Why Connection Comes First
One of our most important tasks in the opening stages of a semester is to learn about our students. Learning about what they already know and getting to know them as people help us teach more effectively and humanely. In fact, Lambert and Felten insist that a sense of social connectedness is a prerequisite for learning. In order to take intellectual risks, students need a sense of community and security. Building that kind of rapport starts with getting to know our students—and helping them get to know each other.
Students feel isolated in their classes more often than we might think, especially in high-enrollment courses. Asking students to complete some tasks in groups or pairs, right from the start, will habituate them to collaborating and working actively. They may (at first) feel awkward about interacting with peers they don’t know well, so we need to make meeting classmates part of the assignment. We can ask them to introduce themselves as the first step in our activity instructions, especially for the first few weeks.
Interactive activities are also learning opportunities. When designing them, it helps to return to your goals for the course. What do you want students to learn together? How will they benefit from hearing one another’s perspectives, from explaining their reasoning to a peer, or from elaborating on their developing ideas? Working in small groups gives them structured time to think aloud with peers, and to provide each other with immediate feedback. Together, they can practice doing the kinds of thinking important in your discipline.
Interaction can be something that you plan in advance, or you may just ask students to turn and talk informally to help them gather their thoughts or check their understanding. When you plan in advance, you can be more strategic, thinking through design decisions to fit activities to your context. For example, group work can take up most of a class session or just a small portion. It can be graded or ungraded. You might ask students to do some steps individually and others together (e.g., they may read and write on their own then get together to discuss and analyze). An activity may begin out of class and continue in class, or it may begin in class and students finish it out of class. A wide range of apps are available to help.
Working together has both cognitive and social-emotional benefits for students. Creating a classroom community where students feel connected and like they belong can even make it more likely that they will persist in your course or in college. Learning about each other helps them learn about themselves too. Joshua Aronson, a social psychologist at NYU, argues that curiosity–simple human curiosity about each other’s individual lives and experiences–is one of the most important antidotes to the stereotypical thinking that often divides us.
If you’d like support to incorporate more opportunities for interaction into a course, please contact us for a consultation by emailing pro-teaching@fsu.edu. We look forward to working with you!
UPCOMING EVENTS
Provost’s Showcase of Scholarly Teaching
Friday, April 4th | 1:00 – 5:00 p.m. | SSB 201/203 | More details on our website
We’re delighted to announce that CAT and FSU Libraries will host the second annual Provost’s Showcase of Scholarly Teaching on April 4th, 2025. This event is an opportunity for you to share your teaching expertise and innovations with the larger campus community. Even if you’ve never thought about presenting at a pedagogical conference before, you likely have strategies and insights that could be of benefit to colleagues. We invite you to apply to host a roundtable discussion or present a poster.
If you would like to submit a proposal, please fill out our Application Form. The application due date is January 31, 2025. We look forward to working with you!
2025 SPRING FACULTY READING GROUPS
This semester the Center for the Advancement of Teaching is offering the following faculty reading groups. Each group will meet once a week for three weeks to discuss the books in sections. We hope you can join us! Please register here.
Tuesdays: 2/4, 2/11, 2/18
1:00–2:30 p.m.
Location: TBD
Print copy, delivered through interoffice mail
In Teaching with AI, Bowen and Watson explore how AI is changing education and offer practical guidance on integrating AI into teaching and learning. They share suggestions on topics such as enhancing creativity, addressing academic integrity, and designing effective assessments. This group will provide a collaborative space to explore the transformative potential of AI in education, discuss innovative teaching strategies, and a range of share experiences. (AI helped to create this description.)
Tuesdays: 2/13, 2/20, 2/27
1:00–2:30 p.m.
432 Diffenbaugh
Print copy, delivered through interoffice mail
How do I get my students’ attention? How do I help them to go deeper, to make connections, and to feel empowered by their own learning? James Lang’s book, now in its second edition, explores the science of learning and shares with us small changes we can make that will have a powerful influence on our students’ learning. Join us as we discuss a variety of practical tools and techniques that can help us answer these and other teaching questions.
E-book available for free through FSU’s libraries.
Wednesdays: 2/19, 2/26, 3/5
1:30–3:00 p.m.
Dirac Library Conference Room
Print copy, delivered through interoffice mail
There has been a revolution in teaching and learning over the past generation, and we now have a whole new understanding of how the brain works and how students learn. In The Missing Course, David Gooblar offers a practical guide to teaching and learning packed with research-based insights to help students learn in any discipline. From active-learning strategies to course design to getting students talking, in this group, participants will find ideas and tips they can use in their classrooms right away.
E-book available for free through FSU’s libraries.
Fridays: 2/21, 2/28, 3/7
2:00–3:30 p.m.
432 Diffenbaugh
Print copy, delivered through interoffice mail
John Warner is the author of Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities and editor of McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. In his latest book, which will be released on Feb. 4th, Warner addresses the topic on so many of our minds: How can we teach with writing in the age of generative AI? He argues that although computers can produce text, important aspects of writing are uniquely human. Emphasizing the ways humans think, feel, and learn through writing, More Than Words can inform both our teaching and our relationship with our own writing. In this group, we’ll discuss those topics and more. We hope you can join us.