Start of Term Guide

You’ve crafted learning objectives, designed your course, updated your syllabus, and set up your course Canvas site and now it’s the start of term. At this point, you may be wondering what else you can do to support your students and set the class up to run smoothly.

In “How to Teach a Good First Day of Class,” James Lang, author of Small Teaching and Distracted, argues that “you want to give students a taste of the engaging intellectual journey they will undertake in the coming weeks — and you have great flexibility in how you go about it.” He recommends thinking about four principles as you prepare:

Curiosity: how might you spark students’ curiosity and “invite them into a fascinating intellectual journey”?
Community: how can you both “humanize yourself to the students” and “get students talking to one another”?
Learning: how might you dive into the learning right away?
Expectations: what should students expect of the course?

In this guide, we address these principles by offering eight things you can consider doing in the first week of term.

Learn about your students

Start of Term Surveys

If you didn’t create a pre-course survey, it can be useful to collect information from students in the first week of class. This sort of survey can include getting to know you questions (nickname, pronouns, hobbies, extracurriculars, etc.) as well as more targeted questions about background knowledge (familiarity with subject matter, courses taken), preparedness and confidence, and potential barriers.

For this type of survey, we recommend Canvas’s quiz feature which can be used to create ungraded or for-credit surveys.
- If your course includes a significant group project, however, you may also want to explore Dartmouth’s Team Formation Tool. See our article on Setting Students Up for Successful Group Work for important considerations and strategies!
The Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning’s guide to Developing a Pre-Course Survey offers a robust list of questions you might want to include.

Course Photo Roster

The Course Photo Roster is a Canvas tool created here at Dartmouth to display student names, ID photos, pronouns, and majors for instructor reference. You can find it in your Canvas course’s left navigation menu. It’s a great tool for putting faces to names.

Encourage your students to get to know one another

Icebreakers

Interactive, low-stakes activities such as icebreakers can be incredibly helpful in establishing “positive interdependence” and classroom community (Holbert, 2015).

Cornell University’s “Getting Started with Icebreakers” guide includes activities sorted by classroom outcome, from introductions to highlighting diversity to getting started with course content
Columbia University’s Center for Teaching and Learning provides another great resource for social icebreakers.

Classroom community-building strategies

Aside from icebreakers, there are a variety of strategies you can use to build and maintain classroom community throughout the term, including:

Informal group office hours
Moving classroom furniture into circles or groups, rather than front-facing rows
Plan ahead about how you will address conflicts and hot topics
- Harvard’s Bok Center’s guide on Classroom Dynamics offers thoughtful questions to help you acknowledge and counter bias in the classroom, for example
Set class norms together (see the section on norms, below, for more)

Be strategic when you introduce yourself and your teaching team

Although many of us––especially those of us with marginalized identities––may have received advice as graduate students or young instructors to craft tough or no-nonsense teaching personas that help us “get our bluff in” during the first weeks of a course, evidence tells us that transparency and a certain measure of professional vulnerability are often better tools for classroom relationship management.

James Lang argues that “our teaching personae should be consistent not only with our convictions about our discipline, but also with our classroom practices and the learning objectives we set for our students” (“Crafting a Teaching Persona”).

In a chapter of What the Best College Teachers Do titled “How Do They Treat Their Students,” Ken Bain outlines a variety of behaviors that work together to create “an interactive atmosphere in which students [can] ask questions without reproach or embarrassment, and in which a variety of views and ways to understand [can] be freely discussed.” These include:

“Openness…about their intellectual journey, its ambitions, triumphs, frustrations, and failures.”
Emphasizing the importance of questions and that “others will appreciate the questions they ask.”
A “frequently expressed sense of awe and curiosity about life.”
A sense of humility and a view of students as “fellow travelers” on the journey for knowledge, and/or future colleagues.

In addition to embodying these views, consider communicating them to students either explicitly or through your approach to the course. In “Make Your Classroom Inclusive from Day One,” Duke’s Learning Innovation team suggests some questions to consider:

What should students call you?
What pronouns do you use?
What is your educational background?
What do you find compelling about your field?
Why do you enjoy teaching?
Would you like to share about your personal life, interests, and/or hobbies?

Our team in Learning Design and Innovation here at Dartmouth would also encourage you to consider creating a Canvas bio (and sharing bios for TAs and Learning Fellows) for students who miss the first day of class.

Be transparent about goals and expectations

Inclusive teaching practices often emphasize transparency. The Universal Design for Learning framework, meant to support accessibility in course design, outlines the need to clarify language and symbols and to decode field- and discipline-specific use of notation and symbols, for example. The Transparency in Learning and Teaching (TILT) project frames transparency as an equity issue. And pedagogical considerations of first-generation and international students might account for the hidden curriculum, or, as this Boston University Teaching Writing resource defines it, the “amorphous collection of “implicit academic, social, and cultural messages,” “unwritten rules and unspoken expectations,” and “unofficial norms, behaviors and values” of the dominant-culture context in which all teaching and learning is situated.”

Consider using this Transparent Assignment Template to bring increased clarity to your class assignments.

Set class norms

Class (and group) norms are a strategic admixture of ground rules, shared values, community agreements. In other words, they are an academic social contract made explicit, and they’re immensely helpful not only in providing a concrete tool for classroom management, but also in giving students a sense of how they should interact and work with one another.

The Stanford Teaching Commons provides an incredibly thorough resource on Setting Norms and Commitments which we highly recommend. But classroom norms don’t need to be complicated. A memorable example is B.W. Speck’s “3 Be’s of Collaborative Writing”:

B.W. Speck’s “3 Be’s of Collaborative Writing”
Be Responsible (as an Individual)
- Meet deadlines
- Schedule sufficient time to make quality a priority
- Plan, plan, plan––including planning for problems
Be Organized (as a Group)
- Prepare a schedule and monitor it as the project progresses
- Complete assignments on time
- Counsel group members who are late to meetings and who do not understanding the meaning of deadline
Be Honest
- Tell group members what you can and cannot do
- Express your reservations about the way the group is approaching the project
- Counsel weak group members

Establish a rhythm

What can students expect your class will be like, period to period and week to week? You likely considered this when designing your course putting together your syllabus, but it can be helpful to be explicit about your structure in the early days of the course. One significant way to do so is to begin as you mean to go on: for example, in a course that will rely heavily on student discussions, get students talking right on day one. For more examples, see “The Rhythm of Online Teaching,” by Dartmouth’s own Josh Kim. While this is, as the title suggests, geared toward online teaching much of the article is relevant to face-to-face classrooms as well.

Plan to keep checking in

See our resource on Mid-Course Evaluations for more about how and why to design a mid-course survey.
Plan one-on-one meetings with students as a getting to know you activity or to discuss projects and course progress. Stanford provides some tips for how to organize them in How to Conduct One-on-One Meetings with Students.
Use class exit tickets to capture snapshots of student progress.
- See Brown University’s Sheridan Center website for sample exit tickets.

Sign up for a one-on-one consultation with a learning designer

If you have questions about any of the strategies mentioned here, or would like to consult with a learning designer, please don’t hesitate to book a consultation with us!