Fostering connection: strategies for supporting first-year students

How do SFU instructors help set up their first-year students for success?

We asked winners of the 2022 Excellence in Teaching awards and 2023 3M National Teaching Fellowship for their top strategies and the response was clear: creating connection opportunities.

Yuthika Girme, Associate Professor, Psychology: Assigning semester-long groups

At the beginning of the semester, I will be randomly dividing my students into five-person groups, or Peer Pod. They are encouraged to sit with their Peer Pod during lectures and activities designed for them to complete together as a group each week. My aim with the Peer Pods is to allow students the opportunity to create connection and community with their peers in a consistent and meaningful way throughout the semester so that they learn from each other – both in terms of class context, but also for reflecting on different perspectives, opinions, stories, and histories that each unique person brings with them.

Sarah Johnson, University Lecturer in Physics and Associate Dean, Learning in the Faculty of Science: Making office hours a group activity

I renamed my office hours to “extra help hours” and hold them in a small classroom instead of my office. This has really helped encourage more students to seek out support because they don’t feel like they need to have a big important question to come see me, they can just drop in and listen to what questions I’m already working through with their peers. In fact, sometimes I leave they stay and continue to study as a group. It’s also great for me because then I don’t have to explain the same thing ten times.

Johnson is also teaching a course, First-year Success Strategies in Science, designed to help students develop the skills they need to navigate learning in higher education.

Danielle Murdoch, Criminology, Senior Lecturer: Interactive online videos = more class time

In my course Canvas shell, I have weekly muddy points videos to help students grapple with some of the trickier course concepts. To motivate students to watch the video ahead of class each week, I’ve added 'small-stakes' graded mini quizzes to each video through H5P. H5P is a digital tool that allows educators to create and share interactive content, such as quizzes, presentations, and videos, directly within web browsers--like a platform that helps make online learning materials more engaging and interactive for students. I am hoping these online engagement activities will increase the likelihood students come to class prepared with a foundational understanding of the week's material so we can spend our in-class time applying content and developing our learning community.

Diane Finegood, Professor, Centre for Dialogue: Establishing a culture of curiosity

One facilitation technique that I plan to use this fall to even the power balance between instructors and students is called Question Storming. I invite students to respond to the course material by posing questions. The key part of this activity is that none of the questions are answered during the question storming, it's only about asking them. My goal with this activity is to establish a classroom culture as a community of curious-minded people that are in it together.

More information on a similar activity, called Quescussion, can be found on the Centre for Educational Excellence’s Great Ideas for Teaching page.

Joanna Woo, Lecturer, Physics: Moving office hours to Discord

I set up a discord server for every one of my classes. Discord is a social platform hugely popular with my students where they can meet each and connect via voice/video chat rooms. So in addition to our in-person office hours, we have "Discord hours" where the TAs and I answer questions on dedicated channels within the Discord course server. What’s great about this model is Discord allows students to ask questions anonymously and answer questions for each other. Students love it and there's always tons of activity on every server I've created.

Brian Fraser, Senior Lecturer, Computing Science: Day one introductions

Students learn better when they can lean on each other, so on the first day of class I pose an opinion question loosely related to the course content. I’m in computer science, so it could be something like “What’s the best thing software has been used for?”. The key is that I not only ask them to discuss this question with the people around them, but I also ask them to exchange names, emails, discord IDs or whatever. I want them to get in the habit of talking to each other and building community so that no one feels like they are doing this alone.