Setting the Stage

I made this edit to my syllabus based on the advice of a senior TA from the English department. Like her, when I was an undergraduate, my assumption was that teachers and TAs didn’t care much about individual students. I was always more engaged in classrooms where professors made it clear that they were interested in their students. Here, I want to show that I find individual students and their backgrounds to be an important part of the classroom community.

Additionally, this is one way that I've attempted to make my classrooms more comfortable for a greater diversity of students. When students traditionally under-represented in biology and those with different learning styles don't feel comfortable or participate less in class, the class loses an opportunity to learn-through-diversity. For example in introductory biology labs students are engaged in a variety of critical thinking tasks, including experimental design, data analysis, and scientific writing. These are all tasks that benefit from incorporating broad ranges of ideas, views, and writing styles.

I’ve followed this discussion of the syllabus by giving the students a survey* and using their responses as an opportunity to get to know a bit about them as people outside the classroom. Then, I give them opportunities to ask me about my life outside of being a TA.

I don’t believe that these small adjustments to my first day of teaching create a comfortable classroom Learning Community on their own. Rather, it sets the stage for me to follow through on working to aid students in attaining the course learning goals. When students want to discuss their assignment grades, I’ve often pointed back to the syllabus to put my feedback on their scientific writing in context of my goal as a teacher and the learning goals of the course. There is often a mutual understanding even when the grade is frustrating for the student to receive. I’ve found that by referring to the syllabus I can turn discussions from point-seeking to discussions about how students can work on their scientific writing, which allows me to follow through on that very goal I’ve written on the syllabus.

Going forward, I want to think about moving beyond a syllabus to a different kind of classroom introductory document that will be more meaningful to a student on the first day of class. For example, retaining something similar to the first few paragraphs of the above syllabus but then including a schematic of course goals and goals for our classroom community (e.g., students feel comfortable communicating with the instructor, students are comfortable contacting others for class resources). Within this, I think being more explicit about the value of diversity in learning biology helps set the expectation that students will be learning from one another. I hope that it will orient the student to where we are going (in terms of learning material and developing our class community) and how we are going to get there. For now, my experiences thinking about and using syllabi and surveys at the beginning of each semester have helped me think about the importance of the first day of class in creating classroom Learning Communities with participation from a diversity of students.