Guide To Teaching and Learning

Supporting First Year Students: Classroom for Community Building  

A sense of belonging has been demonstrated to be among the most important factors in college student persistence. While it may feel like it’s not a faculty member’s responsibility to build a sense of community, helping students feel they belong, through inclusive teaching practices and some of the practices below, will deepen engagement and motivation and therefore improve student learning. 

Because of the impact of the pandemic – and the proliferation of social media – incoming students may lack the social skills they would have developed in high school. In addition to the practices suggested below, consider adopting small practices that can help students grow. 

• Share a little about who you are. How’d you become interested in what you teach? What were your college days like? What are your hopes for the semester? Showing students you’re a human being, too, can go a long way in easing nervous students. 
• Classroom warmups break silence and help students develop rapport.
• Remind students how much they have to learn from each other, and how much you are learning from them.
• Consider rewarding student interactions, e.g. offering extra credit if everyone is speaking to someone else before the start of class. 
• Build in time for discussion to allow students to get to know each other as thinkers, makers and artists.
  • If students seem reluctant to speak, consider assigning students roles in advance, i.e. Next week, Juliet will summarize the first half of the chapter and River will take the second. Everyone else will bring an observation and question to discuss.
    • Ask “What could we add to Juliet’s summary?” 
  • Draw connections between what students share and encourage them to do likewise, recalling what others have said, to promote a sense of a community of learners.
• Collaborative activities create opportunities for students to connect with, learn from, and teach each other:
  • Have students create something new together that includes using course content and external resources. For example, designing a campaign and pitching it to stakeholders in a roleplay scenario.
  • Give students questions or discussion topics to discuss together. Assign roles, such as note-taker, time manager, reporter, skeptic, and discussion leader.  
  • Try the Jigsaw. Create groups of ~3-5  with each one responsible for focusing on a different but connected topics. Each group discusses their assigned material until they all have a grasp of it. Then form new groups that have at least one person from each old group. Each student will summarize the main points reached in the old group, giving everyone a chance to share, own, and deepen their knowledge.
  • Use “Think-Pair-Share” activities: Give students a few minutes to respond to a question in writing, then ask the students to share their answers with their neighbor, specifically asking them to tell each other why they wrote what they did. After a specified time, reconvene the whole class to debrief.