“Make all of your social media accounts private…better yet, delete your social media accounts,” “use an alias,” “don’t friend your students…even if they’ve moved on from your class”, and “under no circumstances friend/add the parents or your principal”. These are all pieces of (sometimes contradictory) advice I was given over a decade ago when I was in the teacher education program. Our faculty associates sat all of the teacher candidates down, myself included, to discuss how missteps on social media could impact our school community’s perception of us. They told us tales of teachers with public social media accounts being easily found by the parents and students, having their personal lives put under a microscope, overstepping boundaries by adding students and parents, and other scenarios where access to social media led to the teacher’s downfall. It was enough for all of us candidates to double check our privacy settings, delete old dormant accounts, and do some major purges of our feeds. We did not want to end up like these cautionary tales, nor did we want to give up contributing to an online social community. It left us torn on what exactly was the best course of action for us to take, so most of us made our accounts as private as possible and went about our career thinking that was all that we could do if we wanted to have online anonymity.
Considering the risks associated with creating an online presence for the private life of a public-facing figure, I put myself in the perspective of a parent or a student and tried to search for myself in different online spaces. I had never done this before, as it felt irrelevant, especially when I was a very early rejecter of Facebook and Twitter (currently called “X”) in my teen years, and my other social media accounts (i.e. Instagram, Snapchat, and Reddit) were locked on the highest privacy settings with usernames not tied to my real name. Anyone who wanted into my virtual world had to go through me first. I began my search at the beginning of my career when I went by a very distinct name. To preface, I have never met anyone else in real life that shared the same last name that wasn’t directly related to me. During my search, I found Facebook profiles that belonged to people who lived far away, or didn’t look like me at all. A student nor a parent could mistakenly attribute any of the profiles to me. Digging a little deeper, I did find old school newsletters from my practicum school and some of my early career schools welcoming me into the community, and a pamphlet from the university I graduated from. So far, nothing out of the ordinary, and you had to do some more thorough searching to find anything relevant. On the flipside, the name that I currently work under is extremely generic. In fact, my last name is the 6th most common name in it’s country of origin. When I searched my current name, I was taken to the social media accounts of CEOs, former beauty queens, company founders, lab technicians, and programming editors that were also not me. No one would be convinced that any of these accounts would belong to me. When I narrowed my search down to the location in which I teach, the first result was a school board report on the annual salaries of all of the teachers. That issue is an other discussion for another day, but the current results from all of my searches yield an impression that most of my personal life is completely invisible to the general public. That was until, this article (below) was brought to my attention. I was not named in the article, but if you knew who I was, and looked like, you might assume that I still dress like I’m living in 1999.
Relating my social media deep dive to the greater scope of the relationship between social media, teachers, and the public, I am torn as to where I stand on the issue. There are different expectations of teachers and students at every level of education, which also don’t always coincide with the community guidelines of the social media platforms a learning community might want to use.
When thinking about social media presence of teachers, at the elementary level, I don’t necessarily think me sheltering my accounts from my students is a bad thing. Regardless of the content of the teacher’s accounts, students should not be members of a majority of the big social media platforms. Under the regulations of Tiktok, Instagram, Facebook, Bluesky, X, and Snapchat, you need to be 13+ to sign up for an account. None of my students are anywhere close to being 13 before graduation, so I didn’t feel the need to have to prove my credibility as a teacher to them, or their families. YouTube has similar 13+ restrictions for accounts, but parents can moderate and approve an account for their child if they are underage, through the family account center. Even if students violate the age restriction regulations for social media, having an online relationship of any kind might break down the boundaries between students and teachers (DeGroot et al., 2015). Students at this age are still learning how to concurrently interact positively in real life and online, so extending access to the teacher after school hours would require the teacher’s “online persona [be] consistent with their offline behaviours” (DeGroot et al., 2015). Instead of true social media platforms, our students, families, and teaching staff use SeeSaw as the social media style online learning hub. In SeeSaw, there is a Facebook-like feed layout when teachers and students post work/tag collaborators, the community can “like” and comment, and there is even a direct messaging feature. In this highly mediated space where the teacher is the creator, moderator, and participant, the can “show students how to build networks using social media…and “model[ing] effective online reputation management” (Remund and Freberg, 2013, as cited in DeGroot et al., 2015). It is a safe space where students can learn the foundational skills of online interactions, grow from mistakes and social faux pas, and experience what an online community can look like. At this level, it not only satisfies the student curiosity for social media, but it engages parents while still keeping the teacher’s online and offline persona consistent (DeGroot et al., 2015). The platform still has an air of professionalism, while being slightly masked to look Facebook-like.
At the middle school and high school level, students are teetering on the precipice of social media use where some are coming of, or are of age to use the platforms, while others are not. Having an online connection to students may create a have, have not situation. “Important announcements may get lost” if teachers use their socials to send out class information (DeGroot et al., 2015). On the flip side, as students become more adept at navigating online social spaces, it is almost inevitable that they will find a teacher’s profile if they are actively searching for it. It might “make the instructor seem more relatable, personable, and approachable,” or the discovery of the “instructor’s…negative or biased tweets…could harm an instructor’s credibility or get them fired from their job.” (DeGroot et al., 2015).
Below is a video essay of a woman, named Emily, who was working in a high school outreach program as a teacher and what happened when some of her students found her YouTube channel. Thankfully for her, the content of her channel was not controversial or inappropriate for her students, but rather it helped her create connections with some of her students in a way that she never could before. This is a positive example of how “instructors’ online and offline personae should be consistent” and it being an asset to her classroom (DeGroot et al., 2015). If her persona was inconsistent, Emily’s story could’ve taken a more upsetting turn.
Personally, I think the risk is too great because everyone’s interpretation of what a teacher’s social media should look like, or if they should have one is highly contentious. I’d prefer to keep my socials on the highest privacy settings and keep to myself and the ones I choose to let in. My students should not be on social media according to the numerous platform guidelines. If I was teaching older grades, I would be concerned that allowing some students into my online space could create stronger bonds, but alienate others. It could blur the boundaries of when and how a teacher should be available for students, and in what capacity. All of these considerations feel like more trouble that what it is worth. If I want to share my personal life the way I would on social media (i.e. big life events, vacations, special interests etc.), I can tell my students about it in-class and further curate how its delivery and how much I want to disclose compared to how I express myself online.
DeGroot, J. M., Young, V. J., & VanSlette, S. H. (2015). Twitter Use and its Effects on Student Perception of Instructor Credibility. Communication Education, 64(4), 419–437. https://doi.org/10.1080/03634523.2015.1014386
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