What roles should the teacher play in a classroom reliant on self-directed learning (SDL)? When teachers give students the freedom and responsibility to take charge of their own learning, teachers obviously lose any role that directs student learning, such as telling the student what to work on, dictating the materials to be used, transmitting information to the student by obligatory lecture, and assessing student learning. Many roles beyond these remain for the teacher, however. This practice brief details my experience with one such role, a role I did not anticipate when designing a college course based on SDL principles (Currie-Knight, 2019): the role of helping students network their diverse knowledge together. In other words, when students have control of their learning, the teacher becomes one of many possible information sources, as do resources like textbooks and internet sources. Another valuable source of information, however, is the other students in the classroom, resources that teachers and students can easily overlook for various reasons. One job for teachers in SDL (and other) classrooms--what this practice brief is about--is to help students network their knowledge together; that is, making it so that students can find out how they and their knowledge can be effectively networked to help each other with their separate projects. In what follows, I will (a) use structural holes theory (SHT; Burt, 1995) to give an account of the challenges involved in helping students network their knowledge together and the way teachers can surmount those challenges; (b) give practical illustrations--again in the language of SHT--of how the networking of student knowledge has worked in my own SDL classes, and (c) offer concluding thoughts on how teachers use SHT to best facilitate student networking of knowledge. Before proceeding, a note of clarification. SHT as described below is a tool teachers and learners can use to help students network their knowledge together. While SHT is not necessary for the practice of SDL (and SDL does not necessarily follow from the practice of SHT), I will frame SHT as a way to add a helpful support to the practice of SDL.