Once a teacher gets past the hurdle of participation in an activity, the next hurdle is emotional investment. Sometimes this is categorized as “effort.” Are students putting in the minimal effort required to do the activity, or are they “trying their best”? High effort does not necessarily mean high quality, but most activities can be evaluated on achieving expectations, which can vary from student to student.

How does emotional engagement look in the synchronous video environment? The difficulty in quantifying a “feeling” is that as an observer, a teacher cannot know what is being felt unless either the student verbalizes it, or the student shows it through behaviour. Generally, a teacher infers based on observation, which as many know, can be a misread of the student’s internal emotional state.

Before listing strategies that may contribute to increased emotional engagement, it is worth noting what aids and what detracts from assessing emotional engagement in the synchronous video environment. Since most interpretations of internal thoughts are based on what is seen or heard, those sensory modes almost entirely dictate how a teacher may “know” how a student feels.

  • In the synchronous video environment, when students have video and microphone enabled, a teacher may be able to better infer a student’s emotional engagement by seeing or hearing them.
  • In contrast, if a student has the video off and the microphone muted, a teacher is effectively cut off from any way to “know” a student’s emotional engagement. A student with video disabled may still be watching and listening but the teacher has no observable way to know.
  • In the classroom, the equivalent of students with disabled video may be if students have their heads down on their desks. There still may be emotional engagement (a student says, “I’m listening”), even though outwardly the body language is disengagement. Even so, a teacher does have a visual reference that the student cannot control like disabling video.

Teachers cannot make students care about what they are doing and there may be many factors that affect students’ emotional engagement in an activity, a class, or a course. All teachers understand that things like:

  • student physical and mental condition (sleep, hormones, pain, anxiety)
  • external stressors (other courses/deadlines, jobs)
  • time of day/ day of the week
  • beginning, middle or end of a course
  • relationships (parents/family, peers, friends, romantic)
  • prior experiences with the subject or teachers
  • course subject
  • feelings toward the teacher

These and other factors will greatly contribute to, or take away from, a student’s emotional engagement at any particular time. It is important to know that sometimes, no matter what a teacher does, there will not always be total emotional engagement from all students all the time, or even for a single activity. That does not mean that a teacher should not aim for it, but that within the constraints of the education system as it is and humans being who they are, complete and universal emotional engagement all the time is extremely unlikely.

Having said that, what can be done in the synchronous video environment? Try these:

  • use of breakout rooms – this feature allows a teacher to separate students into pairs or groups just as would happen in the classroom. This encourages emotional engagement by allowing students to chat in a more private manner, versus making comments that the entire class listens to. In Zoom, the teacher/ administrator has the ability to either self-determine who goes in which rooms, or have the program randomly assign students to rooms. This randomizer saves a lot of time that would be spent by the teacher picking and assigning students one-at-a-time.
  • quick check-in – at the beginning of the whole-group meeting, if the group is not larger than a regular class size (24-30), and with students prepared beforehand, have students give a one or two-word description of themselves at the moment. This can not only give power and voice to the students, but may allow them to see how many others are feeling the same way. This is also a way to build community by finding out something about each other.