As Hrach has shared in this newsletter before, the pandemic’s emergency remote instruction made that mind-body connection more salient for many professors. How might they put it into practice in this new semester?
Hrach says it’s helpful to scope out the space where you’ll be teaching before class begins. “Get familiar with your space,” she says, “and what options are open to you.” Many classrooms are designed for the kind of passive listening Hrach’s work discourages. Lots of instructors have made a habit of pushing against this — one common practice is to move the chairs into a circle in a smaller room. Another idea, Hrach says, is to request oversize sticky notes to use in place of whiteboards, if a room isn’t already equipped with them.
Hrach then asks herself before each class period: “How could we encounter this material in a way that would make us get up and move?” That helps spark the variety of classroom experiences she knows promotes learning.
This doesn’t have to be elaborate. Students can move to different stations, do a classroom gallery walk, or even just get up and take their handout to a group across the room instead of passing it around. Simply moving about the room helps students feel as if they belong there, Hrach says, and helps them feel connected to their classmates.
It’s also important, Hrach notes, to explicitly tell students that you’ll be expecting them to move around — and why. The idea that a college class means sitting down and listening to a lecture is deeply ingrained. Students might resist doing something different, and offering them an evidence-based explanation would go a long way.
“It might be a pleasurable experience for you to sit there and let my words wash over you,” Hrach says. But actually learning the material takes effort — the student’s effort. It’s better to do some of that work in class time, she adds, than to struggle through it alone afterward.
There are so many forms that moving around during a class might take. To help professors think through those options, Hrach will be working on an embodied-learning tool kit, one of the projects she’s undertaking during a Fulbright research year at Carleton University, in Canada. She welcomes questions and ideas from our readers: You can write to her at hrach_susan@columbusstate.edu.
Syllabus Day
After going over the syllabus on the first day of class, professors often ask students if they have any questions. In a recent tweet, Evan Kutzler offered a different way to pose that question, which he’s found leads to more responses: “What do you need to know before you can come back to class confident you will do well?”
There’s nothing magical about those precise words, noted Kutzler, an associate professor of history at Georgia Southwestern State University, when I reached him by email. The phrasing works, he thinks, because “it implicitly acknowledges that there may be some stress in the room, and offers a safer environment to speak up in front of 35 strangers.”
“I’m always trying to figure out how to connect students to the class from Day 1,” he said.
How do you help put students at ease in the beginning of the semester? Share your example with me, at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com, and it may be included in a future newsletter.
ICYMI
- Ungrading need not be all or nothing. In a recent Chronicle advice piece, Michelle D. Miller makes four “moderate” suggestions for professors looking to test the approach.
- Students aren’t always as tech-savvy as colleges anticipate. In a recent article, our colleague Taylor Swaak explores what one university is doing to help.
- In an advice piece for The Chronicle, James Lang explains what The Odyssey’s emphasis on hospitality can teach us about welcoming students to class.
Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us, at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com or beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.
— Beckie
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