ACTLA 51 was the first time the Teach It Like You Stream It framework was delivered as a Zoom webinar — and the audience was a particularly meaningful one: tutors and learning-assistance professionals from California colleges.
Why this room mattered
The proposal was accepted to ACTLA's 51st annual conference, themed "Trust your Process: Making Community and Finding Support." Tutors aren't usually grouped with classroom faculty in conversations about online teaching — but they are on the front line of student trust and persistence, especially in community colleges. That's why this engagement felt different.
The framing: tutoring as practice of freedom
Dr. E framed the session around bell hooks's idea of education as the practice of freedom — the belief that good teaching (and good tutoring) doesn't just push students toward compliance with rubrics. It helps students become aware, reflective, and self-directed. For a tutor working one-on-one through a screen, that framing reshapes everything about how the session feels.
Proving Zoom can teach
This was Dr. E's first webinar in the TILYSI movement, and it doubled as a live demonstration of the same point he makes from a stage: a Zoom call is, by default, a meeting tool. With a few simple shifts — layouts, scenes, intentional camera presence — it becomes a teaching environment students can actually feel something in.
Zoom can be a place where tutoring happens, not just a place where it gets scheduled. The tools are already in your hands. The shift is how you set the room.
Key takeaways from the webinar
- Frame your tutoring practice around student awareness, not student compliance. Help the student see their own thinking — that's what builds trust on a screen.
- Use layout to teach, not just to share. With the right tools, a Zoom session can have multiple scenes, layered camera + content, and visible focus — the same techniques that make a classroom work in person.
- Treat the camera as the front of the room. Where you look, what you do with your hands, and how you frame yourself are part of the lesson.
What people said
"Dr. E rocks!"
What this session opened up
The webinar format makes TILYSI portable in a new way — it can travel directly into the kinds of one-on-one tutoring sessions and small group rooms where the stakes for student trust are highest. ACTLA 51 was the first. More webinars are on the way.