Check in with Students Regularly
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What is this connection?
Check in regularly. Pay attention to student behavior and track student progress. Empathize with students. When a student is struggling, intervene.
Outcomes:
After exploring resources in this module participants will be able to:
- Explain the importance to building connections of checking in regularly with students
- Discuss ideas for checking in across various course modalities
- Give examples of ways to use student progress as a means to check in with students
- Discuss ways to empathize with students (need competing non academic interests here)
Let's read!
Why this connection works:
Evidence from studies of online courses Links to an external site. tells us that caring behaviors such as responding to students quickly and soliciting their feedback encourages students to persist.
Be intrusive; be proactive. We can take the initiative to reach out to students, rather than waiting for them to reach out to us.
All Modalities
Checking in regularly is one of the best ways to demonstrate caring and build relational capital with students. Send them an email to express support, to check on any support needs they may have, or perhaps supports they may need during Covid.
Flower Darby, in Small Teaching Online, thinks of it as checking on a simmering pot, stirring often, tasting to see whether to add more salt. Your interactions in class can be minor. The important thing is to be present, and to make sure your students know it, on a very regular basis. (Darby & Lang 2019)
An easy and effective way to check in is to send them an email through Canvas to ask what you can do to support them and ask how they are doing.
At the same time, such check-ins can accomplish an important educational goal that you may have, such as following through on missing assignments or providing feedback on a project.
Harris III & Wood (2020) suggest that perhaps particularly important in our current environment is to check in with students who disappear or stop attending class. (This is something that you could also encourage the class to do as well - asking them to check in on classmates who may not have attended recently, or classmates you sense could use a caring check-in from one of their peers).
Another reason for checking in might include recognizing/validating good behavior, such as increased participation in discussion forums, improvement in grades, and timeliness in submitting their assignments (see "Validation" below).
Make sure everyone is recognized at some point.
Formative Assessment or Classroom Assessment Techniques
The goal of formative assessment is to monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback that can be used by instructors to improve their teaching, and by students to improve their learning. More specifically, formative assessments:
- help students identify their strengths and weaknesses and target areas that need work
- help faculty recognize where students are struggling and address problems immediately
- give students voice and agency
- give students have opportunity to share personal experiences – how is the content engaging them? affecting them?
Here are a couple examples of how you could use formative assessment as a means of 'checking in' with students. For more ideas, visit the formative assessment page on the LTC website.
- Minute paper: After a class session or a reading assignment, students submit the main ideas that stood out to them and the questions they still have. This could be done on paper as an 'exit ticket' for an in-person class, or submitted via Canvas.
- Muddiest point: Students can write down (or post in the Zoom chat) their muddiest point at the end of a class. Summarize these a bit during the beginning of the next class period, and address the most common points.
Class Meeting Greeting
This idea is borrowed from our K-12 colleagues. Each day, especially for the first few class meetings, stand at the door and greet each student as they come into the classroom. Use their name and share a greeting like, "Glad you are here today," or "Thanks for your great post to the discussion in Canvas."
Campus Resources
There are many resources available for students on campus. One of the best ways to support students, those who are excelling and those who are struggling, is to refer them to these wonderful resources. Even better, walk them to the services, introduce them by name, and help them connect with someone there.
Academic Affairs (and your Canvas shell) provides a link to student resources that are available on campus. Consider sending out individually to your students, so they receive them from you, which demonstrates care.
To learn more about resources available to students on campus, you can visit the Campus Resources page in the DP Faculty Advising Canvas shell.
Validation
Look for opportunities to validate students’ effort, progress, and persistence. This can be part of regular feedback provided to students. Recognize improvements that students have worked to achieve, either observed or that they mention, such as improvement in grades, progression in a sequence of courses, and so forth.
Examples (Harris & Wood, 2020):
- Validating effort: “ I can see you have really worked hard on improving your grades.”
- Validating persistence: “You’ve come a long way working through the math sequence. Don’t give up. I believe you can be successful.”
- Validating ability: ”You earned a high grade in that class. I knew you were capable of doing so!”
- Validating expectation: “I expect an ‘A’ from you next time.”
Remote Teaching
Another option for checking in regularly is to use the Canvas “message students who….” feature. This is a way you can give students feedback on their grade from an assignment, quiz, or anything else in the grade book. Just go to your grade book, find the item you want to give feedback on, and click the three dots next to it. Then click on “message students who”, and it will bring up options to message students who scored either less than or more than a certain number of points.
If you have any questions on setting this up, you can learn more on the Canvas community page for this feature Links to an external site., or get in touch with Educational Technology.
Next, formative assessment – if you’re using Zoom, there are lots of opportunities to find out how students are doing. You can ask a question of the class and have them silently vote “yes or no” by clicking on those buttons at the bottom of the participants panel. Or use polls as a way of checking in with students to track student progress.
Or, during the last 2 minutes of your Zoom session, you could have students type in their “muddiest point” into the chat panel….or type in something they’d like to see reviewed next time, or so forth.
In Canvas, you could set up a weekly check-in forum, with room for questions and comments.
For asynchronous classes, let students know which days or how many days after a due date they’ll receive feedback so they don’t feel unsupported and “out there on their own”.
Empathy
Meeting students where they are is about compassion. Try and recall any of your own personal struggles when you were in a new, different and challenging environment, as many of our students are.
Showing empathy to students is a great way to build a positive relationship with them. Some key ways to express empathy are to listed to students carefully when they have a concern. Ask open-ended questions to help expand, and not constrict, the conversation. Use reflective listening to ensure you understand what they are saying, and to convey to them that you are interested in engaging on the topic or concern with them. To avoid blame or finger-pointing, try to use "I" statements and not "you" statements.
Understood.org has some great resources Links to an external site. for empathizing with students. Or, download their one-page handout Links to an external site. and keep it handy.
Reference:
Darby, F. & Lang, J.M. (2019). Small teaching online: Applying learning science in online classrooms. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Harris III, F., & Wood, L. (2020, March 27). Employing equity-minded & culturally-affirming teaching practices in virtual learning communities [Webinar]. CORA Learning. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMrf_MC5COk&t=19s