It is often said that social media has toxic effects - that it can harm young people’s self-esteem, spread misinformation and create echo chambers. This was my view of social media, too. But that was before I started using Twitter to share my thoughts about education and became well and truly hooked.

With every like, I feel a little bit of affirmation. With every retweet, I feel my confidence in my expertise grow. And when someone takes the time to message me personally, I feel lucky to have been chosen from among many others.

During this most recent lockdown, I found myself wondering: could I find a way to recreate those positive, emotive experiences to support my students’ learning?

I decided to experiment. To start with, I began to use students’ names more intentionally. I thought of this as hitting the like button. Saying “good morning, AJ” when he logs in, or “great start there, Shemiah” once she begins a task, gives those students a sense of personal validation and contributes to an ongoing sense of community in the class.

If this seems a little woolly, we should remember how few positive comments some of our most vulnerable students receive. In their landmark study, The Early Catastrophe (2003), Hart and Risley found that a toddler from a family on welfare hears a ratio of two prohibitive comments to one encouraging remark per hour.

Social media lessons: Giving students ‘likes’ and ‘retweets’

Using students’ names to acknowledge them in a positive way helps to redress that balance. But we can also use comments that promote a student’s learning in a way that others can replicate - think of it as the equivalent of delivering a share or retweet.

For example, an English teacher might say “Well done, Jaya, for changing that vague word ‘afraid’ for the more specific word ‘petrified’” ; doing so would help both Jaya’s self-image as an English student, as well as other students’ understanding of how to use specific vocabulary.

My final social media steal was the act of leaving a reply in the form of written comments on students’ work. Whatever learning platform we’re using, there are plenty of ways to do this with a small sample of students each lesson, without creating the additional workload associated with marking. Just like a direct message, these personalised comments are highly valued and might be one of the highlights of a student’s day.

This might all sound simple, but it is so easy to underestimate how much these tiny acts of affirmation mean to people. When we look at lessons through the lens of social media, we can see that students want the same things we all do: to be acknowledged, to be liked and to know that their ideas are valued.

I’ve been using this approach to make my remote lessons feel more human, but I’m not going to stop there. You can bet that I will keep liking and retweeting for my students once we are all back in school. After all, even three-dimensional classrooms could sometimes do with feeling a bit less remote.

Robin Marsden is a head of English and assistant headteacher at a secondary school in Oxfordshire

This article originally appeared in the 5 March 2021 issue under the headline “Likes are not just for social media”