Simple Ways to Build Community in an Online Classroom
By Dagan Karp and Darryl Yong
Over the last year of remote online instruction, we’ve both desperately missed all of those informal in-person interactions with students before, during, and after class that help to build a sense of classroom community and a welcoming atmosphere.
Given that there’s lots of great advice out there on how to build community in an online classroom, we wanted to share a few more light-hearted, low-effort things that we’ve tried to do to bring back some of that sense of togetherness.
We usually start class a few minutes early with some silly or fun optional activity. Successful activities we might keep using, or else we’ll switch up the activities so that we can get a good cross section of students to show up. An extra benefit is that students showing up a few minutes early increases the likelihood of starting class right on time! Here are some of those activities.
Share a page of a coloring book from your screen and use Zoom’s annotation feature to let everyone in class color it in at the same time. This has generally been a huge hit for us. (Bonus: Save that image and post on your class website or learning management system so that everyone can remember the silliness.) This unicorn is a recent example, starting with this blank coloring page. Julie Rorrer has some wonderful coloring pages honoring history-making BIPOC scientists in STEMM. Also, Edmund Harriss and Alex Bellos have some wonderful, free mathematical coloring pages.
A collaborative coloring page from Math 19, Fall 2020 at HMC.
Play a game together, especially ones where everyone can work together instead of competing with each other.
Recently students have really loved playing The New York Times Spelling Bee, which is a fun word puzzle that changes daily. (Share your screen with the puzzle, then students yell out or send chat messages with potential words while you type them in.)
Sporcle has lots of trivia quizzes, such as this one about human bones. (Operationalize this similar to the Spelling Bee game above.)
Crosswords, Sudoku, Scattegories, etc. (Note on crosswords: We aim to pick activities that a variety of different students can participate in, and since solving crosswords can be a pretty niche skill we don’t use this very often. Use https://squares.io/ to allow everyone to concurrently enter in clues on their own device so you don’t have to type in answers.)
Play music! Federico Ardila writes about a beautiful exercise: play a song on the first day of class, ask students to free associate their reactions, and then to imagine how the mathematics classroom can become a place that evokes similar reactions. But on any given day you can play music before class starts, and ask students for their song suggestions too (as Federico suggests).
Spending long periods of time on Zoom can be quite tiring. We both take frequent breaks during class. During those short breaks, we encourage students to get up and stretch, get something to drink or snack on, or just chit chat with others. Another option is to start a community collection of funny cat videos or other silly things that you can quickly watch during a short break. You and they will be surprised how much more attentive everyone is after a quick refreshing mental diversion. (And there seems to be research to back it up.)
Take into account your students’ circumstances and contexts in building these experiences in your classroom. For example, not everyone is able to join class a few minutes early. To make the classroom feel more inclusive and welcoming, we try to optimize activities so that those who can and want to join are more likely to join. Ask students for their suggestions of fun activities, especially from those who you want to feel included. Be careful not to only create “in-club” kinds of experiences that further divide the class as that is the opposite of what we’re trying to accomplish. We emphasize that these are optional fun things and don’t affect students’ learning or our assessments of them. Of course, engaging with students in other ways (such as office hours or emails) is still important.
Finally, we also acknowledge that as two men, and senior faculty in our departments (one White and one Asian), we have greater latitude to be able to be silly with students in our classes than others might. And of course, being silly may not be your style. But, we hope that this post might have given you some simple ways to increase the sense of having a shared community in your classes.