The first few weeks of the semester (and the fall semester in particular) are critical for students’ later academic success. The beginning of the school year can be an anxious time for students (and faculty and staff) regardless of their level. Incoming freshmen, transfer students, and returning students alike experience a swirl of excitement and uncertainty as they begin new academic pursuits, establish social relationships, and assess their general fit.
If you are thinking that students are “harder to reach,” you are not alone. I’ve heard from a number of faculty and others that students seem less engaged and less inclined to “do the work.” This is, of course, not entirely a new observation – it’s a relatively perennial concern – but in the years since the Pandemic, there has been an increasing sense of a shift in ways small and large. I’ve had conversations in the past few months about increases in student absenteeism, decreased ability or persistence with course reading, and declines in openness to feedback. This came from so many sources, at so many different institutions and settings, that I wanted to capture some of that anxiety here as we begin a new academic year.
This summer I have been reading James Lang’s Distracted: Why Students Can't Focus and What You Can Do About It, which has been very helpful in reframing my perspective in this area. Lang acknowledges the lure that distractions can have on our students and the difficulty of competing with them, even as he acknowledges the importance of intense, focused concentration to learning. Lang offers a handful of practical suggestions that will be familiar to many of you – active pedagogies, transparent teaching, making connections.
At the heart of this, he notes, is the importance of a sense of community among your students. Both in Lang’s work and elsewhere, the necessity to make connections and build community in the first few weeks of class is essential. There is strong evidence that activities that integrate and engage students early on in their academic careers (and in the academic year) support success in courses, retention, and eventual graduation. There is also a wealth of resources on how to implement small activities early in the course to accomplish just this kind of connection. I really like Georgia Highlands checklist for starting strong, and have also shared the Colorado State University checklist with many people (if you want a really comprehensive list, the University of Nebraska offers 101 Things You Can Do in the First Three Weeks of Class). Almost all of these activities have two key features – they are easy to implement without much time, effort or revision to your course, and they are all basically just really good teaching. One added bonus: making connections can also make the classroom a more enjoyable place for you as well as for your students. These strategies are flexible across modalities and class sizes. In a big class, connecting with the students may be less helpful than connecting them with one another.
Finally, I want to suggest that we may need to do a bit more unpacking of the skills that we expect students to have in hand. This may mean talking about how to read a challenging academic journal article or how to use practice problem sets to hone their skills, or even just how to take (and use) notes from class. Unpacking basic academic skills early in the semester, even for returning students, decodes the special toolkit we anticipate students having as we go about our teaching. And while this does take time up front, the cost of not highlighting these necessary practices for students may be considerably higher than the time it takes to be transparent about the “operator’s manual” for learning in college. | 
