Welcome Back to School! Survey Your Students on the 1st Class

Almost every year at the Lilly Conference on College Teaching there is at least one session on teaching that first class of the semester. Different suggestions for getting over the first hump have been proffered over the years.

After teaching what students might vote as the “Worst Subject on Mars,” I’d like to pass on a few ideas on how to set an appropriate tone, classroom atmosphere, and connection with your students. This blog focuses on students’ perceptions and expectations. Future blogs will address what you can do to meet or exceed their expectations and connect with them.

What are your students thinking? Usually you’re prejudged to be guilty until proven innocent from the get-go. A few of their negative thoughts might include the following:

“Why do I have to take this course? It doesn’t relate to my major!”
“Now I know why this course is required; no one would elect to take it.”
“What hoops is this prof going to make me jump through this semester?”
“This subject seems boring.”
“I bet this prof is boring.”
“I wonder how difficult this course is going to be.”

Why guess what your students are thinking? Ask them. You can conduct a survey online before your first face-to-face class or live during the first class. Do this before introducing yourself or the course to them. Don’t contaminate their initial impressions.

Here are 6 steps to surveying your students:

1. Ask them to type their 3 feelings or impressions of the course in single words or phrases. In class, students can list them anonymously on a 3 X 5 card.
2. Collect and compile their responses.
3. Sort the impressions into 3 categories: positive, negative, and neutral.
4. List all of the different impressions in those categories.
5. Count the total number of impressions.
6. Compute the percentage of impressions in each category out of the total.

Here is the typical distribution in my stat courses, undergraduate and graduate, semester after semester: ~75–80% of the words are negative, 10–15% positive, and ~5% neutral.

Report your results to the students in the second class. I start with the negative list, which usually includes entries such as boring, painful, ugh, confusing, tedious, yucky, and excruciating. Keep in mind my undergrads have never taken a course in stat. Positive words are good, better than calculus, and fun. Neutral words include ambivalent, whatever, and don’t care. The list, especially the negative words, is a terrific vehicle for humor because many of the students think they are the only ones who have negative feelings about stat. To find out with laughter that you’re not alone and, in fact, in the majority provides a release of tension and drop in anxiety levels. They’re already having fun just thinking: “We’re on this Titanic together.”
My next blog will discuss how to use this information and turn the negative attitudes around 180 degrees.

COPYRIGHT © 2009 Ronald A. Berk, LLC