A New Community Waiting to Be Built

Classes for Penn State's spring semester started on Monday, and so far, I've had two sessions with my new students. This morning I reflected on how, after 22 years of teaching, I still love what I do. I love engaging with students. I'm not sure how many people can say this after two decades, but I'm in the exact career I want to be in. I'm doing exactly what I love to do.


Each semester has its own rhythm -- the early weeks where everyone feels out the class, the familiar middle when we're in a groove and know our routines, the three-quarters slog when motivation wanes, and the last weeks as we sprint (trudge? limp? plod?) toward finals and grade submissions. Right now, I focus on these initial review-the-syllabus, forge-our-routines, and get-to-know-each-other days.

Because here's something that I've learned: a good classroom atmosphere doesn't just automatically happen. As an instructor, you get to shape how it happens. You work to ensure that when a classroom environment does emerge (because it always does, perhaps except when you're on Zoom), it's healthy. These opening days are the perfect time to work toward this end.

On the very first day when I walk into the room, warmly greet the class, and head toward the podium to pull up our materials on the projector, I notice how students sit silently. They're still bundled from walking across campus in the cold. They're masked. For some of them, you only see a horizontal sliver of their faces at eye level underneath their winter hats. They're entirely unfamiliar with each other, and nearly all of them kill the minutes before we start by turning toward something safe and familiar: their phones.

That's when I offer my first instruction of the semester. As I pull off my own coat and drape my scarf across the back of my chair, I say, "We'll get started in just a few minutes, but for now, take a moment to introduce yourself to the person beside you. Learn their name. Then turn to the group behind you and learn their names, too."

It's so basic that I feel foolish writing it here, as if what I'm doing is special when, in reality, it's remarkably simple, but those few statements completely change the atmosphere. The room comes alive. Students talk. A group in the back laughs. Two people in the corner realize that they come from neighboring high schools. My materials are now ready, but I linger longer, happy to observe them forming connections, knowing that actual classroom work is being done in these moments.

They're a community -- and although they don't realize it yet, they're just waiting to be built. I've never had students balk when I ask them to greet their neighbors and learn names; they dive in like they've merely been waiting for someone to give them the permission to do so.

For the first two or three weeks of class, I start every session this way as I make my way toward the front of the quiet classroom. "Good morning! How are you? We'll get started in a few minutes, but until then, why don't you refresh yourself on the name of your neighbor and greet someone else in the row next to you?"

Every single time I make this request, they play along. Within a few weeks, I won't need to prompt them. When I enter the room, some of them certainly will be on their phones, but they'll also be talking. They'll be greeting each other by name.

And it all starts on the first day, in those first minutes. Bundled in their jackets with their heads lowered toward their phones, they might not appear like it, but they're simply a community who's waiting for that initial nudge to actually be built into one.

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