Classroom community

It may seem intuitive that creating community in your classroom is useful. Research bears this out and details the specific benefits of doing so. Students who feel welcomed in your classroom and have the support of peers are more likely to:

• learn more
• persist in their studies
• report higher levels of satisfaction with their education

Creating community has tangible benefits for learning. In a successful classroom community, your students share common academic goals. Students see their peers as ‘academic friends’ whom they can trust to ask for help and offer support to as needed. They will perceive the classroom as place that allows them to take risks and explore new ideas. Their confidence will grow because they feel accepted for who they are and what they bring to the table.

This sense of belonging and confidence leads to a new ownership of their learning.  Rather than learning to please the teacher or to get an A, they focus on what they are learning for themselves. Adopting such an attitude leads to a mindset that allows for life-long learning. The community you create in your class can affect your students' lives beyond their time at VIU.

How do I begin to create community in the classroom?

Let students get to know you

Obviously, a teacher is not the same thing as a friend.  But often, the distance between teacher and student gives students the idea that you aren’t a whole person with a life of your own. This distance can make students hesitant to connect with you when they need help.  

You’ll have to decide how personal to get—sharing intimate details of your life is counter-productive. Instead, share your excitement about what you teach, why it is important and your hopes for your students.  You can start to open up to students in these days from the first day of class with your introduction. You will also set the tone for the classroom community with how you ask students to introduce themselves to you and their peers. 

Learn who your students are—and act on what you learn

You can ask students to answer some questions as a way to get to know them and welcome them to the course.  The questions might include things like:

• What is the name and pronoun you want us to use?
• What brought you to this course: what do you hope to get out of it?
• What are your previous experiences with the content—either academic or out in the world?
• What are the academic things you’re good at?
• What academic or other skills do you want to strengthen?

Such questions welcome the students into the course as themselves. They can help you to see where they already are in relation to the course learning outcomes. You can use this knowledge to make groups or teams based on diverse skills and assets. It will also help you give relevant and personalized feedback throughout the course.

Build community through place

Acknowledging territory

Acknowledging territory is an important step in creating a respectful and inviting space for students. Understanding why we do land acknowledgements and protocol is vital. Your acknowledgement does not hold value for community building if you see it as an empty gesture. In her article What are land acknowledgements and protocol?, Heather Burke writes about the meaning behind land acknowledgements and protocol. The article includes a video of VIU Elder Uncle Gary Manson’s lesson on protocol.

Learning Outside

Learning in relationship to place goes beyond a territorial acknowledgement at the beginning of class. Any opportunity to bring your students outside is an opportunity for community-building. Research shows that being in nature and with others increases student wellbeing. It also shows that time outside with others strengthens relationship building. Think about taking time outdoors for:

• a group reflection 
• a group activity 
• a short break 
• a whole class 

Build Community between Peers

Interaction and small group work

Provide students chances to solve problems together on the first day of class and throughout your course.  Make those problems hard enough that it takes more than one brain to solve them.  Students learn the difference between “what the teacher says” and “what the teacher does” in the first few hours of a course. If you spend the first day together talking but not having students interact, they will expect the rest of the course to be primarily lectures. This assumption will make it much harder to engage them in activities later. On day one of your course, give students direct experience of the kinds of interactions you plan for them throughout the semester.

Students come to us with existing experiences and knowledge. Leverage their experience to solve complex problems even if they do not know anything yet. They can speculate, imagine solutions, come up with hypotheses and make recommendations. Once they’ve tried to solve a problem, what you tell them next becomes much more relevant. They will have already exercised their intellect and imagination and be ready to build on that with that you teach them. 

It's important that questions you pose for groups to solve are complex enough that a single student would struggle to answer on their own. This helps students see that they are an asset to the discussion and that they can learn from and trust their peers.

Develop a Class Contract

For group discussions and activities to succeed, students need to accept shared rules of conduct. You can come up with rules and impose them, but co-created rules will be more successful. Letting the students design their rules of conduct means students are: 

• less likely to see rules as arbitrary
• more likely to abide by the rules
• more likely to hold their peers accountable to the rules

Instead of something imposed by you, co-created rules are a shared expectation for what makes a good learning environment. 

 Put students into small groups within the first week of class, and ask them develop a set of rules they wish to live by for small or whole group discussions.  Discuss the various options the groups come up with. Have the larger class whittle them down to a manageable number (3-6) of the most important rules that then become the class contract.  

Introduce Structured Peer Feedback

Students can learn a lot from their peers through direct feedback or by comparison of their own work with others. Offer opportunities for peers to give feedback on drafts or early versions of significant assignments. 

Guide peer feedback. Students often do not initially know how to give effective peer feedback. This can be because they do not understand what makes a high quality assignment or because they do not trust that peer feedback has value. Many students may still identify the teacher as the one who dictates what quality means. Many may have had negative experiences with peer feedback. To convince students of the value of peer feedback, several elements must be in place.

1. Everyone needs to have a shared definition for the assignment criteria. This includes a shared idea of what is excellent, acceptable and insufficient. Having everyone evaluate the same set of sample assignments can be a useful way to help everyone get on the same page. 
2. You can help students by providing a rubric or set of guiding questions they will use as a framework when giving feedback. If you can co-create this framework with students that is even better. Co-creating the rubric or guiding questions helps students have a better understanding of the criteria. It can also help to make grading feel meaningful rather than arbitrary.
3. Students should do structured reflection on the peer feedback they have received. They need to be able to decide which parts of the feedback are relevant and how to adopt those suggestions. Equally important is the ability to determine why some feedback is less useful and why.
4. You should establish an expectation that students incorportate peer feedback into future drafts. They should turn in the peer feedback along with justification for why they have chosen not to incorporate specific feedback. 

Build student confidence 

Delay grades and enhance practice

Students sometimes perceive grades as arbitrary or as a power their instructor holds. Grades can create fear, distress and lack of self-confidence. This does not help with students’ learning in your class. You can reduce much of the anxiety around graded work by: 

• giving students opportunities to practice skills in ungraded activities
• providing opportunities to self test knowledge before testing them on it
• build in activities that reward experimentation and curiosity over correctness
• allow students to submit drafts for feedback (this can be from you or peer feedback) 

These opportunities to learn free from worry about grades  help build student confidence. Once students feel confident in their skills and knowledge you can assess their work. This will likely mean you have fewer assessed activities. It will also mean those assessments a better gague of students' actual learning and skills. 

Communicate regularly

There are many ways to communicate with your students. It is important to decide before your class begins what tools you will use to communicate which types of information. Convey this to students early and often so students know where to go to find information. 

We would love to talk with you about building community in your classroom. Send us an email at learnsupport@viu.ca.

Additional resources

• Building a classroom community
• Building community – presence in the classroom