Category: active learning

Principles of Community: 5 Thoughts on How to Build Safe, Inclusive, Engaging Spaces for Students

On By alexandriaggilbertIn active learning, connecting to students, supporting studentsLeave a comment

Community has to be one of my favorite words. It’s a word that has been steeped in a strictly religious context for me for so many years, yet the idea of community, belonging to a socially connected root system, has also been life saving. Communities are where I found healing from trauma, where I found parents and queer elders, where I found partners and friends, where I learn. Community is relational. It is a critical element of change and visible demonstration of our relational values, so how do we bring folks together in a classroom to build this community, how do we engage with students so that they are building community well, and also how do we uphold boundaries for the critical wellness of our students and ourselves? The following represents a few thoughts on community in the classroom, and discussions with colleagues about supporting students with relational intention in spaces of engagement. We hope that this is the start of many conversations about fostering community, and we welcome you to offer your thoughts, strategies, practices, trials, and questions. 

Why Community?

First, it’s important to note that we’re approaching community from a hooks perspective: community is vital and necessary to the teaching and learning process. Without a spirit of community, we cannot approach the classroom with a democratic practice, minimize authoritarianism, or foster learning “…as an experience that enriches life in its entirety.” If we want to change our students’ lives, we have to recognize the value community has in the learning process, mainly that it is a relational process. As educators we focus a lot on how we can produce activities, assessments, reports to demonstrate our effectiveness in the classroom, but how many times do we look to the quality of our relationships with students to determine success? If humanizing and creating spaces of belonging and inclusion are necessary for equity work, then community needs to be the lens through which the classroom and engagement spaces are curated. In his work, Enhancing Adult Motivation to Learn, Raymond J. Wlodkowski makes note that “learning requires us to perceive a person’s thinking and emotions as inseparable from each other and from the social context in which the activity takes place” (96). Thinking and emotions are inseparable for the purpose of learning, which leads me to start asking some questions about my practice in the classroom, especially when I think about engaging students: 

  • How do I address my student’s emotions on a weekly basis? 
  • What language do my students have to talk about their own emotions? 
  • What language do I use to talk about emotions?
  • What emotions do I bring to students? 
  • What emotions are most critical for fostering trust and inclusion? 

When these basic principles of love form the basis of teacher-pupil interaction the mutual pursuit of knowledge creates the conditions for optimal learning. -bell hooks

Teaching Community

If we approach the classroom with these questions and emotion-based principles first, the work of building community has a chance to stick. We cannot do community as an activity, we must approach students in the spirit of community. This is perhaps the largest takeaway that I’ve had in using relational/emotional principles for equity work: My beliefs about community and my own spiritual wellness are going to impact the community work in my classroom, relational wellness of my students, and the trust we have with each other. 

So, the following are 5 core strategies and principles to remember when doing equity-focused student engagement and community building. We can take these principles as challenges to our own identities as educators and then also use them to curate meaningful spaces for students built on trust, inclusion, and belonging. 

Strategy #1: Positionality Awareness & Trauma Acknowledgement 

We have lately said that our first meeting with students is crucial. It’s the first day where we have the chance to make or break trust with students, but this is a false understanding. Our trust starts with students the day they learn our names, see our faces on websites, and watch our names tagged on Discord or GroupMe. Our names and reputations follow us, and students really love to help each other out with this. They know who to trust and who to avoid. We’d be remiss if we didn’t acknowledge this as a vital part of community building and student engagement. Our reputations are our responsibility. What presence do I put forth on campus to communicate trust to the students that I will potentially have in my classrooms? 

This kind of engagement is unseen from our perspective, but not from our students’ perspectives. They are watching and they know. 

One professor, in Picture of a Professor, writes about a critical activity she does with her students on the first day of class before addressing the syllabus or any other academic agenda items: 

Grounded in the understanding of the structural conditions and institutional barriers that Latinas in the professoriate experience, and the importance of critical reflexivity for facilitating inclusive learning communities in the college classroom, in this chapter, I describe the “What Comes to Your Mind?” activity as a tool to help students recognize and work to transform their problematic biases about who a professor is. I offer this activity as a pedagogical tool for educators to use during the first day of class. Critical reflexivity can help facilitate students’ understanding of how their perceptions of who a professor is, or what a professor looks like, undermine opportunities for meaningful learning and the cultivating of positive student-educator relationships. (Fernandez 53)

“Critical Reflexivity as a Tool for Students to Recognize Biases” by Jesica Siham Fernández

Fernandez flips the script a bit here to offer us a reflection on how students come to the professor-student relationship with biases as well. Positionality is a two-way street, and in order to cultivate meaningful engagement, we must tackle bias as a conceptual problem. In a similar manner, relationship experts encourage folks to see one another as supportive partners in tackling relational problems rather than seeing one another as the problem. This is a similar principle when applied to student-professor relationships: how can we tackle the problem of positionality and privilege together. We can acknowledge, provide language, address, and soothe. This practice builds trust on day one (for a detailed breakdown of Fernandez’s scripted exercise – consider coming to our March 30, zoom COP session during college hour)

For light-skinned, cishet, able-bodied folks, there exists a responsibility in acknowledging positionality and power dynamics before students walk into the classroom. This means bringing our faces to the students to help build that trust before the classroom. Whether it’s on a website or in the engagement centers, our online and physical presence across the campus matters when we present ourselves in the classroom. 
In a similar manner, bringing awareness to the traumas that students face because of these power imbalances is also crucial. Bettina Love in We Want to Do More than Survive, reminds us that the education system is built to reiterate the racial and identity inequities of our larger society and “are often forced to simply survive the harsh conditions of school, and this focus on survival limits their ability to truly thrive and be well.” (qtd. in Venet 59). So, how can we break away from the classroom as a place of trauma and bring in healing? How do we address the realities of trauma without overwhelming or dismissing students’ experiences and emotions (and our own)?

Strategy #2: Personal Relationships in Visible Spaces 

When as professors we care deeply about our subject matter, when we profess to love what we teach and the process of teaching, that declaration of emotional connection tends to be viewed favorably by administrators and colleagues. When we talk about loving our students, these same voices usually talk about exercising caution. -bell hooks, Teaching Community

There are several ways in which we can have relational value in the student-professor engagement. We can bring ourselves to the visible spaces of where students live. In other words: get out there. Step out into the community. Find the pockets of where students are and be there. 

  • Hosting office hours in spaces where you can find connections to student communities is a great example of building trust into our reputations as faculty. 
  • Being present for students and taking an interest in their holistic college experience helps humanize us, giving them a context of who we are as people outside of the classroom. If we’re not with students outside of the classroom, it’s going to be more challenging to find moments of community in the classroom. 
  • Two of our colleagues are going to share more about this, but using the engagement centers as pivotal spaces to build trust and inclusion can be fruitful when it comes to being faculty who are trustworthy. 
  • Focus on stories: listening to student stories is also another great way to engage in these spaces, making their stories the central focus of your engagement can inform our practices. If we want to reach them in the classroom, let’s find out who they are outside of it. 

Strategy #3: Creating Critical Wellness

Another strategy for engagement that fosters community-building is approaching the classroom space (online and F2F) with critical wellness. In Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education, Venet reminds us that “[h]umanizing school requires that we dispense with the outdated idea that children or adults can somehow divorce their brains from the bodies. Why do schools so often pretend that it’s possible to leave our emotional and physical selves outside of school and bring only our intellectual selves into the classroom?”(58). Honoring students’ wellness means addressing the ways that their bodies and emotional histories are present with us in the learning process. Venet challenges us to create classrooms and engagement spaces as “places that can increase our personal and community wellness, not deplete it” (58). If our focus on learning seeks only to engage the intellect, we are doing our students a disservice. They walk through the doors and the browser windows with a whole host of emotions, and more tragically, with not a lot of language or tools to even recognize that they do. 

One of the challenges and barriers I’ve sought to tackle (and I know others are as well) is to provide students with language and space for emotional regulation before I ask them to produce an artifact or face an academic challenge. By giving language to their emotions, students can ease anxieties, increase blood flow, stimulate spatial awareness, and find an outlet for potential healing. Venet takes the term critical wellness from Tyrone C. Howard and contributors in All Students Must Thrive, focusing specifically on the point that “wellness cannot be a solo endeavor” (58-59). Healing takes a village, and for 16-weeks (or 8 if you’re fast-tracking), we have an opportunity to facilitate this process and weave it in with the learning. By focusing on topics like students’ mental health, coping mechanisms for anxiety, emotional regulation, and trauma awareness, we allow students to be fully human – to showcase their inner life in conjunction with their visible identities. 

There are several strategies I’ve adopted and created to do this, which I will link to here, and include scripts for: 

  • Writing and identifying emotions 
  • Regulating breathing in the classroom together 
  • Grounding 
  • Anxiety soothing 
  • Emotional regulation 

Most of this can be done fairly quickly (5 min), but the act of consistency (doing it more than once) and intentionality (starting with it), addresses students’ whole selves in the learning process.  

Interdisciplinary Deep Dive: for a deeper dive on using emotion-based community practices in group work, consider research on the dynamics of groups and healing from Chris Burris’s Creating Healing Circles.

Strategy #4: Boundaries Create Safety

Perhaps a counterargument to this perspective is: but how much of this is really my responsibility? I can’t answer that for any one person, but I can say that the more we provide relational support for students, the more successful they’ll be. This doesn’t mean we enable oversharing or focus solely on these relational skills, but rather use our relational skills when needed, strategically and intentionally, by setting boundaries. 

Having scripts readily available for when students venture into more delicate conversations can be very helpful as we navigate the growing mental health crises on our campuses. My class in the fall had a very robust discussion one day on our theme of love. They asked questions that were text-driven but deeply personal. At the point at which they asked if they should “break up with so-and-so because of they way he’s been treating me,” I said, “I’m not really trained to give that kind of advice or support, but I definitely encourage you to talk to a therapist.” The class, represented by multiple voices shouted: “But YOU are our therapist. We need your help.” 

While I redirected the thought that I would be a therapist to them, what didn’t escape me was their need to be seen in that moment. That someone would teach them not only how to write, but how to love well, how to communicate, how to set boundaries. It’s important to note that this was in week 10 or so, and after we’d built a lot of trust around the topics of love, relationships, systemic oppression, and healing. We’d written about love, we’d discussed it, but now they wanted to know how to embody it. I was out of my element, and I believe I stumbled my way through that conversation. In this next semester, I’m teaching the same themes, but I’m preparing scripts now for how to create boundaries with our conversations. Boundaries that allow me to tell them I see them, but that also keep me and others’ safe in the classroom from potentially triggering or oversharing moments. 

Scripting potential conversations and responses to emotional distress is also a great way to foster engagement with students. It is a teaching moment that says “Even though I can’t directly help you, I still care that you receive the help you need.” 

  • What content in your classroom leaves students emotionally charged? 
  • How can you script and prepare for responses ahead of time to foster inclusion without cutting off their emotional experiences? 
  • How can we teach others in the class how to respond and create boundaries as well? 

Interested in scripts? Come to our March 30th session during college hour on Zoom! 

Strategy-esque #5: Don’t do it alone

This last strategy is based solely on opinion, but also kinda not. None of this work should be done in a vacuum, a silo of coffee-induced lesson planning and course building. In the spirit of community, we need each other as well. I assume that’s partially why you’re reading this, and also why you’ll attend our session later this month (March 30, college hour, zoom –  see flyer). If student engagement is going to be genuine, it’s going to need practice, so how do you check-in with colleagues? How do you foster emotional regulation in your spaces? What space is there for vulnerability for the sake of humanizing our processes and putting people first? This work requires us to start with ourselves by acknowledging our emotional responsibility to be people of trust with one another and for the sake of our students’ wellness and success. 

Further Questions for Thought: 

  • How do I address my privileges and positionality in my classrooms and engagement spaces early in the semester? Throughout? 
  • How can I instill a reputation of trust before students enter the classroom? 
  • How do I address the traumas that students have experienced because of the personal and systemic prevalence of others’ positionalities? 
  • What are my boundaries when it comes to offering students’ support? Are these intentional or presumed? 
  • How do I communicate these boundaries? 
  • How do I bring relational value to the forefront of my practice? 
  • Where can I show up more with students? 

Works Referenced

Fernández, Jesica Siham. “Critical Reflexivity as a Tool for Students to Recognize Biases: A First Day of Class Conversation on What a Professor Looks Like.” Picture of a Professor: Interrupting Biases about Faculty and Increasing Student Learning, edited by Jessamyn Neuhaus, West Virginia UP, 2022, pp. 51-67. 

hooks, bell. Teaching Community: A Pedagogy of Hope, Routledge, 2003. 

Venet, Alex Shevrin. Equity-Centered Trauma-Informed Education, WW Norton & Company, 2021. 

Wlodkowski, Raymond J. Enhancing Adult Motivation to Learn, Josey-Bass, 2008. 

Come to Our Community of Practice!

Community of Practice: Student Engagement & Community Building

March 30th, 2023 | 12:50pm – 1:50pm 

Zoom (link can be found here)

Hosted by: Alex Gilbert (English), Thatcher Carter (English), Sharon Walker (Umoja), Tim Gutierrez (Sociology), and Thea Marie Seals (LASSE/WRC)

First Impressions:  Helping Students to Feel Welcome and Engaged on Day 1

On By composingpossibilitiesIn active learning, connecting to studentsLeave a comment

By Kathleen Sell

In her book The Spark of Learning, Sarah Cavanagh writes, “On the first few days of class students will be forming their impressions of you, and this impression may be more important than much of what you do later” (qtd. in Lang).

James Lang, in his article for The Chronicle of Higher Education “How to Teach a Good First Day of Class,” suggests that these “thin slice judgments… condition [students’] attitudes toward the entire course, the effort they are willing to put in, and the relationship they will have with your and their peers throughout the semester.”

Lang outlines some key principles to keep in mind as you plan your first day: curiosity, community, learning, and expectations (see the article linked below for his full discussion).

1) Curiosity

  • Rather than starting with the syllabus (please don’t make this the first thing or the sum total of what your first day is all about!), try starting with something that sparks curiosity about the course content itself and begins to establish the relevance, interest of the course material to students’ world and lives.  So what will students be able to do/ do better—and why does it matter—as a consequence of taking this course? Then a look at the syllabus later can show how the course content can satisfy that curiosity/ help develop those skills. So think big questions addressed by course content.
  • Showing your love for the material and what sparked and continues to spark your curiosity helps here, too! What do you love about your field and teaching this material? How can you communicate some of that to your students?
  • This also works with Darla Cooper’s framework for student success (RP Group “10 Ways Everyone Can Support Student Success”) by laying the groundwork to help students feel engaged as they begin your course—establishing a sense of the overarching questions, the big picture, why the course matters, and why they should be interested!

2) Community & Partnership

  • Right from the start of a class, signaling that we see ourselves in partnership with our students in learning the material and accomplishing the goals of the course is key.  And intentionally working to create community helps to get this partnership off to a good start.
  • This can (hopefully does!) start even before the first day of class with a welcome email or uploaded welcome video to the class, a reach out to students requesting name pronunciation/ pronouns, info about course materials. Tools in Canvas, such as Name Coach can really help. Once class begins, one strategy to avoid mis-pronunciations or using a name other than the name they choose to use is to have students name themselves and you can check them off as they do so. Using name cards for the first week or two, too, can be a help with learning names especially if masks have made it harder for you to do so!
  • Humanize yourself! Greet and talk to as many students as you can individually, give them an opportunity to ask YOU questions since you’ll be asking lots of them. Online, this can happen with the welcome video, too. Tools to facilitate this, such as a short Flipgrid video or video assignment with flexible guidelines, can be a great way to meet both your online students and your masked in-person students and for students to meet each other in a less stressful environment. 
  • Get to know your students—a survey or info card of some sort that allows students to share (as willing) information about themselves, their interests, what brings them to your course, any areas of concerns or needs they may have can help you begin to know your students as the complex adults with complicated lives that they are. Beyond simply saying or signaling that you are happy to answer questions or see students in office hours (which many of us call student hours), what might you more concretely say or do to communicate your commitment to each student’s learning? Offering information—on syllabi, in Canvas, in class the first day—about resources available to students can help here, and get students involved in sharing resources they know about that you may have missed. All this demonstrates your willingness to know and support your students as whole individuals.
  • Get students talking to each other—this could be an icebreaker but could also be something simple related to course content if you’re not comfortable with icebreaker activities (so part of sparking curiosity and getting them learning!). 
  • All this is key to helping students feel nurtured, connected and valued—three of the six factors for student success in Cooper’s student success framework. Offering students an opportunity to share something about themselves—and listening and responding!—taking the time to get to know them, and creating space/ opportunities for them to connect with one another will be crucial to their success all semester long.

3) Learning

  • Get students learning the first day! This is “not the same as content delivery” but rather an effort to get students engaged with reflecting on and processing something about the content you’ll be covering (Lang). Or perhaps you might get them meta-cognitively thinking about strategies for effective learning in a class like yours, experiences (good and bad) they’ve had in a class like yours before (helpful for math and English!) and meeting any concerns that come from this productively from day one.
  • Think about something that will allow students to activate any prior learning, apply the knowledge they walk in the door with to something you’ll be working on in this course. Connecting the knowledge and experiences they already have and bring to your class to what they’ll be learning and highlighting what their knowledge and experiences can contribute to the class’s learning can help create an environment in which students feel valued and seen.
  • Getting students engaged right away in content also can have, crucially, the added benefit of helping to establish your expertise, especially if your embodied self doesn’t “match” what students might stereotypically expect a “real professor” and can begin to disarm any of the assumptions they might make about you as their professor on the basis of your race/ethnicity, age, gender, appearance, differing physical abilities.

4) Expectations

  • And yes, some time this first day to address the essential questions students will have about the course is good! So addressing materials/ texts to buy, tests/ projects/ assignments they’ll have to complete, the basic shape of the course is a good idea. Evan Kutzler (who regularly posts on teaching on Twitter) suggests asking, “’what do you need to know before you can come back to class confident you will do well?’, [which] gets a bigger response on syllabus day than ‘so, any questions?’”.
  •  Leaving some time for follow up questions on day two to address anything that comes up as students take a more thorough look at the syllabus is a good idea, too. And this could be gamified with a Kahoot or done as a group activity to continue to help students build community. Some time to transparently address and demystify course expectations will help lay the groundwork for students to plan ahead and feel that they belong. Our adult students, with all their many responsibilities, need to know clearly from the outset what they’ll be expected to do and within what framework of expectation (e.g. around grace periods for late work, etc.).
  • I send the syllabus out with my welcome note before the start of the term so that during this portion of the first day of class, they may already have some specific questions they’d like me to address or clarify.
  • HOW we do this matters a lot—the tone, the language, the emphasis. Signaling your expectation that the students CAN accomplish the tasks outlined for the course, communicating that learning involves mistakes and re-dos and growth over the course of the whole semester, highlighting the supports built in to and available alongside the course to help students succeed—these are positive approaches to a discussion of expectations. Highlighting only the difficulty, that not everyone can or will succeed, or too much time on rules and regulations send exactly the opposite message. We need to signal from day one our belief that our students are capable and expected to succeed.
  • Something else to try to extend this through the first week or two (even beyond as other kinds of questions emerge about content or specifics of assignments) is to have a system for gathering questions—whether this is a question box that students can drop a note into, a parking lot (giant sticky and smaller ones to post questions) up during class sessions, or index card check ins where students can reflect on something they’ve learned and ask any questions they have. For both online and in person classes, you could also try having an Open Q&A discussion board. This helps students ask questions that others might have, too, and creates a spot to check for answers at any time in addition to emailing you.

What first day strategies have you tried that work well?

Resources

Active Learning: Let’s DO This

On By cmrosalesIn active learning15 Comments
Students from Prof. Rosales’s English 50 class engaging in a “text-mapping” activity

[Lecturing] is tradition. It was part of my training, and seems like what I should be doing. I feel somehow guilty when I am not lecturing”

– One professor’s response when asked why he lectures (qtd. in Bonwell and Eison 7).

I’ll be the first to admit that when I first started teaching, this quotation above could have been from me. I spent years in classes and seminars with professors in their sharp-looking corduroy coats with patches on the elbows, who spent hours talking at us as we furiously scribbled down every third word. So, naturally, when I started teaching, I assumed I should do the same. Sure, I peppered in some group work and discussions, but mainly it was a “Here’s what I know, now listen and learn” type of class. 

FORTUNATELY, a few years into teaching, one of my colleagues staged a “lecture intervention” on me and introduced me to a variety of active learning techniques: some from reading apprenticeship workshops, and some from acceleration workshops, all of which were very exciting, but also a bit overwhelming at the time. These new strategies and techniques forced me to reassess how I thought about learning and what it should look like. Over time, and after much trial and error, these once unfamiliar and overwhelming techniques became the norm in my classes, and I found myself automatically planning for what students would DO in the classroom rather than just what they would learn.

The test of a good teacher…is, ‘Do you regard “learning” as a noun or a verb?’

qtd. in Bonwell and Eison 10

I think we can all agree that learning cannot be defined as a passive activity. Therefore, we cannot teach our classes using what Paulo Freire describes as the “banking” method of education: students are receptacles waiting for us to open up their brains and deposit knowledge. To illustrate this idea of passive learning to my students, I’ll often compare it to a scene in The Matrix. The classroom exchange usually goes something like this:

So, my friends, we are not passive learners. We cannot learn how to write in the same way Neo learns how to do kung fu in The Matrix. 

After noticing a large number of blank stares, I’ll realize that many of them were born after the release of this film, and I’ll further elaborate on this example (all while trying to hide my utter shock and disappointment). 

Well, what happens is a wire gets shoved into the back of Neo’s brain, information is uploaded and, voila! Neo awakens and confidently claims: “I know kung fu.” Nice. 

Unfortunately, our brains do not work that way. We cannot learn through osmosis and Apple has yet to release “iBrain” technology that uploads knowledge directly into our brains; I mean, we’re at least 5 years away from that…

So in the meantime, in order to help our students learn what we want them to learn in our classrooms, we must engage them in an active process that not only provides them with knowledge and skills, but allows them to practice this in relevant ways. Freire argues that it is not enough to just gain knowledge. We must also be able to collaborate with others to think critically about our world and how we can act upon it — essentially, how we can DO something with what we have learned. 

Thus, an active learning environment encourages this collaboration while also inviting a diversity of ideas through activities like small and full class discussions, presentations, and Socratic seminars. Cathy Davidson mentions that “structuring a way where everyone in the room has a voice and has an opportunity to register an idea, is by far the most effective way to avoid ‘group think.’” 

There are a variety of ways to create an active learning environment that I think will fit any number of learning and teaching styles, room limitations, class sizes, or other variables. I hope that throughout this month in this blog and later at our meeting on September 27, we will be able to share some of the strategies we are using to engage our students in the learning process. I also hope we can address any questions or concerns you may have about using active learning techniques in your classes. As you brainstorm some ideas and evaluate what you already do to create an active learning environment, keep in mind some general characteristics of an active learning classroom outlined by Bonwell and Eison:

  • Students are involved in more than listening
  • Less emphasis is placed on transmitting information and more on developing students’ skills.
  • Students are involved in higher-order thinking (analysis, synthesis, evaluation)
  • Students are engaged in activities (e.g. reading, discussing, writing)
  • Greater emphasis is placed on students’ exploration of their own attitudes and values
  • Anything that involves students in doing things and thinking about the things they are doing. (2)

If you haven’t read Cathy Davidson’s “Active Learning” blog post, check that out as soon as you can. It’s a quick read and will give you a general overview of what active learning is and how it can look in the classroom. If you’d like some additional resources, I also recommend the following texts:

Let’s start the discussion here! If you could, take a few moments to leave a comment (after the jump!) responding to any of the questions below. Feel free to add information and links to any resources, activities, and assignments you are currently using. 

  1. Can you share a story of a student’s success (or multiple student successes) after using active learning strategies? What was the strategy? Why do you think it worked so well?
  2. What is one of your own “go-to” active learning strategies you use in your classes? Why is this your “go-to”?
  3. What questions or concerns do you have about using active learning strategies in the classroom? 

Thanks so much to everyone who was able to come to our meeting last Friday! Below are the wonderful posters you all created. I’ve also linked the “Active Learning Strategies” handout I distributed that day and the Google slides for anyone who wasn’t able to make it.