Tip: Students & Belonging

Simple strategies for reframing our assignments & feedback that increase students' sense of belonging

The class of 2026 is not only incredibly diverse - for many institutions, one of the most diverse first-year classes they’ve seen - but they are a group of students who spent a quarter of their sophomore year, most of their junior year, and possibly some of their senior year learning online. They also were admitted under test-optional policies, and probably spent little to no time visiting campus before arriving this fall. They are a group of students who had limited opportunities for socialization to the norms of being a student in a classroom with other students, at least during their high school years.

REFRAMING

What does this means for us as we welcome the class of 2026 to our campuses? I think it means that we will need to find new ways to make these students feel like they belong and feel like our classroom is a place where they can be successful. I believe one key to helping students feel they belong and are capable of being successful in our courses comes down to how we communicate with them. When I think about times in my teaching career when things in the classroom have really not gone well, it’s more likely to have been a failure to communicate clearly rather than a failure to plan or execute.

I have shared previous articles about students’ sense of belonging on topics like increasing belonging through writing assignments and helping students to feel seen, and what research tells us about college students and belonging. Today’s newsletter offers two fairly easy ways to reframe our communications with students so that they feel they have a place in our classes and at our institutions.

Reframing Assignments

We all have assignments and assessments that just flop. For whatever reason, students don’t complete them the way we want them to, leaving students confused and frustrated, and forcing us to spend time re-explaining what we wanted them to do. I have found the TILT (Transparency in Learning & Teaching) method to be very helpful in examining how I communicate expectations to students. The method asks us to articulate clearly and in novice-appropriate language the assignment expectations, with a focus on three components: purpose, task, and criteria.

- Purpose -

Articulating the purpose comes down to telling students why they are being asked to complete the assignment. Explain how the task connects to other assignments and to course goals (learning outcomes). I also like to engage students in thinking about how the assignment (and the class in general) connects to their program of study and their personal academic and professional goals.

- Task -

Outline the steps students have to take to complete the assignment successfully - it can help to have someone else review the steps, to make sure you haven’t assumed procedural knowledge that your students don’t have.

- Criteria -

Tell students how their final product will be evaluated: will you use a rubric? If so, share that with them. Is there a checklist of things you are looking for? Do you have a model of what a successful one looks like, and perhaps student examples?

To these three I would add resources. I think it’s important to list resources students can use, so they know where to go for help. Think about what types of assistance students should get from library staff, computer lab staff, teaching assistants, or writing center/tutoring center staff. Students often don’t know when it’s acceptable to get help, or from whom, and listing available resources normalizes the importance of asking for help and sets expectations about what type of help is acceptable.

Reframing Feedback

If building trusting relationships with students is important to their feeling secure enough to attempt new challenges, one important way we can build these relationships is through the type of feedback we provide students. For many of us, the relationship we have with our students is shaped in large part by the grading and feedback process, especially if we teach large classes where it’s harder to get to know students individually in class. There are two strategies that help me better communicate why I am giving feedback and what I expect students to do with the feedback: providing wise feedback and rewarding feedback uptake.

- Provide Wise Feedback -

The goal of wise feedback is to support students in meeting high standards through reframing how we provide that feedback. When we tell students that we believe they can meet our expectations, the communication of our belief in them can be very powerful.

Wise feedback prevents the student from misconstruing teacher comments as negatively biased by proactively offering an alternative, positive explanation: the teacher is giving detailed, ambitious feedback because the standards of the course are high and the teacher is confident that the student has the skills and motivation to meet them. (from Intervention Central)

This strategy works well because it just asks us to reframe the way we communicate our feedback, and it encourages students to see us as sources of support and encouragement.

Baby Yoda Wise Feedback created by me with https://buns.life/

- Reward Feedback Uptake -

Another strategy for reframing feedback is awarding points for how well students address the feedback (uptake) in their second attempts at a task. Asking students to do something in response to feedback - and incentivizing this work with points - boosts the likelihood that students will read (or listen to) and respond thoughtfully to the feedback I provide. This strategy is successful because it increases both the intrinsic motivation - students have to use the feedback to perform better when they revise/try again - and the extrinsic motivation - students lose points if they don’t demonstrate how they have attended to the feedback provided - for students to pay attention to feedback. It also normalizes trying again and improving from one attempt to the next, helping students to accept their own missteps as part of the expected learning process.

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How do you communicate messages of belonging to students?

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