Getting to Know Students

Faculty and students getting to know one another helps build a learning community that motivates students to engage in their courses, thereby increasing the likelihood of achieving learning outcomes. Here, we have gathered information on three aspects of getting acquainted:

helping students get to know you
helping you get to know students
helping students get to know each other

This information stems from research, established best practices, and examples from successful instructors in the College of IST. For a quick read, see Chickering and Gamson’s seven principles for good practice in higher education, based on 50 years of research on teaching.

Create introductory remarks (or video) of who you are and what your course is about, including something about you personally
Use short, just-in-time weekly announcements (which could include webcam-recorded versions) from instructor to students
Upload a profile image in Canvas under Account > Profile
Complete the Canvas Bio under Account > Profile with information about you and your contact information
Make note (in class, live; and/or in course materials online) of connections to the larger community – what’s going on in Penn State News, tech blogs, current events, civic events, life events
Make use of multi-media to communicate more about you each week
- Introduce students to your music
- Share memes and other images that resonate with you
- Post cartoons that highlight your sense of humor

Administer a survey
- Get-to-know-you survey, about their goals for the course, their interests in general, or anything else you want to know
- Pre-course knowledge survey with additional items about how they prefer to learn
- Cultural references survey, about their taste in music, sports, movies, books, etc.
- Technology survey, about their uses and/or interests in relevant technologies that you can highlight in the course
Ask for photos and names, and encourage them to update their profile picture in Canvas
Invite students to send you their preferred name and pronouns (he, she, they)
Meet with individual student teams 1-2 times per semester, or more often if your course is small
Post a sign-up schedule for 5-minute meetings during your regularly scheduled office hours, and invite students to meet with you in person or virtually
Create an assignment for students to share their goals for the course and/or their goals for a career
For courses with a synchronous element, invite students to speak during the first synchronous class session—use roll call method and ask for each person to say their name as they like to be referred to and one thing they hope to gain from the course
For courses with a synchronous element, schedule “one-for-fun” activities, taking one minute in class for something fun
- Ask students to share pictures of their pets
- Invite students to respond to a poll about preferred movies, music, or television shows; and invite commentary for one minute
For courses with a synchronous element, join pre-class chatter

Connections to peers in the course
- Assign ice breaker activities (in the beginning) and team building exercises (later), for students to get to know their team members on team projects
- Request that students share information (availability, time zones, team preferences, etc.) that could aid in group formation
- Assign teams to create team contracts in which they list goals for course projects
- Create a Canvas Discussion for students to connect with each other
- Express your support of students using GroupMe or other social tools to stay connected
- Encourage and set up study groups in your course space in Canvas, emphasizing that study groups can help facilitate deeper learning and retention of course concepts
- Create a Google Map on which students can volunteer to place a pin to indicate their hometown or where they currently live.
- Set up a wiki space where students can share, asynchronously, about themselves and about concepts that they find interesting
  - Tip: To encourage participation, assign some amount of points for students to post news articles, social media examples, cartoons, ads, and other artifacts about course-related concepts throughout the semester; and assign points for students to comment on others’ posts
- For courses with a synchronous element, assign student teams time at the start of class; and assign them to share and submit what they did/learned since the last class
  - Tip: Anchor the team session to a meaningful task, or else this strategy will devolve into silence
- For courses with a synchronous element, end the class period with team-time for 3-5 minutes, so that they can make a plan to incorporate whatever they learned from class into their project
  - Tip: Consider assigning a brief (paragraph) statement from each group about one thing from their team conversation that helped students discover new ideas or new perspectives
- For courses with a synchronous element, assign team time for significant activities that students can do to make sense of course content; and keep students in those same groups for several weeks at a time–or for the whole semester
  - Tip: Team time can vary from 2-minute activities to 20-minute activities; consider the difficulty of the task when assigning the amount of time and don’t allow teams to linger longer than they need
  - Tip: To ensure more engagement during small group sessions, assign some amount of participation points for activity completion or require a deliverable that relates to an upcoming assignment
Connections to the course community, at large
- Use VoiceThread to create and share multimedia-based introductions that allow for commenting replies to one another
- Survey students and share the anonymous results of the surveys, so that students can see that they are not alone in lacking knowledge about a topic or having programming experience
- Poll or survey students about how things are going in class, review their feedback, and incorporate the suggested changes that you think are appropriate
- For courses with a synchronous element, establish routines for the start of each class period; for example, choose one of the following:
  - Begin with music to calm, welcome, and/or wake students
  - Begin with game-like trivia, capitalizing on gaming and competitive tendencies
  - Begin with a question of the day related to course content
  - Begin with announcements, including tech news; and allow students to share announcements about clubs/organizations
  - Begin with a cartoon to lighten the mood

Getting to Know Students

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