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It's been a long semester. During this last week of classes, I asked my first year students what made the biggest difference for them this term. These are 3 things they said made a big difference for them: (1/...)
1 a) Connecting with the professor / other students and having a sense of community in the class. This happens in a number of ways, but in my courses, two things that helped were regular "check-ins" via synch meetings, emails, and discussion posts;
1 b) encouraging students to have a space that is "by students, for students" (without the prof) -- they exchanged contact information and made an Instagram group to connect with each other, which they said made a big difference for community-building.
1 b) student noted they even made connections with students that they didn't know were in their other asynchronous courses.
2 a) Making the avenues to approach the professor clear; being approachable can mean a lot of things. In my course, a few simple things included synch weekly office hours, one-on-one appointment availability, and early formative feedback;
2 b) To me, being approachable also means sharing a few personal anecdotes for balancing work from home (brief pet story, incorporating walks, etc.) in ways that show the invisible work that goes into things for all of us;
3 a) And finally, incorporating aspects of care is something I've become all the more attuned to over the term. The things faculty and students are dealing with are incredible. Having some flexibility on deadlines and making extensions easy to request was important for students.
3 b) I'll be honest, this does mean more juggling on the prof's end; and I do have some hard end-of-term deadlines to get marks in. One thing is to know where the flexibility can be on your course outline and where it's more difficult to have longer extensions in advance.
Ss do appreciate all of the efforts that they know go into this support. The class surprised me by saying 'we have something for you,' turned their cameras on, and held up hand-illustrated THANK YOU signs in our last class. I was floored.
So keep going -- keep doing the good work, the hard work, and know that students see and value all of the efforts that go into making the experience meaningful.
