How TikTok and YouTube Made Me a Better Teacher
We’ve all had students who just won’t stay off their phones. In recent years, platforms like YouTube and TikTok have exploited student attention—robbing them of valuable learning time. Here’s what I figured out, and how we teachers will win them back.
In recent months, I’ve dabbled in social media. First with TikTok and now with YouTube where I post 5- to 10-minute videos of camping and hiking excursions with my wife. I’ve also uploaded a few YouTube shorts. These are less than 60-second clips of often cute, exciting, or meaningless content that the viewer clicks through at random. They “like” or don’t and move on.
My shorts of a fighter-jet flyby, a bear devouring trash, a close-up of a red-tailed hawk average 2,000 views. That’s not a lot. The longer videos of our trips—ones I’ve spent five or 10 hours editing to semi-professional quality—average only about 200 or 300 views.
Late one night this week, that difference led me to a revelation. But it wasn’t about how I can be a better YouTuber. The revelation was about how to be a better teacher.
The YouTube algorithm (like other social media algorithms) is intended to draw views. The more views, the more advertisers will pay to get their products noticed. So, of course, YouTube incentivizes creators to post stimulating videos.
My longer travel videos are well-produced but uninteresting. Even at 2,000 views, my shorts are barely more interesting but get more views because they are shorter. It was obvious why when these reached 1,500 views, views started to slow down: the algorithm. YouTube knows if your post is getting engagement (comments, likes, subscribers). If the algorithm sees that your video isn’t picking up speed, your views go dark.
The human brain—especially the brain of a young person—absorbs vast quantities of information about the surrounding world, and it wants to be engaged. Whether they know it or not, students are looking for something to be interested in—something stimulating.
It’s why so many love social media that offers up a never-ending stream of exciting, stupid, scary, hilarious, racy, and, yes, sometimes even thought-provoking content. It is this same principle that YouTube and TikTok exploit and which we, too, must harness if we are going to compete for our students’ attention. Teachers must create personally engaging and stimulating lessons that allow students to feel ownership over the curriculum. What makes students love swiping through videos is the same thing that makes them love learning—the same thing that makes them put their phones down and pick up a book or join a conversation. It’s why even my most disengaged student will gladly join a Kahoot! trivia quiz.
How can we make the classroom more engaging than TikTok, especially for our least motivated students?
Even movie days, that once reliable treat for students, are losing relevance in the face of the TikTok feed. The TikTok algorithm uses search history to feed users personally relevant content at a remarkably fast clip. If a user gets bored, they can immediately go to the next video (down an infinite rabbit hole)—potentially scrolling through hundreds of videos within minutes in their search for more. Much like traditional classroom instruction, movies have broad, content-specific appeal, are not individually tailored, and require a far longer attention span.
Academically motivated students don’t need to be as entertained when they value traditional public education as an end in itself—if you have some of them, consider yourself lucky. Though they undoubtedly appreciate and benefit from thoughtful lessons and critical engagement, students motivated by grades, class rank, and college admissions will do their work with gusto, regardless.
Therein lies the solution—or perhaps the question: How can we make the classroom more engaging than TikTok, especially for our least motivated students? Just as YouTube must steal viewers from TikTok to stay relevant, so, too, must teachers battle for the heart of the viewer. We’ve already been doing it for years, and the conflict is only growing.
I think of one student, let’s call him “A”— who had his phone out in class almost every day last semester. I threatened (and gave) detention for breaking the class cellphone rule; I called his home, I spoke with him one-on-one about the importance of doing well in school, and I tried to personally connect with him. Although he clearly didn’t want to disappoint me, he nonetheless returned to TikTok time and again.
But during our debate unit, something changed. When the day came for his group’s presentation, A took the lead, maintained focus, and developed powerful, authentic arguments. He was present, active, engaged, and his intellect took center stage. The learner within him emerged. All the while, the phone remained out of sight—if only for that day. It was a minor victory but an important one.
Creating consistently engaging lessons that allow students to own the curriculum may be a Herculean feat, but it’s not impossible. We will have our failures. But with patience and a steadfast resolve, we will also have our successes engaging our students.
Whether we wish to acknowledge it, social media platforms are winning with a simple algorithm that harnesses human psychology. We need an algorithm of our own. We need to steal back our viewers. TikTok and YouTube cannot take the place of good teaching. Nor can these attention-grabbing, algorithmically controlled platforms prepare students for the world beyond our classrooms.
Why We Can’t Escape the Status Quo in Education
The general reason is that inertia is powerful—things keep on doing what they are already doing. Under stress, the brain does not like uncertainty; we “flock” to what we know best, the old patterns of being. The second reason is that COVID and its related forces have given society an individual and collective nervous breakdown. There is little energy to fight back. Yet there are huge resources being poured into some notion of “build back better.” The current system is based on “academic obsession,” which serves only a few (and even many of them don’t do so well). Today, there is more sensitivity to well-being, and questioning of traditional assessment practices, but no concerted effort to change the purpose and nature of learning.
The moment for serious change will be fleeting unless there is action that provides early and continuing energy to change practice. The new purpose should be to help young people cope and thrive in an increasingly complex world, including developing the competencies to do well under circumstances never before experienced. A big part of making this successful is to figure out how to make individual and group (small and large) interests and actions fuse or at least work together. System change is a collective matter. But here is my worry—my mystery if you like—even when change is badly needed, hidden forces pull us back to pockets of the status quo or worse.
We need a few of our basic change assumptions to guide our early action: Employ triage (urgency of need); “go slow to go fast”; seek specificity without imposition; and engage in joint determination (those with the problem must have a hand in shaping the action, assessing how it is going, and what corrections to make).
The foundation of the new strategy is well-being AND learning. However, we need two other terms—relationships and pedagogy—that are easy to remember in the educational context, grounded in practice, possible to judge whether they are evident, and above all, can work in tandem. Well-being has always been part of the learning lexicon, but until COVID, it took a back seat to learning. In fact, its earlier manifestation was more concerned with ill-being—those students who didn’t have the conditions to learn normally or at all. Later, when COVID ill-being became front and center, stress, anxiety, and dysfunction became everyone’s affliction—young and old alike. At the same time, within a very short time period (2020 to the present), some of us began to see well-being as associated with thriving—with what we call deep learning: the ability to learn how to learn, know oneself, and care about “the other” and the environment.
Neuroscience and our common sense told us that ill-being is part and parcel of extreme stress. But we lucked into the flip side of the equation: well-being (sense of purpose, belonging, the plight of humanity, engagement, making a contribution, and so on) led us to realize that well-being and learning together was what education should have been about in the first place. This science also supports the notion that education must recognize the role of emotion in learning, “I feel, therefore I learn.”
