Welcome back, explorers, to our BCcampus UDL Explorer Challenge Series! Our next challenge is to create an activity for your class that builds community.
Why Is This Important for UDL?
Building community in your courses is vital to increasing student engagement. Students become engaged in class when they feel they are a part of the group and are valued. It is so important to establish a trusting classroom environment where students feel safe to take intellectual risks and talk about what they know and what interests them.
This connects with the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principle of engagement that speaks to fostering collaboration and community. A strong sense of community helps create a positive learning environment where students can be successful.
Our Challenge for You
Share a building-community activity you are currently using or would like to use in the future.
You will find instructions, examples, and helpful resources for how to submit below. We are excited to see what you come with! Happy exploring!
Examples
Here are some examples of activities that build community:
“I like to use an activity where students are shown an interesting picture and asked, ‘What is going on in this picture? What do you see that makes you say that? What more can you find?’ Students can work in groups or together to come up with ideas. This activity encourages communication and collaboration, and most importantly, it’s fun!”
– Heidi
“I like to do a virtual escape room with different cohorts in my organizational behaviour class. I usually do this activity when I teach the topic “Working in Teams.” Students are grouped in different teams on Zoom and must try to escape the room by reading the clues together and figuring out what to do. Students really enjoy this activity. It helps them explore the course concepts and also builds friendships.”
– Venecia
Explore
- The UDL principle: Learn more about the UDL guideline for fostering collaboration and community.
Resources for building community:
- Western University explains the importance of building community and provides some examples on its Building Community webpage.
- The University of Toronto provides practical examples of how to build community in online classes in this Building Community Online blog post.
For an activity, I like to incorporate movement. As a first day get to know you, have students play the name chain challenge. Each student learns the name of the person to their right and left. Start in one corner of the room. My name is XX and beside me is YY. The next person says. This is XX. My name is YY and beside me is ZZ. And then it repeats through every student. Each student is only learning two names but by the end everyone in the class has heard everyone else’s name 2 or three times. To add movement, it could be head turning and looking at the person who’s name is said or it could be using hands to gesture (politely) or it could be stand up/sit down (or similar depending on abilities). With movement, it’s always an invitation to participate (not mandatory). I also like to do something fun just to get everyone laughing and relaxing. Some sort of cross midline movement with hands/fingers and arms. Or a fun video with dancing (in our seat or standing whichever is most comfortable and accessible). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6PP_yucJEo By having these fun brain break moments, as a class we are acknowledging the need to break as well as having a short fun time as a community. This gets students talking and even laughing at me as a way to start to form connections.
Thanks for sharing. We are some pleased you mention movement. Studies show that anytime of movement with learning, increases the learning and helps it to stick. Here is a link to a great podcast on movement and learning.
https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/movement/
I do a lot of breakout/discussion groups in my classes. This includes giving people a small task to work on in partners (group of 2), and then having the partners join with another group to share their ideas (group of 4). Usually these activities are non-competitive and people have the opportunity to share feedback and support each other in revising their work, nso that the end result is a collaborative assignment.
This activity made me think, however, that one of my classes is being a bit neglected because it is slightly more technical. I do have one assignment in that class in which students have had to design a creature suited to a Star Wars planet. On Monday, we will break into small groups according to the Star Wars planets, and students will share their creations with one another. This should be fun. I think for future classes I will also consider incorporating the “What’s going on in this picture” activity because it would fit in well with the course material and allow students to connect with each other.
Thanks for sharing! We love that you have activities that are non-competitive and students are given the opportunity to share feedback and support each other. This is really what learning in a community is about. We are curious to hear how the Star Wars sharing activity goes.
As learning consists of two essential elements: retain and transfer, creating an activity for students is a great way to apply their knowledge to practice with their peers. Also, sharing their interest and ideas naturally builds an environment that provides students with positive energy and inclusivity.
One of the things I used to do was create a community board on one side of the classroom. I post and share some activities on the board to visualize those that remind their thoughts and ideas.
Thanks for sharing. We like the idea of a community board! Students could also be invited to share on. the community board as well.
At the end of some classes, I play a game with the content in an online solution. The game can be anonymous so that people can participate without worrying about being right or wrong in front of others. It serves as a review, but in a fun way that is low risk.
Thank you for sharing. We also find online quizzing/games a fun and interactive way to help engage students with the content. As you have mentioned, low risk is the key to allowing students to relax and determine what they really know.
My favourite community building activity is a 3-2-1 Speaking Activity that I conduct in Week 1 (first class) and Week 8.
For context, I begin every class with a Warm-up Discussion because most students are coming from work or home and need to get into the collaborative mood so to speak, so I give them a low stakes speaking topic to get their creative juices flowing before we start our lesson.
However, in week 1, I set up the 3-2-1 speaking activity. For this activity, the students are numbered off into pairs. Once pairs stand up and find each other, they all stand in two lines at the front of the classroom (think speed dating style). Standing across from their partner, they have to speak to each other for 3 minutes. The goal of this communication is to learn things they have in common. They are directed to consider things in common that are not nationality, language, being a VCC student, etc. because it forces them to dig a little deeper below the surface to learn more about each other.
After 3 minutes, the students all move down in the line and rotate around until they have a new partner standing in front of them. Then they have 2 minutes to have the same conversation with their new partner. We repeat this one last time but for the last round, they only have 1 minute with their new partner to discover something in common. At the end, all students thank each other and sit back down. Volunteers then share the results of their “speed-dating” style conversations and tell us what they learned about their classmates.
We learn SO much about each other in the first few minutes of class together and it really sets the expectation for team collaboration and community for the rest of the semester. The room always erupts into amazing conversation during the activity and the room is always buzzing with energy afterwards.
I do this activity again in Week 8, so they get another opportunity to learn even more about each and potentially talk to someone that they had not previously collaborated with.
ZOOM alternative: I also do this with online classes by putting students into breakout rooms. It’s not the same effect as all the noise and discussion and physical movement of doing it in person, but it’s still helps the students build community and get to know one another.
Thank you for sharing. This 3-2-1 activity is a great way to build community and foster inclusivity. It has so many elements that are conducive to learning such as sharing personal experience, laughter and movement!
I enjoy helping students connect and share their own areas of expertise on their first day of class. I teach Communications courses. My standard first day activity has students completing a self-assessment. Once they determine their communication super power (reading, listening, writing, speaking), they join their peers with the same skill and create a set of “how-to’s” for their peers who may not be as comfortable in this area. We post this compiled advice in our LMS. And, then, when it comes to assignments that require these skills, students know who might be able to help. Anecdotal feedback for this exercise is great. Students like celebrating their expertise and it definitely helps connect students and by association, engage them!
Thanks to all who read. I am certainly enjoying your ideas!
Thanks for sharing. We really love this idea of having learners identify their superpowers. This really gives them the chance to reflect on what they are good at. We need to create more opportunities to celebrate the expertise students bring.
During the pandemic I used a Teams ‘Get to Know You’ channel. Each student posted a picture of themselves as well as an interesting thing that they wanted the class to know about them.
Thank you for sharing. We love Teams as well. It is great because we can engage students quickly using a messaging format that is familiar to students!
Since many students are currently struggling with Mental health, the “ice breaker” activity, if the course is online, will be focused on act of kindness and well-being. Encouraging students to notice and share each other’s kind acts is a great way to promote positivity and inspire compassion. If, for example, one student notices a caring peer helping a struggling classmate with a challenging task, they can then post a note of thanks in a forum called Kudos or Kindness Chain. Another activity would be creating a shared document where students can post relevant topics/resources for mental health support (i.e. free yoga or meditation classes, websites)
Thank you for sharing. We really like the idea of encouraging kindness and well-being from the peer perspective and not only from the instructor side. This will really help create a safe learning community.
My classes are either asynchronous online or web conference/online and I do the same sort of things, only slightly differently for both.
The first thing I do in every web conference, and post at the start of each week in the asynchronous courses, is a brief meditation. I find that this helps my students to transition from ‘out there’ in the real world, to ‘in here’ in our classroom, and gives them the space to focus.
I also do an icebreaker, getting-to-know-you activity at the start of each course. In one asynchronous course, I ask the students to post a picture mosaic with photos that represent the most important things in their lives right now; in another, I have them do a ‘which Muppet are you?’ quiz and post their results. In my web conferenced courses, I do a similar activity. In one course (diversity & social justice), I have the students create a Coat of Arms that has five spaces to be filled: 1) 1-2 of your most important values; 2) your greatest achievement(s); 3) your motto; 4) what you bring to our team; 5) feeling that should exist on our team.
I have also been thinking about doing an escape room activity – maybe as a way for students to explore the course syllabus, or as a learning/reviewing APA citations & referencing activity – and admit to finding the creation process daunting. I would love to hear more about your escape room activity, Venecia!
Thank you for sharing. We really like that in all your activities students have an opportunity to do something that centers them or makes them reflect on their own experiences.
This is the link to the Escape Room Activity I did with my students, but I am pretty sure there must be lots of other options by now.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pGhX4uWFLJYsymO9nAydlZP10Z8rBT-QutlYZXm5z4U/edit
An activity I used to do to build a sense of community and engagement is the library scavenger hunt. I’d go into the classroom and show them how to use the databases and then break them into teams and have them find particular items, like an ebook on Bears or a peer reviewed journal article and so forth. During the Pandemic my class became asynchronous and I lost all of the interaction. I’m really struggling to get that back.
For my language classes at or above the intermediate level, we do a number of ice-breaking activities that do not require specialized knowledge or complicated syntax. One of them is quite simple:
1. students form groups of 3-4
2. each group has a pile of papers with two words” “Coca-Cola or Pepsi”, “Mountain or beach”, etc.
3. They take turns picking one and choosing their favourite. They can explain as much or as little as they want.
This gets them talking in the language might away with very low pressure and low stakes. They get to know each other and exchange a few laughs.
I have done some collaborative games to break up long lectures (spot the differences, hangman, jeopardy, etc.) to foster classroom community.
For the online environment, I have whiteboard exercises, polls, and breakout rooms for different activities.
The next atctitivy I will be working on is to have a practicum preparation session online. An exercise I have in mind for community building is the “What if I was the practicum office”. There would be 2 parts to this activity. The first part, students would be put into small breakout rooms and they would be asked to imagine themselves being the practicum office hosting students and come up with a list of expectations they would want from their assigned practicum student. The second part, students would have to create a list of discouraging practicum behaviors. These lists will be shared on the whiteboard with the rest of the class.
This activity will show the values of the group and get them to know each other better.
I implement small group breakout room activities as part of my professional communication classes. This gives students the opportunity to practice communication techniques that mimic clinical practice (i.e., communicating to a patient/client). I find that in small breakout groups, it allows students to get to know one another on a more personal level, which builds the comfort needed to experiment/practice communicating. Students are able share personal experiences, their vulnerabilities and they can feel safe giving and receiving feedback to one another. It’s hard to build these deep connections and the trust needed to develop skills in a larger group format.
For an online Health and Wellness class for paramedics that is scheduled at the beginning of an advanced diploma program, I ask students at the start of the class to think about and share their favorite color and comfort food or space and I begin sharing mine in a lighthearted and easygoing manner and move along playing “online-tag” with the next person to share.
I then ask them to take a free personal values assessment to find out what is important to them. Here is one of the survey links I’ve used before – https://www.valuescentre.com/tools-assessments/pva/. We take time at the start of the class to complete the 5-minute survey and wait for the results to be emailed to us. I ask the students to review the results and reflect on them during the breaks we have throughout the morning class time. After lunch, I ask volunteers to share their values with the group, and if we have no volunteers, I use my values or values from an anonymous person to facilitate the groups’ discussion on, 1) how activities like these might influence mental health and self-development, 2) If we have volunteers who shared personal values (which we often do), we look for similar or the same amongst other group members, and build on that sense of community before asking students to begin developing their health and wellness development plan or goals, in whichever format the students feel to capture their plan. I encourage the students to share their plans with their fellow students and to support one another in the plan/goals as they move along in the paramedic program.
In the beginning of the course (via Zoom), students are asked to join a virtual room named with different learning styles (where they feel that suits themselves the best) – visual, auditory, reading/writing, and kinaesthetic. They are encouraged to share their learning style and strategies as a small group and then share as a class after 15-20 min. This activity helps student feel a part of the class and feel comfortable as they are sharing something in common and also learning different strategies from each other.