Published Sept. 29 in the journal\u00a0Communication Teacher,<\/em> the article is based on a January 2021 survey of 351 instructors from kindergarten to higher education from across the nation who made the shift from seated to Zoom classrooms during the pandemic.<\/p>\n McArthur invited participants to reflect on their own behavior as they taught on Zoom. The respondents, in turned out, faced many of the same things.<\/p>\n In addition to the exaggerated expressions, they identified other nonverbal communication challenges as well, he said.<\/p>\n A graphic of McArthur\u2019s publication.<\/p><\/div>\n These included replicating typical face-to-face nonverbal communication patterns, engaging in reciprocal nonverbal communication, and monitoring their own nonverbal behaviors in real time.<\/p>\n McArthur speculates that teachers exaggerated their smiles or other expressions so they\u2019d be better received by their students.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve known for a long time through research \u2026 that nonverbal behavior has a direct impact on students\u2019 perceptions of their affinity for the teacher, the content, and the ability of the content to be relevant to their lives,\u201d he said. \u201cTeaching is a performative act, and my guess is that instructors had the idea that some of that performance could be lost (online).\u201d<\/p>\n In terms of reciprocal nonverbal communication, instructors struggled with how to show they were listening to a student, something they\u2019d never considered before.<\/p>\n \u201cThe biggest issue they faced was eye contact,\u201d McArthur said. \u201cIt\u2019s hard to figure out the best solution. It looks like you\u2019re looking off camera if you\u2019re looking at a person who is speaking.\u201d<\/p>\n What\u2019s more, he said, when people communicate nonverbally, they do it unconsciously, and thinking about it consciously can change what they do.<\/p>\n \u201cMost people are very unfamiliar with watching themselves teach \u2013 when you\u2019re leading a group, you don\u2019t watch yourself,\u201d he said. \u201cBut Zoom almost requires you watch yourself. And that constant mirror was a dilemma that instructors face.\u201d<\/p>\n But sometimes, he said, they used it to their advantage by making sure to gesture inside the camera range or wearing T-shirts that revealed things about themselves.<\/p>\n When it came to replicating face-to-face nonverbal communication patterns on Zoom, McArthur said that if instructors used a lot of gestures or wore funny clothes in the classroom, they continued that on Zoom.<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of the theory about communication on digital platforms suggests we can do a lot of the same things as in-person,\u201d he said, \u201cbut it\u2019s also very different in the way they are perceived.\u201d<\/p>\n In the end, he said, the way instructors teach on Zoom may be different than the classroom, but it can have the same outcome in terms of engagement and effective learning.<\/p>\n McArthur will present his paper at the National Communication Association conference in November.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When the pandemic shuttered classrooms around the nation, educators scrambled to find new ways to teach. Online instruction, notably via Zoom, helped them do that. But as innovative as that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":265,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,51,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academic-department-page","category-communication-studies","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/265"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9580"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9580\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.furman.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/news.furman.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/10\/image0-1.jpeg\")