Cultivate a Learning Community in Any Course!

One of the ways to provide a positive start to your course is to begin by instilling a sense of community in your class. Inform the students that you want them to be active participants in the learning process by contributing their ideas, insights, and perspectives. Make them aware that while your role will be to serve as an instructor and guide to the course activities, meanwhile students have an equally important role to share information, problem solve, and provide constructive communications with one another. Emphasize that learning is a collective experience that involves both the instructor as well as the students’ dynamic involvement.

Students benefit from active involvement in
a learning community.

Building a learning community requires intentional plans by the instructor to create ongoing learning
activities that promote student-to-student interactions. In addition to lecturing and other methods of delivering content materials, it is important to design your course to include frequent opportunities for student connections and small group assignments. As part of these group exercises, remind students that interpersonal communications and collaborations are a critical component of their grade for this course.

Start your course by having students meet in small groups to introduce themselves to each other, and have them perform some simple low stakes assignments or icebreaker activities. After that, have each group member introduce one of their classmates to the rest of the class. Subsequently, switch around group members in this and other class sessions so that everyone gets to know and work with one another. In addition to group work, include other learning activities that require student interactions such as working in pairs (e.g. Think-Pair-Share), discussions, peer reviews, and encourage them to form study groups.

Creating a learning community helps establish an environment where all students feel included, connected, and actively involved in learning together. Participating in learning communities has demonstrated many benefits for students including increased academic performance, engagement, retention, and satisfaction.