"In my teaching, I’ve always used the Socratic method, which means calling on dozens of students during the class hour, and engaging them in dialogue with me and with each other."

"I’ve found that this is not harder to do on Zoom, and in some respects it’s easier, and better. Facial expressions are closer and more legible. The difference in volume between those who speak loudly and those who respond quietly is minimized. Students seem less self-conscious and less intimidated than they did in a room of a hundred people, perhaps because speaking on a screen doesn’t feel too different from FaceTime conversations they’re used to having with friends... [T]he give-and-take of the one-on-one exchange feels both urgent and viable. There’s something strangely more intimate about online teaching, which makes the attention to each student feel more live and personalized, not less. This new intimacy surely has something to do with the change of setting, which has afforded glimpses into home life and has meant some erosion of strict divisions between professional and personal, between public and private. As my class studied the Supreme Court’s doctrine on the privacy of the bedroom, they could see each other onscreen sitting in bedrooms.... In the past, like many female professors, I have probably expended extra energy holding up boundaries to keep signs of vulnerability at bay. During this period, though... it’s possible that the relaxing of appearances humanizes these institutions.... We might think of our online efforts as mere shadows of the real thing. But those performances are also heightening our senses for teaching and learning. The breaking through of imperfection, messiness, sadness, and struggle might bring us all to a different appreciation of our own humanity, showing through the screen."

From "Finding Real Life in Teaching Law Online" by Harvard lawprof Jeannie Suk Gersen (in The New Yorker).

This is the teacher's experience of becoming more vulnerable on camera. Not all teachers are going to be so sanguine about the exposure — the close-up photography of the face, the view into one's own home. And then what of the students, who have far less control over the discussion, and, usually, much more confined living space? Socratic discussion can be stressful for the students, and now every other student is looking right into their face, ready to detect twinges of fear and realization of knowledge gaps and able to make screen shots.

As for the similarity to FaceTime... not only is it FaceTime with a whole huge group, there shouldn't be an assumption that everyone is comfortable doing FaceTime conversations. Some people hate FaceTime.

Anyway, I'm glad Gersen is finding the good in what is a necessary substitute for the real thing, but she's leaning toward saying it is the real thing — the real thing plus, better than the cold, hierarchical classroom. We thought we were distancing, but really, we were becoming so much more intimate....