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Why Didn’t Anyone Do Today’s Reading? – Engaging Students by Building Relationships 

Article by Pamela Rivers

The semester is well under way. Your students have taken their first exam. Some are active and excelling. Others have stopped coming to class or are not completing the assigned readings. Welcome to the end of September.

Maybe you thought this time it wouldn’t happen. Everyone was eager and excited and answering your questions for the first few class sessions. Now, however, you are right back to encountering some disengaged students doing what feels like the bare minimum, and it’s eating away at your passion for teaching. Is this the fate for our classes, or are there more or different things we can do to reach students?

First, to be clear, engaging students is not magic, and although it should be informed by science, in many ways it’s also an art form. Like all art, some of it appeals to us and some of it doesn’t. No one can promise you a room full of fully engaged students who always turn in their homework, laugh at all your jokes, and come prepared every session. No trick or strategy works for every person, every time. There are, however, certain strategies you can employ to make it more likely your students will listen, attend, and want to do well, for you and for themselves.

Relationships Matter

In “Culturally Responsive Teachers Create Counter Narratives for Students”, Zaretta Hammond argues that relationships can be the “on ramp to learning.” She says that relationships can be as important as the curriculum. One research study cited in Relationship-Rich Education showed that alumni who had a faculty member who cared about them as a student felt more connected to their current jobs. Unfortunately, only 27% of graduates surveyed had someone in that role. This powerful research shows that developing relationships with our students not only engages them, but can also lead to their success down the road.

That is compelling research, and it can take a lot less than you might imagine to make a real difference in the lives of your students. Students want to know that you care, and they want to feel welcome in your classroom. Research suggests that colleges and universities need to invest in a “relentless welcome of their students,” (Felton and Lambert, 2020) but faculty can lead the way in their individual classrooms by integrating activities that build relationships and encourage engagement.

Getting to Know You Surveys

Before class starts, whether online or face-to-face, send out a “getting to know you” survey through Canvas. This survey can ask questions specific to your discipline, but it is also a place to show interest in your students and what might hold them back from being successful. You could ask about your students’ pronouns, how they prefer to be contacted, any worries they are having about your class, and any specific needs they have. You can find a lot out about a student by simply asking. Need a ready-made survey? Reach out to CATL to get a copy of our Canvas Template, which includes a sample survey.

Ice Breakers

When you hear the word “ice breakers,” you may groan. The truth is a silly, active icebreaker is a wonderful way to get face-to-face students moving and is a start to building classroom community (Sciutto, M.J., 1995). A people bingo game, for example, can help get students talking and will help them get to know each other. If you are teaching online, there are plenty of icebreakers you can do asynchronously, including video introductions or a game like two truths and a lie.

Class Norms

Developing a set of agreed-upon class norms (expectations or guidelines), both for your students and you, that everyone is involved in creating goes a long way toward building both trust and community. Next semester, take part of your first class session to have your students help you develop norms. If you need some ideas for what these class expectations might look like, check out the “Trust” section of this CATL toolbox article.

Make It Matter

Find ways to tie your assignments to students’ goals, lives, and futures. If you ask me to spend 2 hours every week looking up dictionary definitions for words I’ve never heard of for a random quiz that doesn’t seem to have any bearing on what I’m supposed to be learning in your course, I am unlikely to be motivated to keep spending my time looking in the dictionary. If, on the other hand, you explain to me the importance of the words I’m learning, how they will be useful in my next class, and even how they may show up on a licensing exam for my future career, my motivation changes.

Unplanned Conversations

In face-to-face or synchronous online courses, you can use the time before class or while students are working to chat with those students who are unoccupied. Mention something you liked about their work, ask how their weekend was, and show a genuine interest in them. You never know what you might learn in these conversations. It may not lead to anything, or it may lead to a student feeling seen. Establishing a friendly and open line of communication with students in this way also makes it more likely that they will feel comfortable coming to you if they have a question or issue in the class.

Give Your Students a Chance to be Successful

As you build up to the major coursework in your class, have small, low-stakes assignments that give them all an opportunity for success and to receive formative feedback. As students get a small taste of success, they will want to feel that more.

Use Your Students’ Names and Pronouns

Another way to make a student feel seen is by how you address them. Ask your students what they would like to be called and what pronouns they use in a “getting to know you survey” or some other activity at the start of the semester. If you are teaching a face-to-face class and are good with names, try to memorize their names and pronouns during the first few weeks and use them frequently. If you are teaching online or have more students than you can remember for a large face-to-face roster, ask students to complete the name pronunciation activity created by CATL to help instructors with names. In face-to-face classes, also consider having students create name tents that they can pull out for class use. These small steps show that you care about making them feel comfortable in class, and help students learn the names of their peers as well.

Engagement is Key for Student Success

There are no silver bullets for engagement, but hopefully there are a few things on this list that you can consider adding to your teaching practices. And the truth is, engagement matters. According to Miller in “The Value of Being Seen: Faculty-Student Relationships as the Cornerstone of Postsecondary Learning,” engaged students experience more academic success and have higher persistence rates. Keeping our students engaged gives them the best chance at success.

References

Cohen, E., & Viola, J. (2022). The role of pedagogy and the curriculum in university students’ sense of belonging. Journal of University Teaching & Learning Practice, 19(4), 1–17.

Felton, P., & Lambert, L. (2020). Relationship-Rich Education. Johns Hopkins University Press.

Hammond, Z. (2018, June 18). Culturally Responsive Teachers Create Counter Narratives for Students. Valinda Kimmel. September 12, 2023, valinda.kimmel.com

Lu, Adrienne. (2023, February 17). Everyone Is Talking About “Belonging,” but What Does It Really Mean? Chronicle of Higher Education, 69(12), 1–6.

Miller, K. E. (2020). The Value of Being Seen: Faculty-Student Relationships as the Cornerstone of Postsecondary Learning. Transformative Dialogues: Teaching & Learning Journal, 13(1), 100–104.

Sciutto, M. J. (1995). Student-centered methods for decreasing anxiety and increasing interest level in undergraduate. Journal of Instructional Psychology, 22(3), 277.

Resources on Dual Domain Pedagogy and Growth Mindset

Recently Dr. Angela Bauer, former UWGB instructor and current Vice President of Academic Affairs at High Point University, visited our institution and presented her research regarding the equity gaps in introductory science courses. We invite you to engage with the readings and videos below to learn more about dual domain pedagogy (both cognitive & affective) and its relationship to equity gaps in the college classroom. If you would like to talk more about how you might use this information in your teaching, feel free to request a consultation with a CATL member. Please remember as you consider these resources that growth mindset interventions should not be used to de-legitimize real structural, systemic, economic, etc., obstacles that students face.

  • On Mar. 4, 2022, Angie Bauer visited the Green Bay campus and gave a presentation on her research titled Tapping into the Affective Domain of Learning to Close Classroom Performance Gaps. View the recording by clicking on the link and then logging in with your UWGB credentials.
  • You can also read the study that Dr. Bauer contributed to, Fostering Equitable Outcomes in Introductory Biology Courses through Use of Dual Domain Pedagogy. The article describes Dr. Bauer’s work at High Point, including growth mindset interventions and the impact on equity gaps.

A great place to start learning about growth and fixed mindsets is with the work of Carol Dweck, who is the psychologist best known for research on this concept. Watch this 50-minute talk on YouTube which Dweck gave in 2019 at the Annual Convention of the American Psychology Association, or, for a shorter watch, check out her TED Talk from 2014. You can also read the first three chapters of her book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, online for free. These are, of course, just a starting place—to dig deeper, check out the research articles in other sections of this guide.

  • For a good overview of growth and fixed mindsets, including specific examples, research findings, and even videos illustrating educators using growth mindset language in class, check out this guide from the MIT Teaching + Learning Lab.
  • Also found on the MIT Teaching + Learning Lab site is Dr. Elizabeth Canning's 1-hour talk about growth mindset and research surrounding the impact of instructors’ mindset on student success. There’s also a written summary of some of the relevant research on this site. Note some of her full articles are included in the "Influence of Instructor Mindset on Students" section of this post.
  • Academic Affairs at the University of Arizona has a series of "Learning to Learn" strategies for teaching and learning, including an overview of growth mindset with videos and practical tips for instructors.
  • One potential growth mindset intervention, if used well, is normalizing struggles and even failure. Read about Stanford University’s institutional attempt at reinforcing this idea and watch brief videos from the project.
  • Transforming Education has some sample strategies for supporting students' growth mindset, as well as a growth mindset toolkit. Although intended for K-12 educators, these sites provide some helpful, practical tips about encouraging growth mindset as an instructor that could be adapted for higher education, as well as video clips, PowerPoint presentations, and graphics.
  • Dr. Bauer referenced the affective domain of learning in her "dual domain pedagogy" intervention. The affective domain is an extension of Bloom's taxonomy created by psychologist David Krathwohl, one of Bloom's colleagues. We are typically more familiar with the cognitive domain, but this document by Indiana University provides a nice overview of the affective realm.

A critical research finding is that instructor mindset influences multiple factors for student success, including students' motivation, academic performance, and whether growth mindset interventions will be effective on them. These results are important to consider as we transition to becoming an access institution. If we expect students will be less capable as we embrace that mission and believe that ability is fixed, will we produce the poor results we expect?

  • It is vital to remember that growth mindset is not about telling students to “think positive” and expecting it to achieve miraculous results. For one thing, growth mindset is not the same as “thinking positively.” For another, students may experience a number of obstacles to academic success, and no one is suggesting mindset will overcome issues such as poverty. Living in poverty, for example, can be associated with a greater fixed mindset, for understandable reasons. That said, a national study suggests that children with a growth mindset had some buffer against the effects of poverty on their academic performance.
  • For another interesting read, these authors explored how the mindsets of 875 organic chemistry students changed across a semester. In their analysis of students' responses, they found that students attributed their own beliefs about the malleability of intelligence to five main factors: academic experiences, observing peers, deducing logically, taking societal cues, and formal learning.

Growth mindset research is one of those areas that has endured some criticism as part of the social science “replication crisis.” For those of you interested in really digging into that, the articles below are good resources. We also include them because they do point to some of the nuance involved in this work. For example, the success of growth mindset interventions on a student's academic performance may also be tied to the student's trust in their instructor, as indicated in the third article.