In October 2020, a first-grade student was distance-learning over Zoom when they found themselves struggling to ask a question. “Who was on … who is … who is … who … who was it … who was it is,” they said, before at last managing to get it out: “Whose turn was it on letter F?” Although this adorable interaction took place at least 4,000 miles away from my home, I—and some 17 million other viewers—heard it because the child’s teacher recorded their voice and later uploaded it to TikTok.
I also know that in February this year, a group of kindergarteners was tasked with drawing the Pixar character Luca. One of them drew him small at the bottom left-hand corner of their page, and another gave him big round eyes and long stick fingers. One child drew disconcertingly sharp teeth, but another colored their drawing expertly, blending green and blue pencils to produce an impressive piece of art.
The hashtags #teacher and #teachersoftiktok have a combined 72.1 billion views on TikTok. While many of these videos feature educators simply discussing their job, others take place inside the classroom and include children’s voices, faces, and schoolwork. And even though many teachers on the platform clearly understand how to safeguard their students, the rise of these accounts does raise a number of ethical questions: Should educators really be filming while they’re teaching? Is it acceptable to share children’s work with hundreds of thousands of strangers who may mock it, no matter how young the child or inconsequential the work? Do kids and their parents consent to having their voices and faces shared online?
In many cases, these questions have no concrete official answers. It’s often up to individual districts and schools to determine their social media policies, and the novelty of TikTok means some institutions do not have up-to-date policies about its use by educators. In the US, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) does not outright prohibit recording in schools or posting these recordings online, provided they don’t include Personally Identifiable Information (PII) about students. This often means teachers have to draw their own lines for what should and shouldn’t be TikToked and figure out how to avoid crossing them.
Many teachers use TikTok to encourage important conversations about their profession and crowdfund for their classrooms, but the value of other videos is less apparent. Meanwhile, the popularity of classroom videos means some educators copy other teachers’ practices on the app, mistakenly assuming they aren’t breaking any rules.
Miss A is a teacher from Pennsylvania who began TikToking at her students’ request in 2020. Her first video—of herself and another teacher dancing during their lunch break—went “moderately viral,” earning tens of thousands of views. Miss A continued to TikTok throughout the year and ultimately filmed a skit featuring a few of her teenaged students—it accumulated hundreds of thousands of views. Miss A asked not to be named in this article because her school board reprimanded her for this video and she subsequently deleted her TikTok account. She now works at a different school.
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“It was a mistake to post it,” she says of the skit. “There was really no other point to do it other than for views or likes or approval from internet strangers. It was just enticing to go viral and make videos that were funny and entertaining.”
In disciplinary meetings with the district, Miss A was accused of endangering students (the skit involved children jokingly hitting their heads); she was also accused of making the school look bad. Though Miss A feels that administrators went too far by attacking her character, and does not feel her video was harmful or immoral, she understands how the TikTok could be perceived as unprofessional.
“There does need to be more conversation around what school districts expect in terms of the social media behavior of teachers,” Miss A says. “I got the idea from another teacher. Every school district is different. What my district perceived as inappropriate, other districts might not have really cared about.”
On TikTok, it is mostly unclear whether teachers have explicitly sought parents’ permission to post videos of their children, but some teachers do reference waivers in their video captions. Underneath a June video in which a teacher and five students mouth along to a Kim Kardashian interview, the teacher assured viewers that “two media release forms and a FERPA form were signed” (she did not respond to a request for comment).
Yet more often than not, creators don’t reference media release forms, and it is unclear whether parents have signed them. While teachers like Miss A might assume that a school’s general photography waiver applies to personal TikTok accounts, the parents signing these waivers may not agree.
In September 2021, University of Tennessee education professor Joshua M. Rosenberg led research that found between 15 and 20 million photos of students were available on publicly accessible school Facebook pages, and at least 150,000 of these photos depicted students who were identifiable by name.
“Our research has revealed that the accessibility of photos of students may be far greater than most parents realize,” Rosenberg and his colleagues concluded. “Minor students in particular may not yet fully understand how their likeness is being used and shared by their educational institution, and the adults in their lives have a responsibility to protect and care for them.”
While Miss A believes teachers have the right to post their opinions online and argues that many teachers create helpful and educational videos, she says “keeping students out of it is probably the most wise thing to do.”
Colin Sharkey, executive director of the Association of American Educators (AAE), says teachers who want to create TikToks should “err on the side of caution” and “ask permission rather than forgiveness.” Sharkey says educators should get familiar with their district and school policies, as well as AAE’s own Code of Ethics for Educators, which encourages safety for students, healthy learning environments, and responsible behavior for educators. “Social media is not a necessity for the learning environment, so the first rule should be that it does no harm and poses no danger,” Sharkey says. “Proceeding with caution is vital.”
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Sharkey says that posting students’ faces, voices, work, and personal information “must be done in compliance with a policy by the school or district that has been made known clearly to parents.” He adds that teachers should post professionally and respectfully, and monetizing an account that features content produced by students is potentially problematic. He warns that “even well-intentioned educators can find themselves in legal situations, due to the uncontrolled and sometimes boundary-less nature of social media.”
Beyond that, finding the line between what is and isn’t appropriate is complex. Is it problematic when a teacher reenacts classroom interactions in their spare time, joking about funny things students have said? Does it cross the line when a teacher asks the class a question specifically so they can film their responses for TikTok? What about when a teacher and their students choreograph a dance to a popular song on the app?
“It so greatly depends on what is being shown and why,” Sharkey says. “If the content isn’t helpful and productive for student engagement or content, it should probably be discouraged or prohibited, due to the potential risk to students.”
The first-grade teacher who filmed their student struggling with a question could not be identified or reached for comment; the teacher who filmed their students’ Luca drawings covered the children’s names on their work and did not respond to a request for comment sent to their private Instagram account. WIRED approached 10 TikTok-famous teachers to ask them about their videos and practices; the smallest profile had 30,000 followers, the largest more than 4 million. The only teacher who responded was Miss P, a middle school teacher with almost 600,000 followers on her account. Miss P does not reveal her full name or location for the safety of herself and the children she teaches.
Miss P explains that TikToking has greatly improved her relationship with her students. When teaching remotely during the Covid-19 pandemic, Miss P was troubled by the lack of engagement from her class—her school had a rule that students didn’t need to turn on their cameras or microphones. “I would have a computer open with 30 black tiles,” Miss P says, “It was like staring at a blank wall.” Miss P saw a teacher on TikTok record themselves teaching and did the same—when she uploaded the video, her students saw it and were excited.
“All of a sudden, kids are talking to me and showing me their faces—kids I haven’t talked to for months,” Miss P says. “It created a culture of excitement, especially at a time when things were just so terrible.” Miss P says she continued to TikTok to “build relationships” with her students; today, kids greet her enthusiastically in the hallway. “The kids really have a different layer of respect for me,” she says.
Yet Miss P does admit to making mistakes. A stranger in another state emailed Miss P’s principal to complain about her TikTok account—afterward, Miss P deleted videos in which her school’s logo was visible and banned any mention of the school’s name in her comment section. “I learned the hard way,” Miss P says. Back when she only had tens of followers, Miss P also included students in skits—she reevaluated after a few videos got over a million views.
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“I don’t want any students in my videos now, absolutely not,” she says, “Whether you have 10 followers or 100,000 followers, a weird person is a weird person who could find you.” Miss P’s students beg to feature in her videos, but she refuses to film their faces for safety reasons.
Yet Miss P does occasionally record students’ voices. She conducts a “roses and thorns” activity with her classes once a month, in which they each share something good and bad about their lives anonymously on a piece of paper; she sometimes TikToks herself reading these notes to the class. If a student’s voice is audible in the background, Miss P asks them if they would like it to be cut out of the video; she also asks a class’s permission before recording.
While individual students cannot be identified in “roses and thorns” videos, I felt odd when I first stumbled across one. Should the world know that one student is self-harming and another is addicted to porn; shouldn’t this information be kept within the confines of the classroom? Miss P understands this criticism but says her classroom is a safe space: “You see a little tiny piece, but the heart-wrenching stuff and the conversations we have, I don’t post that.”
Miss P says it’s often the students themselves who want her to record the activity. “They have so much pride that it’s their roses and thorns on the TikToks,” she says. Roses and thorns is also not a mandatory activity—Miss P has some classes who have never once participated, and individual members of the class do not have to write anything down. Her videos are flooded with supportive comments, such as, “You are definitely that teacher that will make a difference” (14,000 likes) and “I need you at my school” (2,000 likes).
There are some teachers within Miss P’s school who do not approve of her TikTok account, but her principal and the superintendent of her district are supportive. Like Miss A, Miss P believes schools need to start having more explicit conversations with teachers about social media, establishing firm rules about TikTok use.
“There should be lines; you can’t post everything,” Miss P says. She wishes, for example, that someone had shown her how to filter comments and warned her to check for identifying details in the background of videos. “But I do think it has the potential to be good,” she adds, arguing that TikTok humanizes teachers. “Some students think when my day’s over, I go under my desk and lay out a blanket and sleep in my classroom,” she says, “I think it’s cool to see teachers are people; they have lives and personalities.”
While browsing teacher TikTok, I’ve seen a small child in a polka-dot coat clap along to a rhyme in class and another group of young students do a choreographed dance to a Disney song. I’ve seen a teacher list out the reasons their kindergartners had meltdowns that week, and I’ve read poetry written by eighth-grade students. There is room for debate about the benefits and pitfalls of all of these videos, though no one yet knows how the students featured in them will feel as they age.
In April, TikTok surpassed Instagram as the most downloaded app of the year; it’s the fifth app to ever reach 3.5 billion downloads. As the service continues to grow in popularity, it is up to individual institutions to create clear guidance for their educators. Meanwhile, a new school year has begun—and with it comes a fresh round of TikToks.