Building a strong classroom community is possible even during students’ asynchronous work time.
Community building in school happens best when everyone is together in person, or in remote classes during live synchronous sessions. Yet over this past year, a large number of remote classes happened asynchronously, and sometimes a class that is completely asynchronous, may pose challenges as you try to build relationships with and among your students. It is difficult to build a sense of community when your students never see each other in person or live on screen.
Using creative strategies to develop a sense of community in asynchronous learning spaces has been helpful. And while you teach college-age students, these strategies can easily be adapted to middle and high school students.
5 WAYS TO FOCUS ON COMMUNITY IN ASYNCHRONOUS CLASSWORK
- Passion boards: Using online corkboards such as Padlet has been a very effective way for students and teachers to share good news, shout-outs, interests, and celebrations. For example, set up an asynchronous online board where students and you can post weekly good news or shout-outs, and you could comment on each other’s posts to lend support and good cheer.
The board can stay up the entire term, and you can learn about each other and share in celebrations via the board. Use a password to protect the board for student privacy, and be able moderate comments.
- Scavenger hunts: If your students are scattered across your state, you can set up an asynchronous scavenger hunt with Goose Chaseto get to know more about them and their home communities. (The app has free and paid plans for K–12 teachers.)
Set up challenges (missions) where students could share about their home life and culture, favorite places to eat, hobbies, and videos of their talents, or discuss the local organizations in their neighborhoods doing good work that relates to their class. One challenge you can send to your students is ask them to find a local organization working to alleviate inequities in their community. You can ask them to interview a worker and share what they learned by posting a video or image with text to the Goose Chase app. You could ask middle or high school students studying environmental science to find a native or nonnative tree in their neighborhood, or have math students calculate the area of a table in their home—there are premade scavenger hunts, and you can create your own.
Send a menu of challenges each week to your students through the for example the Goose Chase app, and they could choose the ones they want to complete. They could also see each other’s posts in the class Goose Chase feed, which helps them get to know each other better. You can also add a point system so students can try to earn a certain number of points by the end of the week. The app has leaderboards and opportunities for “bonus” points if you wish to use those to gamify the community building experience.
- Netflix-style watch parties: During Covid, many students have enjoyed having Netflix watch parties, co-viewing a movie while having a live chat feed. You can decide to create a similar collaborative experience using Video Ant. Load a video from YouTube into Video Ant, and then students would be able to asynchronously comment on the movie as they watch. They could also see each other’s comments and respond to them.
- Digital storybooks: Your students may all have rich, unique stories about what shaped them to become who they are. In order to share these stories, You can use the free and easy-to-use My Story book website, where students can create stories. This tool is great for every age of student, and can be used as a way to share stories asynchronously. You can create a new story prompt, “my life journey during Covid.” Each week students would add a new page to their story, like a journal entry, so that by the end of the semester, they can have a storybook about their lives during the pandemic.
- Myself as a GIF: A quick, engaging—and sometimes juvenile—way to build community is to ask your students to communicate by making GIFs of themselves. You can use And Then I Was Liketo do this. Provide a prompt, such as “how is your day going?” or “pretend you got your dream teaching job!” and then let your students create and share their GIFs with the class. It would be a way for them to see each other and provide some joy in the asynchronous class.
These are just a few ideas, and there are definitely other ways teachers can develop community with the tools above. For example, a book or podcasting club in a Slack feed, or an “all about our class” digital storybook where each student adds their own page. While it can be challenging to build community when you’re not able to be synchronous with your students, it has been found that it is possible.
