Tips Round-Up: First-Day Activities
Strategies for the first week of classes to engage students in discovery & community-building.
Today’s newsletter concludes the three-part series of back-to-school topics that started with preparing a syllabus and continued with making a time/workload management plan.
The most important thing about the first day of a new class is not the policies, the syllabus, the schedule, or the content to be covered. It’s the people who are sitting in the room. If we don’t start with the people, we won’t get very far with anything else. For me, starting with the students is about engaging them in discovering their own interests and passions and engaging them in building a community.
Engage students in discovery
I love this recent article by Paul Hanstedt on why instructors should Begin with Intrigue instead of the more quotidian syllabus review and introductions. He talks about engaging students with the very things that engage us - sharing our passion for our discipline and the course we are teaching:
We engage them by using the first day, the first hour, the first minute of class to introduce them to beautiful problems—the kinds of problems that intrigue us. The kinds of paradoxes that drew us into our fields. The kinds of questions that, as we walk to work in the morning, cause us to nearly cross into traffic, we’re just that distracted. The kinds of confusions and challenges that we discuss over coffee with colleagues at conferences, that we laugh about in the taxi ride back to the hotel after that keynote that wasn’t particularly interesting. We begin not with the syllabus, not with the table of contents, not with the attendance policy, not with lame jokes but with the real questions that delight us in our own work.
What can this look like? It might be offering students a glimpse into a recent controversy in your field or setting up two opposing viewpoints for students to discuss. It might be sharing your morning commute ponderings.
Engage students in community
After introducing students to why your curse is going to be an exciting space of inquiry and learning, I think it’s important to keep the momentum going by building community between students. Over the course of the past two years, I’ve incorporated more deliberate ways for students to introduce themselves to their classmates (like with these icebreaker activities). I have found that students sometimes need a bit of help with making those small social connections that are important to building community. Another first-day and first-week goal for me is learning everyone’s name quickly. I create seating charts - knowing that students tend to sit in the seats they pick on the first day - with notes to help me remember everyone. Colleagues at schools where student profile pictures are attached to the roster have a definite advantage, but you can always create your own roster with pictures.
One high-tech option is the NameShark app. You can create groups for each class, ask students to take a selfie and enter their name, and then you can quiz yourself on names and faces. You can also ask students for details - like their major, or their favorite class to date - to help you get to know them better. Names are an important part of helping students feel like they belong, and students who see themselves as belonging tend to be more motivated and more likely to persist.
Other ideas for student-community engagement here
Here’s my new semester round-up from fall 2021
Example: Cookie Evaluation
Last week I shared my student time management activity, which is a great way to help students take ownership of their success. The other first-week activity I frequently use is another one that gets students thinking about their own thinking and learning process. I typically use rubrics for evaluating student work and have found that, while some students may know how to interpret a rubric, they don’t usually know how to use it to help them prepare their assignments, and they have almost never been asked to help create a rubric for evaluating performance. I want students to have ownership of their work, which I believe means actually handing over some of the assignment evaluation procedures to students. So I like to begin the semester with an activity designed to help students understand rubrics by asking them to develop a rubric to evaluate chocolate chip cookies. (I admit, I do bring in a few different varieties of cookies for the class to evaluate.) This relatively short activity gets students talking to - and debating with - each other and has them engage in thinking about rubrics both as students and as future teachers and future rubric-developers. In short, it has them engage in both content discovery and community building. Also, cookies are never a bad way to start the semester.
What do you plan to do with your first day of the new semester?
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