First Day of Class

Review Your Syllabus

• The syllabus itself presents an opportunity to make a good first impression, and it is the most important thing students take with them from the first class.
• Your syllabus should be both encouraging and clear (Wagner et al. 2023). Use language that highlights what students will learn, how their learning will be assessed, and emphasizes the learning process. To read more about syllabus best practices, visit the CATE syllabus guide.
• Demonstrate flexibility by adjusting your syllabus to better suit your students as you learn more about their interests and take their input into consideration (Benjamin 2005; McKeachie 2011; Weimer 2013). Consider co-creating classroom policies with students or leaving room at the end of the course schedule for student-selected readings. You might co-create a classroom community agreement, by asking students about their expectations for themselves, their peers, and you, the instructor. Involving  students in the learning process helps build trust and keeps students engaged throughout the semester.
• Help students plan ahead by providing a comprehensive and transparent course plan. At urban universities like UIC where few students live on campus, students benefit from receiving as much information early on as possible (Collins 1997). In this spirit, consider sending out the syllabus in advance, attached to your welcome email.

Get to Know Your Students

• Review your class roster before day one, with photos if possible. Take the time to learn students’ names, practice pronunciation, and learn about who will be in your classroom. While memorizing students’ names can be challenging, it fosters greater sense of belonging for students, especially in high-enrollment classrooms (Townes O’Brien et al. 2014; Cooper et al. 2017).
• Print out the roster, making note of phonetic spellings and adjusting these as students introduce themselves. Make sure to note preferred names and pronouns. Using students’ preferred name and pronouns has a positive impact on student belonging.
• For online courses, ask students to provide an audio pronunciation of their name, and share a picture of themselves or something meaningful to them. Encourage students to personalize their Blackboard profiles in your course.
• You can also use dashboards provided by the Office of Institutional Research to get a better understanding of the incoming class of students at a broader level. Use this information to learn about the social history of your students. Knowing more about what your students’ prior experiences are likely to have been will help you prepare an inclusive classroom environment (Artze-Vega et al. 2023).

Get to Know Your Space

• Visit your classroom before the first day and get to know the space. Decide which boards you will use and where you will position yourself to teach. Make note of any supplies you may need and their location, including board erasers or door stops. You can also view pictures and descriptions of all centrally managed classrooms across campus through the UIC classroom database.
• Move around the space, and make note of opportunities or potential limitations presented by the space. Are there arrangements where collaboration will be easy, or where it may be difficult for students to move places in order to participate in group work?
• If the classroom is equipped with technology that you plan to use, test it out before you use it in front of students. Use the Learning Technology Solutions Classroom Tutorials to get familiar with the technology in your classroom. If you discover a problem, you can create a ticket to get IT support.

And finally, make sure you…

Send a Welcome Email

• Your first opportunity to make a positive impression comes before you meet any of your students. An enthusiastic welcome email that shares something about what motivates you to teach and invites students to connect with you before the start of class can lower student anxiety and encourage students to adopt a growth mindset (Artze-Vega et al. 2023).
• If your class meets synchronously in person, include where on a campus you will meet and a map to help students find the classroom.
• Consider attaching your syllabus and a two-minute video to your welcome email. This helps students feel prepared and feel seen—an important part of building trust in the classroom (Artze-Vega et al. 2023).

Inspire Curiosity

• Ask the kinds of questions that got you interested in your field. Let students in on the central questions, problems, and mysteries. Learn what students find most interesting and show how their interests intersect with your subject.
• Examples include:
  • In English: Tell a partner about your favorite book. What about the writing style made it stand out to you?
  • In Political Science: If you could change one thing about how your country is run, what would it be and why?
  • In Statistics: What ways do we rely on statistical measurement in our everyday life? Describe one way you have used statistics outside the classroom.
• Engage students on the first day with active learning strategies, like a think-pair-share, to prepare students to be active participants. Priming students to be active learners especially matters for courses that depend on student participation (Round and Lom 2015).

Create Classroom Community

• Learn about your students and give them the chance to learn about you and each other. Ice breakers may feel awkward but have been shown to promote student engagement (Sasan et al. 2023). Consider implementing the Conocimiento exercise or another first day activity that provides structured time for students to learn about each other and the course. These are the first steps to fostering classroom community, a key element of any inclusive classroom.
• Learning about students’ interests and background is essential for assessing whether your strategies for presenting course material are appropriate to your students’ learning. Consider using a who’s in class? survey or first day info sheets. Surveys help students feel comfortable sharing important information about their goals, obstacles, and preferences they may not disclose otherwise (Addy et al. 2021). Information you gather about students provides a guide to inform your inclusive teaching efforts throughout the semester (Killpack and Melón 2020).
• Consider having students design their own name tags or tents and ask them to introduce themselves when speaking in class. This practice helps both you and the other students learn and remember everyones’ names more quickly, especially larger classrooms. Name tents, in particular, foster an impression that instructors know their students’ names, even if they have not memorized the roster (Cooper et al. 2017).

Set Expectations and Assess Prior Knowledge

• Gather students’ first impressions and the expectations they bring to the course. Our students walk in with preconceived notions about our subjects, some helpful and some less so. Learn what they expect from you, from themselves, and from the subject, and what their goals are.
• With a prior knowledge assessment, you want to capture the excitement you have inspired during the first class and correct misconceptions. Consider using a background knowledge probe, which might include a misconception/preconception check asking students whether they agree or disagree with a common misconception about your field. Prior knowledge assessments allow instructors to reach students where they are without having to guess (Angelo and Cross 1993).
• Consider asking students to formulate questions about your subject using a Google Form or Padlet; then, you can select questions from the form for students to answer using a Clicker poll. Student-generated questions lead students to form positive impressions of the course (Robinson 2019).

Introduce the Syllabus (Actively!)

• Ultimately, students come to the first day of class to learn what the rest of the semester will look like. Make use of the entire class period to set a tone that gets students excited about the semester and establish a classroom culture that encourages participation (McKeachie 2011; Lang 2010).
• Data shows that students who experience a more engaging first day have better learning outcomes throughout the semester (Anderson et al. 2011). Provide an active learning activity associated with reviewing the syllabus, like collaborative annotation using Google Docs or another software.
• An example from James Lang’s On Course: Ask students to find a partner (and wait for them to do so). In pairs or trios, ask them to come up with three things they want to know about the course that are not covered by the syllabus. Then, hold a class discussion about the questions students came up with in groups. This process helps you make sure your students have read the syllabus and may help you discover content you want to add to your syllabus in the future.