Embedded Files
Purpose, Identity, Values
In a thriving community, all aspects of the community relate back to its core purpose.
Make the values of HPL and its community more visible in the course. Strive to communicate them openly to its members at least once during the course, and to embed them in its content and structures wherever possible.
Find ways to explicitly encourage community and community involvement. This could be in the form of a statement in M0 that people who are proactive and set aside time to engage in the community also get the most out of it.
Understand and leverage students' curiosity to learn more about one another in designing the community activities and offerings of the course
Member Identity and Success Definition
Grant students ownership of the community as befits their role as valued community contributors. This doesn’t mean they should control everything, but rather that they should be cognizant, and course structures should reflect, the reality that the community emanates from them, not from the offerings of the course.
Commit to a success definition that takes responsibility for supporting all students in the course, regardless of background, and meeting them where they are at. Student experience of community is the surest metric of course community success.
Create better supports for diversity.
Brand: Tone, Vision, Language
Use the language of co-ownership to make students feel like welcome contributors to the community.
Invite students into the discussion about the course community vision.
Use external communication and brand to create an enduring space for the stories and successes of the HPL Community.
Onboarding/Welcome/Initiation
If HPL concentrates on co-creating a sense of community with students as they enter their first HGSE experience, this sense of community will be more present throughout the entire course.
Sense of Belonging: How can students be invited into the course in a welcoming way that draws on their gifts?
Onboarding
Concentrate on creating onboarding processes that welcome the learner into the community, familiarize the learner with the community, and provide support for them to enter the process of co-ownership.
Provide a variety of supports for students to get support in onboarding. Examples: fixed Live FAQ Sessions 2x weekly for HPL onboarding for the first two weeks, a devoted #FAQ Slack channel, Ask me Anything hours.
Offer resources, suggestions, and supports to help them make the most out of the community.
Ask students to introduce themselves by reflecting on their particular strengths as learners, or to create a "Personal Highlights Reel", so they are better equipped to create a positive social identity as they enter the course community. Alternately, students could also identify a feature of their experience that makes their perspective unique and could potentially bring value to the broader community of practice.
Support groups for students, according to special need or generally (e.g., international students, people with families to look after, etc.)
Welcoming/Initiation
Offer a synchronous welcome or initiation event in which students are formally invited into the community.
Include students into the conversation about co-ownership and vision. Create discussion prompts that allow students to be involved in the process of envisioning their cohort's community. Help students to understand that they are the arbiters of the community.
Make sure students have an opportunity to interface one-on-one with a TF or other faculty member.
Create a low-lift Flipgrid or other video service assignment where students introduce themselves and share one fun thing about themselves. Place a 15 second limit on the video so that students can begin to put names to faces and have a low-lift, fun experience of watching videos.
Shared Experiences
Encourage students to form affinity groups, study pods, and other small groups.
Use synchronous modalities for events that benefit from social presence.
Create virtual "Student Lounge" spaces with Zoom rooms where members can drop in and meet up with other students.
Find ways to embed students' gifts and talents in the course through Slack channels and other embedding and support.
In general, find more opportunities for students to share out about what they themselves and what do; center course concepts around students' own experiences. Show preference for events and content that showcase students' experiences.
Course Content
Provide many opportunities throughout for shared ownership of the course and its content.
Center students' work and unique experience in the course. Create opportunities for members to create or share content that is personally meaningful to them.
Encourage students to form small groups and affinity groups. Support student-organized events that give students opportunities to share about who they are and what they do.
Consider the inherent differences, challenges, lifts, and affordances of asynchronous communication when designing discussion prompts.
Seek to create prompts and arrangements of students that are meaningful and engaging. Larger group "cross-pollination" may be good for lower-lift interactions but thoughtful introductions that require members to reflect on their own experience may seem to get lost in the vast discussion space and may work better in small groups.
Offer members more ways to initiate the conversation, such as allowing for different types of responses, or creating an alternative discussion area where students ask their own discussion prompt to other students. (*High-lift version: Jigsaw course content and questions according to student interest. For instance, if 4 TF groups were placed in a single discussion, each group could decide one or two questions.)
Create concurrent discussion opportunities to ideate around the Module 6 Project (find more on that here).
Rules, Roles, and Responsibilities
Rules: Invite students to co-create rules, possibly in TF groups, or ask them to agree to pre-determined rules when entering the community.
Responsibilities: Always connect students' responsibilities in the community back to course values and goals, such as supporting other students' learning.
Roles: Community members' roles should be complementary. Students are responsible for engaging in community, TFs are responsible for making sure students have support to engage in community, and Instructors are responsible for modeling community engagement and creating connections.
Rituals
Be intentional about rituals. Have some type of intentional and thoughtful ritual which speaks to the value of the course for the beginning, middle, and end of the course.
Examples:
Beginning Ritual: Have a welcome ‘toast’ that brings students together into two or three large groups. Have them bring a drink of some significance to them and share out briefly in small breakout groups.
Middle Ritual: Around Module 3 or whenever talking about the project, send an email or communication that explains that in this part of the course, peoples’ experience and efforts as mentors will be very important. Praise the students for the work they have done so far and indicate your confidence that they will succeed in this next area.
End Ritual: Call students together in some synchronous way to thank them for their participation in the course and its community. Grant them some symbol or token, like an HPL pin, that they can now wear henceforth signifying their participation and membership in the community.
Explore ideas for ritual actions to enhance events like discussions, such as always offering a compliment before providing constructive criticism.
Exit Trajectory
Have a concrete exit ritual.
Use the alumni community
Use student surveys to offer research/class-based recommendations for students, moving forward.
Create an enduring community presence that connects the HPL projects between annual iterations.
Decide on a Slack community lifetime. Recommendation: Keep Slack enduring. Allow it to remain as a resource.
Recommendation: Politely remove dropout students from the HPL Slack following the experience but not during the course.
Channels and Platforms
Concentrate on seamless onboarding. An automated message can invite users to introduce themselves in the Slack space and offers guiding principles/rules for congregating there.
To avoid tool fatigue, only introduce one community at a time. Introduce the social-facing tool (Slack) first and academic-facing tools (Harmonize and Perusall) second.
Try to onboard students to Slack and get introductions/community going as soon as possible.
Slack
Have an exit process for dropouts.
Have a plan for the lifetime of the Slack community. Will it stay an HPL community forever, become an HGSE community, or end in July?
Decide whether or not the Slack platform will have a set of rules and what these will be, or if students should be involved in deciding them. Additionally, decide whether or not faculty should join or moderate student-created groups in the Slack.
Harmonize
Experiment with different types of discussion prompts and scales of discussions. (Do introductions work better in smaller discussion groups? Maybe students have the option to periodically return to smaller discussion groups for reflective activities or lower-pressure "journal" prompts.)
Offer alternative discussion prompts where students can ask questions of classmates.
Enduring Learnings, Growth and the Future
Create and curate enduring spaces where the stories of the community can be accessed. This might look like a course blog, website, or social media community to which students and faculty alike could contribute. Students could write about course topics, share about their careers, or describe their experience of being a part of the community. Teaching fellows, instructors, and designers could write about the experience of creating the course.
If super members were put in charge of this course blog or website, they could look for people with unique experiences to interview, or contribute writing, poetry, or other artifacts of value.
In general, find more opportunities for students to share out about what they themselves and what do; center course concepts to their own experience. Key concepts include stories, co-creation, centering student experience, professional identity, and collaboration.
Create enduring opportunities for students to access and display work related to the HPL design project.
Hold on-campus events throughout the year giving students opportunities to showcase what they learned from HPL and how they have put it into practice.
Possibly create social media account, Instagram or Twitter account with semi-weekly links to these blog posts or orienting followers to student research/research in the broader Harvard educational community.
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