizing fits perfectly with Wesch’s statement. In Mitra’s Ted Talk “A School in the Cloud,” he discusses his profound findings in his research about student learning: that students, for the most part, are capable of teaching themselves. In his framework for learning, all that is needed for students to learn is a teacher to spark a question, the internet, and someone to provide motivation and encouragement to the students as they go through the process of learning. He describes this model as “educational self-organization,” and claims that the teacher “sets the process in motion and then stands back in awe and watches as learning happens.”

I now have three fundamental ideas about learning. Wesch says that real learning happens when students take risks, Mitra says learning cannot happen when fear is present, and Turkle says conversations with others leads to self-reflection, and in turn, self-love. The answer to breaking the cycle of fear in the classroom is making room for real human connections.

The next question becomes, how do I create an environment conducive to having real conversations, and is there room for technology in this environment? My vision for a connected classroom looks like this: Students need to feel safe enough to be vulnerable with each other- and can’t be allowed to filter or edit themselves; there needs to be clear boundaries around when technology is used and when it isn’t; my primary role in the classroom needs to be one of a positive motivator; I need to create a classroom that has structures and routines in place so students feel safe enough to take risks. This is my vision for my classroom, and my change project is going to be using technology to help me plan for my structures and routines.

A major goal of mine is to make my lessons look more like Mitra’s self-organized learning environments, and thankfully I already follow a similar model in my lesson planning: the inquiry-based 5E model. The lesson begins with the teacher engaging students around a scientific phenomenon and proposing a meaning-making question. Then, students are lead through the steps of exploring, explaining, and elaborating to find an answer to the meaning-making question. The 5th E in the model is evaluating student learning, but I think that Mitra would agree with me that there is a more important E: encouragement.

According to Mitra, “The reptilian part of our brain, which sits in the center of our brain, when it’s threatened, it shuts down everything else, it shuts down the prefrontal cortex, the parts which learn, it shuts all of that down. Punishments and examinations are seen as threats. We take our children, we make them shut their brains down, and then we say, “Perform.’” In the current model of education, students are constantly threatened, and their learning is stunted. Instead, we need to focus on praising student learning and making it a pleasurable and fun experience.

My first task will be creating a living 5E lesson planning template for myself using Google Docs. This template will allow me to create more student-driven lessons and also create a clear structure that all of my lessons will follow.

My second task will be to create a living calendar for myself using Google Sheets. This calendar will include my long-term lesson, unit, and quarter plans, as well as the time I set for myself to plan, grade, and communicate with families. The more structures and routines I can create for myself will result in better structures and routines for my students.

My third task will be creating a digital resource center for my students, which will either be located on Google Classroom or a Google Site. This will be a place where my students can find interesting and relevant websites to explore while learning.

My final task will be to plan for at least two major technology-driven projects for my students next year, such as a Podcast or a Pecha Kucha. The goal of these projects will be to use technology as a tool for learning, exploring, and communicating ideas, rather than using technology as a barrier to communication. 

After the dark days of fully virtual teaching at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, eventually, more and more students returned to school and started making real connections. The greatest learning I saw in the classroom happen when students put down their computers and talked to one another.

I know it was easy for me to be cynical about technology in the past. After this past school year, I was ready to swear it off for good. But Wesch, Mitra, and Turkle taught me that technology isn’t the enemy, fear is. I don’t have to swear off technology for good to make real human connections, I only need to create an environment where love is stronger than fear.

To quote my favorite president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”