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Welcome back, and, if you’re teaching this semester, we hope you had a good first week!

The beginning of the semester is crucial for setting a tone for the semester and for establishing rapport with your students. I learned this the hard way when I taught a once-a-week class last year in the fall: with all the September holidays and weeks off, I got distracted and never really made enough effort to build a good connection early on with my students.  By the time October rolled around, I’d lost momentum and the classroom dynamic just never really seemed to click (plus, I felt awkward asking students to remind me of their names more than a month in).

“How to Build and Maintain Classroom Rapport,” a white paper from the Teaching, Learning, and Professional development Center at Texas Tech, explains why good rapport is so important, and provides useful tips for creating a “professional yet personable persona” as an instructor:

• Learn your students’ names.  This can be tough if you have lots of students, but it’s worth the effort.  Being able to call on your students by name stimulates class discussion, and signals that you acknowledge students individually and hold them each accountable for coming to class prepared.
  • For strategies on how to memorize names, check out:
    • “What’s your Name Again?” (sample tips: try learning 5 names per class and calling on those students that day; fill in a seating chart when you take role, as students will frequently decide to sit in the same seats throughout the semester)
    • Improving your recall from ProfHacker (for example, practice using names by coming to class early and chatting with other early arrivals, and call roll for at least the first few class meetings)
    • Tips for very large classes from Bowling Green State University (read names aloud when returning papers and other assignments, and ask students to make name cards for their desks)
  • Note: some CUNY colleges provide online rosters with photos of students next to their names, which greatly simplifies the process (for example, access Hunter’s WebRoster here).

• Arrive early and/or stay a bit later after class. Engaging in a bit of small talk before or after class can put students at ease.  For example, I frequently like casually mention something in the news that’s relevant to that day’s class to get conversation flowing.

• Share something about yourself.  Why does the subject matter excite you?  What type of difficulties did you face as an undergrad or in mastering the course material, and how did you overcome them?  Disclosing this type of information can make you seem more “human” — and provides encouragement to students.

More resources:

• “Creating Rapport in the Classroom,” written by two psych professors at Auburn State University, recommends strategies like sending students regular emails so that you come across as more accessible (the “announcements” function on blackboard makes this easy.  I like to post relevant fellowship or event info that gets passed along to me, along with the occasional news story).
• Faculty focus has a number of short posts on building rapport with students.
• This longer paper from the Idea Center examines 20 strategies for building rapport in more depth.

Good luck, and best wishes for a great semester!