FRESH KEYS FOR THE CLASSROOM

There are those who say change for the sake of change never works. But over a 15 to 18 week term, change for the sake of energy is often necessary.

Professors often feel like they are locked in for the whole semester to all the things that they first begin. But that doesn’t have to be the case. An addendum to the syllabus or a new imaginative concept can often serve to make a course more fascinating and more educational.

Here are five things you can begin in your classes today; five keys to being a different (and better) teacher than you were when the term began.

1. Tell your students that beginning today you are going to raise the bar higher in the course. You’re going to add a new level of challenge and complexity. What you, the prof, will find when you do this is that while the students will have to work harder, the ones who truly want to learn will always rise to whatever realistic height you set.
   
   
2. Ask students at the end of each class session: What have you learned? Then hand out small note cards and ask each student to write a single sentence about the one important concept or idea they learned during that class. Do this after every class.
   
   
3. Come early to every class so that when most students arrive you are already there.  Sit among the class and talk to them as they enter. Make it enjoyable and worthwhile for them to be a bit early. Work at discovering ways to make your class a place where students like to be, and where they love the educational value and enjoy the camaraderie. Often you can ask students themselves for small suggestions about this.
   
   
4. Emphasize to students that right now in their lives being a student is their job. Tell them you’re going to make the course more like a job. Absences for any reason should be communicated to you before class either by email, text or phone. Simply missing class without notice is unacceptable. Explain that poor performance can result in a warning. A student can get fired. Then follow through with this for the rest of the term.
   
   
5. Assign seats. Designate a couple of students each class to organize this. Seat students alphabetically by first or last name, by birth sign, and even boy-girl. And if you really want to make a class interesting, have students seat themselves in order of perceived grades.

Courses are about being interesting in all sorts of different ways. And it’s the profs job to lead that effort.