The first week of class provides an opportunity for faculty to create an environment where students feel comfortable and excited to be a part of the classroom.
Learn your students’ names. Create community. Be authentic and encouraging.
Anna Klis
These are tips NIU faculty members offer to get a new academic semester off to a good start.
Anna Klis is an associate professor in the Department of Economics. Klis looks forward to learning her students’ names each semester. She utilizes games and interaction with students to help memorize the names. In the process, her students get to learn and know the names of their peers, as part of this open dialogue.
“This sets good vibes for the beginning and the rest of the year,” Klis said. “It’s also a good way to demonstrate learning. You’re showing students how to memorize things and creating a sense of belonging. This is my favorite activity; it gets students engaged and checks a lot of boxes.”
Daryl Dugas
Daryl Dugas is an associate professor in the Department of Leadership, Educational Psychology and Foundations. Dugas is a strong believer in creating community within the classroom from the beginning, prioritizing interpersonal relationships to increase comfort and communication while breaking down barriers that come with starting a new course.
“Students may come into a course resigned to just going through the motions,” Dugas said. “I try to break that by centering relationship in the frame, giving students a chance to talk with each other and share about themselves, and sharing about myself. Then, we can talk through the content and the curriculum of what we’re going to do.”
Dugas explains that investing in students as people creates a space where they can feel valued, which deepens the connection between faculty and students and ultimately, the connection students will have with the content being shared in the course.
“I tell some of my story on that first day, what I’m doing in this role and how I got here,” Dugas said. “I share why this course matters to me, but also my background because I want to be a human being with them, first.”
Gibson Cima
Gibson Cima is an assistant professor in the School of Theatre and Dance. Cima points out that many students enter the first week of classes with a preconceived notion that the initial session or two will only involve going over the syllabus and may not be interesting. He tries to inject enthusiasm into the atmosphere from the beginning, which has proven to be a winning strategy.
“Instead of just running through the syllabus, I’ll have a portable record player and will say, ‘Based on this record cover, what kind of music do you think is on this record?’ This gets students to start thinking about aesthetics, about how visual cues tell us what we can expect from the art that we’re about to receive,” Cima said. “Having an activity right away helps students get interested in the material from the first day of the class.”
Cima, Dugas and Klis agree that simply going over the syllabus right away on the first day can be a turn-off for students, or not an engaging way to begin the semester. They recommend finding alternatives to presenting the syllabus, like creating walkthrough videos and coming up with activities.
All three recommend creating a non-adversarial syllabus, showing students the path to their successful course completion and explaining this in a helpful and positive manner, instead of simply presenting a list of tasks that must be completed to pass the course and consequences of not doing so.
“This should be more of a ‘Look at this lovely path’ message, instead of a ‘Keep off the grass’ message” in creating and sharing your syllabus,” Cima explains.
“The message I’m trying to convey is, ‘We are going to deal with challenging material and my job is to help you with that. We’re going to do it together.’ That becomes much more believable if I come across as a human being who actually cares about what I’m doing, and students will be more likely to come to me for support along the way,” Dugas said.
Klis has seen the shared value of connection between students and faculty in classrooms. She encourages fellow faculty to build community with their students, and to be creative in how they approach each semester.
“If professors think back to their best classes, they probably had a connection with the professor in some way. The goal is to extend that to our students,” Klis said. “That’s not just about making somebody feel good; they are going to get more involved in the material. You can adapt things that work best for you, and if it doesn’t work, try a different method. The point is to do something and be authentic and engaging while you do it.”
The Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning (CITL) offers a Week of Engagement Toolkit to NIU faculty, to help kick off the new semester and create a welcoming environment for students. This resource includes tips on activities to build engagement, creating a student-centered syllabus, recommended strategies for inclusion and more.
Contact CITL at citl@niu.edu for comprehensive support of your teaching.
This article originally appeared in NIU Today.
