First Days
One of the most helpful pieces of advice I got during my pedagogical training as a graduate student was that students tend to form expectations for a class very quickly, so anything you’re going to ask them to do regularly in the course of the semester, you should ask them to do on the first day.
I’ve long taken this advice to heart in methodological terms, and I think my experience has shown me that it does help to model right away some of the essential units of classroom time, which in my case usually include different sizes of discussion group, collaborative activities, and brief, structured presentations of information that I call mini lectures.
Increasingly, I’ve also thought of the advice in philosophical terms: what are the larger orientations toward learning that I want students to practice in the course of the semester, and how can I bake those into our first hours together? I want to focus on two of those approaches in this post - collaboration and risk-taking - in the hope that you might find something of interest for reflecting on your own practice.
First, I hope students will come to see the classroom as a collaborative project, where we all share responsibility for discussion and where the result of our time together will depend on what each of us is willing to share. In order to model this, I try to build in first-day activities that allow students to see their collective insights amounting to something that is greater than the sum of its parts.
One way I like to do this - especially in classes with a more specialized subject matter - is to guide students in gathering a set of big questions and initial ideas. In a Women’s Theatre Writing class, for example, we start by reading an article from the Guardian about why women are underrepresented in positions of power in the theatre world. In small groups, students then share what surprised or interested them about the piece, along with some things they’d like to learn more about. When we return as a full class, I ask for volunteers to share questions that came up in their group as I record them on the board – occasionally tweaking the form of the question to connect it to larger-level concerns or narrating what kind of question we might consider it to be (historical, political, literary, dramaturgical, theoretical etc.). I then ask the class about what hypotheses they might want to test - possible answers, which I stress they needn’t feel committed to - and I write those on the opposite side of the board. I take a photo of the chart they create and add it to our course site, so we can check back in with our questions as the semester goes on. In this way, I hope to show students that their curiosity drives the course, and what they learn will depend in large part on what they decide they want to get out of our time together.
In my Intro to Literary Studies class, I take a similar approach to a group close reading, which for the past few years has been a study of Chen Chen’s wonderful poem “I am reminded via email to resubmit my preferences for the schedule.” I project the poem on a shared Google doc, ask students to read it silently, and then I read it out loud, asking each student to highlight one word, phrase, image, or break that seems interesting or confusing to them, even if they’re not sure why. This gives us a new text of the poem, where we can see the class’s hot spots light up in a range of colors. I then take volunteers to pose their questions or offer observations about particular moments in the text, transcribing the class’s ideas using the comment function on the shared doc. By the end of the close reading, students can hopefully see how, together, we have come up with ideas about the text that are more complex than the reading any single one of us could have generated alone. I often point this out to them, along with the observation that questions, even seemingly simple ones (why does the author use so little punctuation? why are the lines short? why does the word “long” get repeated?) can generate even more fresh, dynamic conversation than finished thoughts.
This leads into a second major approach I hope students will develop toward the classroom: embracing it as a place to take risks rather than a place to perform mastery - a place where what we don’t yet know is often even more important to the project of collective learning than what we think we’ve got down pat. This is a big ask, especially early in a class, as many students may not yet know or trust each other, and being wrong in front of a group of our peers is deeply scary.
One way I try to help us warm up to the idea - especially in the theory courses I’ve taught, where we will all have to practice working through misunderstandings in public - is to start the first day’s introductions with a targeted icebreaker: what’s one thing that, no matter how many times someone has explained it to you, you just can’t seem to “get”? This is my chance to tell them that something inside me absolutely refuses to store information about even the simplest car repairs: as soon as someone starts trying to describe to me how to change a tire, my brain starts playing the hold music. It’s also, I hope, a chance for the whole class to reassure each other that in the space we will create together it will be fine if the ideas we share are sometimes uncertain, incomplete, or even wrong. Indeed, it will be essential. We often learn more from what doesn’t work than what does, and giving each other access to our mistakes is a much harder, more generous, and in many cases more valuable contribution than offering only the answers we feel sure are right. After all, if we could all understand this stuff perfectly on our own, there’d be no point in coming to class.
Today is the first “first day” in a long time that’s not a first day for me. As I adjust to a new stage, I share this post as a way of taking my own advice: if I want to set myself the goal of continuing to practice the collaboration and risk-taking offered by the classroom, I should do it on the first day.