Back to School and Feeling Overwhelmed: Learning Social Skills in the COVID-19 Classroom

By Zainab Cheema

Returning to face-to-face classrooms this fall is proving to be overwhelming for students. Alongside fear of COVID-19’s variants and the everyday anxieties of juggling academics and activities, another stress factor is looming large. How do we relearn social interaction in the face-to-face world after being virtual for a year and a half?

In a recent orientation held by my university to prepare professors and instructors for the Fall 2021 semester, a panel of students spoke out about their perspectives on going back to school. As one student expressed it, “students are learning what it means to be part of a [face to face] classroom again after being on our computers for so long. There’s a lot of anxiety on re-learning how to be with one another.” While social media opened up new platforms for connectivity, person-to-person interactions require different set of skills in reading and emoting embodied communication. Many students transitioning from high school to college missed the key bonding experiences that help develop those skills. So, what does it mean for the incoming students of Fall 2021?

Learning in COVID-19 proved to be effective in many ways and draining in others. Maria Carrasco’s recent article in Inside Higher Ed profiled a new study that surveys the mental states of incoming freshmen. According to theannual Beginning College Survey of Student Engagement, percent of first-year students reported a substantial increase in mental and emotional exhaustion. Of those, nearly 70 percent indicated “high expectations of academic difficulty” in contrast to 42 percent of their peers who did not experience greater exhaustion. Accounting for this mental health toll is something that universities, colleges and K-12 schools will have to navigate. According to the Beginning College study, 30 percent of the surveyed students identified as experiencing increased depression; 27 percent reported experiencing greater loneliness and 20 percent felt more hopeless.

In her article for VeryWell Mind, Arlin Cuncic noted that the effect of isolation from other people for an extended period of time means that “you will end up feeling awkward, socially anxious, and unable to tolerate what used to feel mundane. This isn’t a mental disorder; rather, it’s a collective experience of those who are isolated and it’s happening to everyone who has had a decreased level of social contact due to the coronavirus pandemic.” As the US National Social Anxiety Center has observed, “keep in mind that every single one of us is now socially awkward to a certain extent.” This deficit in sociability will have to be accounted for in our pedagogy as we return to the classroom. There is no simple on-switch for the kind of social skills that students will need to succeed in face-to-face learning spaces.

However, for other students, the retreat to online learning actually proved to be welcome escape from the social pressures of school. Marginalized students are often disadvantaged by social groups organized around oppressive hierarchies that value certain physical characteristics, racial traits, class privileges and the like. Think about the kind of social groups that pop culture likes to lampoon in movies and shows such as Mean Girls. In her August 15 report for CNN, Faith Karimi covered how a number of students welcomed the pandemic retreat to online learning as a way to avoid those pressures. “For online classes, you don’t have to worry about trying to fit in, who will talk to you in the hallways,” remarked Taliyah Rice, a returning senior to a high school in suburban Chicago. For students like Taliyah, social anxiety on returning to F2F classrooms is compounded by social anxiety from her memories of being marginalized by peer groups when she was in school.

Perhaps COVID-19 will prove to be a reset button for our social landscape, given the mainstreaming of mental health conversations in COVID-19. As another student on my orientation panel noted, “It’s important for teachers to have patience and understanding and leniency, given the challenges of this past year and a half.” It’s likely that patience, understanding and leniency will also characterize peer-to-peer student interactions, given the increased awareness of mental health during the pandemic. On returning to the F2F classroom, SEL related skills that educators and students will have to brush up on include interacting with others in affirming ways; feeling and emoting empathy; undertaking social negotiation; and reading social cues through facial expressions and body language. Such skills are intertwined with guiding students towards positive learning outcomes and pathways to career success.

Resources for Social Interaction in F2F Learning Spaces

A number of articles and online resources offer tips for re-learning social interaction in F2F spaces that will be helpful for educators and learners alike:

Cuncic’s article for VeryWell Mind recommends acknowledging your feelings of social awkwardness to yourself and others. She also recommends what learners do best—practice social interaction in small, manageable steps. Here are some of her top tips.

• Embrace being awkward instead of fighting against it.
• Make jokes about the situation (e.g., during a conversation at the water cooler, say something like “long time no see” as a joke).
• Adopt a gradualist approach. Start out with situations that feel safer to you (e.g., people you used to know well).
• Practice for a limited amount of time at first (e.g., don’t throw yourself into a weekend getaway with a group of strangers at first).
• Click the link above to see her other tips.

Role playing can be incorporated in the classroom that will allow students to perform social situations. Teachers can take transform one of the units of their lesson plan to incorporate role playing. Not only does it offer greater potential for the content to “stick,” the structured social scenarios tied to immediate feedback help to boost students’ confidence. Check out this resource on educational role-playing by NIU’s Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning.

Finally, set goals around improving your and your students’ SEL skills. This helpful handout on Social Emotional Learning helps to break down components of SEL and identifies the practices that determine them. While the handout identifies SEL skills from the elementary school stage to high school, you can ignore the timeline. Based on the social situation of your classroom, feel free to develop activities to help students relearn the SEL skills that the handout flags as should having learnt during elementary or middle school. One of the most liberating aspects of the pandemic is that there is no “should.” Compassion comes from taking things as they are and adapting to it.