The CIEL Blog

Starting Your Semester Off Right

Our first interactions with students will set the tone for the rest of the semester. This initial engagement, whether in person, synchronously via tools like Teams, or asynchronously through VIULearn, provides the perfect opportunity to achieve several key objectives: to forge meaningful connections between instructor and student, to cultivate a collaborative learning environment among peers, to begin the process of engaging students with the core course content, and to clearly establish the structure and expectations for the upcoming term.

I have often started off a semester by saying “I am going to talk a lot today while I go through the syllabus, but that won’t be how classes will usually be run.” I would then be surprised when students resisted speaking up or working in groups to explore content. I had introduced the course one way and taught in another. I realized that it was far more effective to begin in the way I meant to go on. So, the first day of class became interactive. Everyone was invited to speak, students worked in groups, and we started exploring content right away.

We all have our own teaching styles and philosophies, so there is no magic formula for creating the perfect start to a semester, but here are a few ideas and resources that can get you started.

Building Community

When students feel connected in a positive way to their instructors and fellow learners, they are more likely to be successful. There are many ways that you can start building this sense of community from the very beginning of the term. In fact, you can start building community even before the first day of class.

Think about using VIULearn to communicate with your students before the term starts. You can use the Announcements tool to welcome students to the course and provide them with some information about how the course will work. You can also provide some information about yourself to help them feel like a real person will be teaching them.

Here are some other ways that you can start building community in your first interactions with students.

  • Include a territorial acknowledgement in your introduction, VIULearn course and/or your syllabus. Learning whose territories you live and work on, and including an explanation of that in your syllabus, not only orients people to the Indigenous people in the area but can also make Indigenous students feel seen and supported. (Starting off the Semester with a Trauma-informed Syllabus)
    • In her article What are land acknowledgements and protocol?, which is available on the VIU Community Classroom website, Heather Burke writes about the meaning behind land acknowledgements and protocol. The article includes a video of VIU Elder Uncle Gary Manson’s lesson on protocol.  
  • Before the first class, consider the classroom (or learning environment) to set up the space effectively to create a welcoming comfortable atmosphere that emphasizes collaboration.
  • Create a video to introduce yourself and/or provides a tour of the course on VIULearn.
  • Are you doing group work in class? Have the students meet each other that first day and start thinking about how they want to work together.
  • Greet students as they enter the class or Teams meeting.
  • If you are teaching asynchronously, set up a forum for introductions that includes some guiding questions. Post your own introduction first and be sure to respond to your students’ posts.
  • Connect students with low-risk activities (introductions, name tags, group chats, icebreakers) that help students learn about each other and something about the course content.

Promoting Student Engagement: Why wait to get to the good stuff?

I suspect that nobody has ever signed up for a course because they wanted to read the syllabus. While the syllabus is an important document, it is not inherently interesting. Students are there, in fact we are there, because we are interested in the content. What are the problems students will be able to solve because of this course? What are the complexities of your field? What pulled you into this area? All these things are far more compelling than the course syllabus, so what don’t we lead with them? Don’t be afraid to jump right in and get them thinking about the kinds of things they are going to be learning.

Do one fun, engaging, thought-provoking, high-impact activity that introduces the content in a meaningful way. 

For example:

  • In a Cultural Geography class, you could give students a map of BC or Vancouver Island and a list of Indigenous language groups and have them plot them on the map.
  • In a writing class you could give students a list of 10 sentences where 6 have grammatical errors and 4 are okay.  Have students work on their own, and then in small groups to determine which are correct, which are incorrect and then possibly how to fix them.
  • In a math class you could list the names of the math theorems that you will be using and have them match them to real life applications.

Co-Creating Expectations: Correcting the Power Imbalance

There is often an unspoken and unintended power imbalance that happens between instructors and students. This can reduce the agency that students have over their own learning. This can lead to lack of engagement, lack of autonomy and lack of ownership in the learning process.

One way to do this is to have your students become actively involved in creating expectations for the class.  While there may be some things in your course that are non-negotiable (e.g. lab safety), there may be other parts of your course that will benefit from having student input and buy-in.

These elements might include:

  • How to communicate (in class and online).
  • What is class attendance vs class participation?
  • How to respectfully disagree.
  • What are the consequences for problematic behaviour?
  • Due dates and formats for assignments.
  • Use of devices in class.
  • Participation in Teams meetings (e.g. camera, mic, chat expectations).

One way to do this is to have students work in groups (face to face or online) to identify 2-3 expectations that are most important to them. They can then present their ideas, and you can discuss them as a class. Have the groups send you their ideas for you to take away and compile with your own expectations. You could even create a rubric and have students assess themselves once or twice throughout the semester.

The result is that you have a set of “rules” that are not set out by you but are created by the class community. This allows students to play an active part in the creation of their learning environment and how they interact with it.

Co-Creating the Classroom: Collaborative Ground Rules for Engaged Learning provides a similar strategy for co-creating expectations as well as several useful resources.

Don’t Forget about the Syllabus!

The syllabus is a mainstay of the beginning of term for a good reason. It is the document that lays out the course learning outcomes, learning materials, assessments and often the course schedule. It tells students what they need to do to be successful in the course.

However, for something that is so important it is seldom referred to after that first day of class. Therefore, it can be a good idea to think of ways to engage your students meaningfully in the content of your syllabus. How can you get them to engage in the content? One approach is to have an Annotated Syllabus in which students are actively engaged in creating the syllabus. This Annotate the Syllabus activity can get you started.

Other ways to get students engaged with the syllabus are

  • Teach your students how to use the syllabus to answer their questions about the course.
  • If possible, choose a different or additional format like this.
  • Connect the elements of the syllabus together.
    • How do the readings fit with the assessment?
    • How do the concepts fit together?

Want to Learn More?

Check Out these Additional Resources:

And, as always, we encourage you to contact us for a conversation about this or any other teaching and learning topic.


 

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Anwen Burk