Fostering Community in the Classroom
To help students thrive, we can make teaching choices that affirm students’ identities and that encourage connectedness and community-building.
Creating Community Guidelines Together
Developing community agreements and guidelines with students can help reinforce expectations for engaged, critical, and equitable discourse during class.
Community agreements can be framed around broad questions:
- What behaviors, actions, and practices help students feel supported to contribute to a learning space?
- How can instructors and students demonstrate respect and dignity in the classroom?
- How can instructors and students collaboratively define and practice confidentiality?
- How can instructors and students exercise active listening, especially during moments of disagreement?
See some specific examples of language you can include in your community guidelines.
It is never too late to establish community agreements; if this is not something you did at the start of the quarter, pause at the start of your next class and let students know you would like to take some time to clarify the expectations you have for one another to help ensure the classroom is a space that fosters deep learning and belonging.
Community agreements work best when they apply to everyone involved in a class, including the instructors and TAs. It can be helpful to remember that having one’s ideas challenged by students can be uncomfortable and may trigger defensive responses; being cognizant of our own response patterns ahead of time is crucial.
Read more from the University of Michigan on Community Guidelines and from UMass Amherst on Participation Agreements.
Practices that Build Classroom Community
- Taking time for check-ins and icebreaker activities during class sessions to give students a chance to connect with each other
- For asynchronous engagement like discussion boards, use prompts that invite students to share about their lived experiences, respond to each other, and ask each other questions
- Creating and sharing a sense of belonging story with students, invites students to recognize how they themselves can and have overcome challenges.
- Making a brief video and/or friendly landing page in Canvas to welcome students to your course and identify yourself as a partner in their learning. Here’s one example of a “humanized homepage.”
- Supporting students to set up peer networks of care and support, such as a course Discord server or Canvas Discussion threads, so that students can study together and check in on each other throughout the term. When doing so, be sensitive to different students’ privacy needs and preferences, by setting clear expectations for which kinds of contact are appropriate and which are not, and always allow students to opt in or out of sharing personal information.
- Encouraging peer-to-peer collaboration and relationship-building with activities like structured group work, pair-shares, discussion prompts, and/or structured peer review processes that allow students to learn from each other’s works-in-progress. Here are 50 ideas for using Google docs for collaborations.
See Also
Equity-Minded Teaching
Trauma-Aware and Wellness-Oriented Teaching Practices