How Can I Increase Student Buy-in in My GUR?

by Kiik Araki-Kawaguchi, Assistant Professor, English, WWU

Common challenges in teaching larger courses (GUR)

In teaching my recent GUR (around 60 students), I felt I struggled to gain the student trust, commitment, attendance, and involvement that I was used to in my smaller major courses (around 20 students).

I suspect I’m not alone in these feelings, and my GUR was relatively small compared to those of my colleagues in other disciplines (folks who attended my presentation shared that they teach GURs of 100-250+ students).

To note a few aspects of the predicament of teaching large-lecture courses:

Physical space (of lecture hall) might not be ideal for interaction or collaboration
Limited interaction = some students may feel lost in the crowd
Accessibility challenges; is appropriate tech available?
If GUR content is seen as unrelated to student’s projected major, will they bring the same open mind and enthusiasm to class?

Student worries, doubts, uncertainties

As outlined in Promoting Inclusive Classroom Dynamics in Higher Education, Kathryn C. Oleson notes a few aspects of the predicament of our students (i.e. how our students show up to our courses):

Self doubts about academic abilities
Feeling like an impostor
Uncertain sense of belonging
Loneliness
Alienation
Homesickness
Fixed mindset
Anxiety around stereotype threat

This is probably an obvious point to many of my colleagues, but my thinking here is that student anxieties around their academic abilities, impostor syndrome, and social struggles are further exacerbated by the predicament of large-lecture
courses. Therefore, I believe inclusive teaching methods to be critical when working in a large-lecture (GUR) context.

Additionally, I believe attention to ADEIAR (accessibility, diversity, equity, inclusion, anti-racism) is a very practical approach to improving engagement and learning in the large-lecture context. I feel just a few strategies lead to significant gains.

Below, I will detail a few inclusive teaching strategies (for you to remix depending on your class) aimed at increasing student buy-in. As I am a relatively new faculty member, I tend to lean toward practices that are:

Practical
Easily integrated into daily activities
Completed in a short amount of time

“Inclusive practices = student buy-in = learning”

The above is a formula I keep on a post-it near my desk. It represents my belief that if the desired outcome is student engagement and learning, I need to stay mindful of inclusive practices that help students feel welcome, invited and necessary in the classroom. The three practices I’ll detail here are:

Learning student names
Highlighting student work
Integrating student suggestions

Learning 60 names

A few things I’ll note here: I messed up student names on many occasions, and I felt students were pretty forgiving here. My underlying goal here was to communicate that I was trying, that their names were important to me, and I believe this came through even when my memory did not. I also asked students for help on this undertaking.

I feel I must also acknowledge that what works for 60 students may be ineffective for those of you working with 100-250+ students. I’ve been told name cards and seating charts can be useful here, though I can’t speak from personal experience. I will keep this predicament in mind and report back!

I feel learning student names has innumerable benefits, including:

Promoting student belonging
Creating a welcoming classroom environment
Mitigating student impostor syndrome

I’ve always had a poor memory for names. My mother (a Kindergarten teacher for over 30 years) told me if I forget a name, it’s ok to call them “Sweetie.” But my brain, at default, would likely know about 90% “Sweeties” at the end of the quarter. Here are the methods I used to help me remember preferred names in my GUR:

I talked to 7 new people every meeting, by classroom area
- Ask an easily-answerable question related to a topic of the day
- Example, “When you were a child, who was your favorite superhero?”
- Students respond with preferred name, pronouns (if they like), answer to question
- This takes about 7 minutes per class
Directly after this, I gave the quickwrite of the day (usually about 5 minutes)
Writing time students used to gear up for conversation, I used to write down student names and pronouns. And, if I could remember, their answer to my question of the day (I’ve been told associations are a good memory trick too). Then, I would take out my photo roster and try to circle the student photos of those I recognized.
I studied my photo roster again after class
Sometimes I would print this out again and circle the names of those I remembered.

Highlighting student work

Some scaffolding that helped me highlight student work:

Assigning of regular (weekly) low-stakes writing
Creating some email language requesting student permission to use their work in lecture
Dedicating some class time to review of previous meeting

Every week, my students completed “sketches” i.e. low-stakes writing and reflection on course content. Typically sketches were extensions of the quickwriting they began in lecture.

Sketches were “public” in CANVAS, so that students were encouraged to think about writing for an audience. Additionally, it battled the anonymity of the large-class environment. I was able to connect student names to ideas, and students were also tasked with learning each other’s names when commenting.

In review:

This communicates that their ideas are central to how we’re all learning
Communicates that I am engaging with their work
Affirms their ideas, makes them feel they have multiple modes for participation
I’m learning their names, they are learning each other’s names

When reviewing ideas from previous sessions, I pulled quotes or ideas from student sketches and put them in my lecture slides. Prior to this, I asked for student permission. Generally, I feel this makes students feel pretty good. Here is some sample email language:
Hi Jamie! I found the ideas contained in your last project to be key and inspiring. Would you mind if I used (XYZ, section, quotes) in an upcoming lecture? I can redact your name if it would make you feel more comfortable. Thanks!

Integrating student suggestions

This comes from an idea I got from Debi Hanuscin, a brilliant professor over at SMATE (science, math and technology education).

In the first weeks, I asked students these questions:

Could you talk to me a little about your favorite classroom experiences (subject of the class aside)?
Could you talk to me a little about the activities that you feel help you to learn best? Talk to me about your favorite assignments.
Can you talk to me about some of your goals? What would you be excited to focus on over the time we have?

These questions can be deployed as sketches, or one could create a shared collaborative document (Google Docs) that collects responses.

One can also use an exit-card approach (I do this in WEEK 5). Some sample language:

At the midway point, I like to ask folks to consider a “STOP / START / CONTINUE” for our learning activities. What is something that isn’t working for you as a learner? What is something you would like to try? What is something that is working for you that you’d like to see continue?

The goal here was to create a well of desired content and engaging activities where I could orient my teaching. Although this did take time to gather and read initially, I sense it saved me time and brain power later in the quarter.

Some of the benefits include:

Reiterates that everyone is working on the same team
Communicates that student goals and interests drive course design
Students are not anonymous, not impostors; they provide key contributions to the learning experience
Improves class culture and vibes
Improves teacher morale (to use a cooking metaphor, it felt good to serve things up the way students liked)

Additional strategies for strengthening student buy-in

I’d like to thank (TLCo-op team) Justina Brown, Lauren Nicandri, Lee Posthumus, AJ Barse, (TLCo-op faculty mentors) Kamarie Chapman, Christina Gutierrez-Dennehy, Jennifer Riepl, and all the educators that shared in this presentation. During debrief, folks shared a number of additional ideas to strengthen student buy-in. Their work is quoted here:

I have used online polling to demonstrate certain concepts in my 275 person class
Find a fun way to start the day, German Expressionism and Beyonce edited together, and discussion
I tie in their interests outside of school into the lesson, thankfully I have small classes and it’s easier to do
I like to show a music video that relates to the topic of the day, to help ground into the space
I like to play music to get the class going – vary the type/style
I also use online polling to engage students. I also do a lot of small group work, and sometimes do a pair/share between 2 groups
I collect information about the languages students know/use/have as heritage languages and then refer to them throughout the quarter
I always asked students for a favorite song as part of a “student info form” and I made a playlist out of it that I would play as class began. I did say I had the right to eliminate songs that were antithetical to our course ADEI topics
At the start of the quarter, I like to have students share their “expertise” in a 3-minute slideshow presentation