What to Do on the First Day of Class

Will students explore case studies or primary sources? Look at artifacts or other objects? Participate in a particular type of discussion? Build a first-day lesson plan that reflects the kind of thinking and communicating you will be doing in the class around a topic that engages students’ interest.

Our courses are often an attempt to answer a puzzle, problem, or question, but we don’t always lead with these provocations. Use the first day of class to build students’ curiosity by exploring those puzzles, problems, or questions. What makes them interesting, and how will the course approach exploring or solving them?

Our students do not arrive in our classrooms as a blank slate. But especially in courses that are not part of a structured sequence, it can be hard to know what students already know—or what they think they already know. Use the first day of class to conduct an activity designed to activate prior knowledge or assumptions: a brief anonymous pre-test, for example, that students grade with a peer and then turn in. Not only does this kind of activity help you understand what, if anything, your students already know, it helps them begin building a structure for the new knowledge they’ll gain through your course.

The ideas above are all adaptable to a large class with a few specific tweaks:

Active lecturing

Dive right into your initial lecture, but include questions, check-points, and opportunities for students to deploy their newly gained knowledge. Make it clear how the course will actively engage them in their own learning process throughout the semester. One creative idea, from a GW professor in Romance, German, and Slavic Studies, is to display an infographic with key information covered up and ask students to predict what that information is. Students could discuss in pairs or respond to a poll.

Use polls

Polls can be part of an active lecture, and they can also help you with surfacing prior knowledge and assumptions. Polls have the benefit of being able to be shared on a screen so that you can talk through what the students as a whole are thinking and explore where the course will build on their knowledge. You can use a web- or app-based tool to poll students digitally or simply ask them to raise hands or hold up fingers.

Introduce other members of the teaching team

If your large course has Graduate Instructional Assistants (GIAs), Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs), or undergraduate Learning Assistants (LAs or ULAs) as part of its teaching team, use the first day to introduce them and position them as experts and assistants for successful learning in the course. Perhaps they can help facilitate an activity, share what excites them about the course material, or tell a story about their own experience in a similar class.

Many of the above ideas are adaptable to synchronous or asynchronous online environments. You could add a puzzle or question to the introductory module, invite students in a synchronous course to engage with the kind of work they’ll be doing throughout the semester, or add an ungraded (or graded for participation) prior knowledge check quiz to Blackboard. You could add polls via a Google form or other method that students have a few days to respond to before you share the results. If your online course has a teaching team, make sure to introduce them via Blackboard, too.

If you feel like you are bad with names, you are not alone. But learning your students’ names creates a more welcoming environment and is an action that students value. Consider doing a roll call, using the Blackboard photo roster, and/or having students either provide their name each time they speak in class or display nametags. Start using students’ names as soon as possible to call on them, answer their questions, or mention a contribution that they made earlier. Over a few semesters of concerted effort, you may find that learning student names gets easier.

Use an icebreaker to learn a little bit about who is in the classroom and why they registered for your course. Are your students majors or nonmajors? First-years or seniors or a mix? What led them to choose the course, and what about it are they most interested in? You could even invite students to move around the room, standing in a particular spot based on their year at GW or major, or finding another student who shares a course-related interest with them.

You, too, are part of the classroom community! Use the first day of class to humanize yourself by sharing your academic journey and passion for the subject. What are your research interests related to the course? How did you first get excited about your field? What class sessions are you most excited to teach? Do you have a cool story related to your field—time on an archaeological dig, a breakthrough in the lab, or a way your research has been applied in the world? Introducing yourself as a person with interests and a history of learning helps students feel more comfortable engaging and seeking help.

Along with you beginning to learn names and faces and getting to know who’s in the room, build some time into the first class period for students to start to get to know each other. Have students discuss an icebreaker question in small groups, then rotate to another partner or small group for another question. Remind students to introduce themselves to their groupmates during any small-group discussions you have in the first several class sessions. A minute or two of informal conversation pays dividends in helping students feel comfortable engaging in challenging discussions later in the semester.

Name tents

The perception that an instructor knows a student’s name can make a large class feel a little smaller and more personal. In a 2017 study, the use of simple name tents—folded card stock with a student’s first name written on it that they put in front of them on their desk—in a large-enrollment biology class helped students perceive that the instructor knew their name. Students reported that the perception the instructor knew their name made them feel valued and increased their investment in the course, even if the instructor did not actually know their name without the name tent.

Use polls

Find out who is in the room by using polls or having students raise their hands. Creating a word cloud of what interests students about the course can help you see patterns.

Small groups

Even in a classroom with fixed, auditorium-style seating, students can turn and talk to a neighbor or small group. In a large class, having a classmate or two whom they know can help them feel less anonymous. Setting a timer on the screen for the length of the discussion can help manage the challenge of having to call a large group back to order.

If your online course includes synchronous components, many of the suggestions for in-person environments are adaptable with the use of breakout rooms and/or Zoom polls. Zoom includes people’s names, so that makes it especially easy to refer to your students by name.

Use video or audio introductions

In an asynchronous environment, you can go a step farther than the typical discussion board introduction by inviting students to record short video or audio introductions using the VoiceThread tool available in Blackboard. You too should introduce yourself in this way, which can help humanize you to your students.

Give small groups of students a list of items to find on the syllabus: When are your office hours? What is the homework for Tuesday, September 22? What is their first major assessment in the course, and when is it happening or due? What are their options for getting help in the course? The collaborative aspect makes this activity a great icebreaker!

Invite students to engage with different aspects of your syllabus in small groups or as an out-of-class activity using a Google form. For instance, which class session interests them most, and why? What learning objectives do they feel most and least confident about? What is their reaction to a particular course policy? What study strategies do they think will help them succeed on an exam? Unlike a scavenger hunt or quiz, an interactive syllabus is less about identifying specific elements of the syllabus and more about gathering student reactions, impressions, and learning goals. You can use this information to shape or adjust elements of the course.

The syllabus scavenger hunt (above) or syllabus quiz (below, online classes) would both work well in a large class.

Syllabus quiz

Turn the syllabus scavenger hunt described above into a Blackboard quiz that is worth only a few points. Consider having it be automatically graded but then using a short video or voiceover with the syllabus to correct common misconceptions.

Begin with a series of questions and solicit answers from groups of students or all students: What have positive group learning experiences looked like? What about negative environments? How would they like to participate? What should the community do when disagreement arises? When something harmful is said? Combine group responses into a list of class norms that you can refer back to as needed.

Begin with a list of norms

Rather than co-constructing norms from scratch, you can begin with a list of classroom norms and invite students working in groups to propose additions, deletions, or specific changes.

Consider using collaborative annotation

Using a tool like Hypothesis, available within Blackboard, invite students to annotate a document that offers a starting place for norms. What questions do they have? What would they add or change?

Although much classroom technology is standard and GW IT has a webpage for learning about the technology in each classroom on campus, visiting the classroom ahead of time can help you feel confident about where the podium and room computer are located, where you will stand or walk, and even how anything projected onto the screen will read from different places in the room.

Use the mic!

In a large classroom, no matter how loud your voice is, plan to use the podium or lavaliere (lapel) mic to ensure accessibility. Make sure you know where it is and how to turn it on.

Find out who is enrolled in your class! Banner has information on students’ years, majors, etc., while Blackboard has any photos students have chosen to upload. Blackboard also more easily allows students to update their preferred name than the official Banner system.

Use a Blackboard announcement to let your students know that the course Blackboard site is open and that you are excited to meet them on the first day! If you are comfortable doing so, you can also introduce yourself with a fun fact about your research or what you find most interesting about the subject matter of the class. And, students love seeing photos of your pets if you have any!