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Building a Rapport with Learners
Establishing and maintaining a rapport with our learners is essential for creating an engaging learning atmosphere for our students. A lot of that work is done early in the course, but you may need to do maintenance work throughout the semester.
Click on the following for specific tips about techniques for building trust with your learners.
Engaging Learners on the First Day of Class
Maintaining Close Communications With Your Learners
Incorporating Humour into Your Learning Space
Creating an Atmosphere of Trust
Engaging Learners on the First Day of Class
The first day of class is a great opportunity to begin building that rapport with your learners
Ice Breakers
http://adulted.about.com/od/icebreakers/
Maybe you would like to begin with an ice-breaker. This site contains lots of ice-breaker possibilities, including a printable bingo card that you can use as a specific ice-breaker.
http://www.ion.illinois.edu/resources/pointersclickers/2002_01/index.asp
Icebreakers in online courses? An intriguing concept! The Illinois Online Network at the University of Illinois has a very interesting article on the use of ice-breakers in online courses, and also provides links to many other sources on the same topic.
Learning Students' Names
http://www.ntlf.com/html/lib/bib/names.htm
One of the toughest jobs during those first few weeks of class can be remembering students' names. Here is a site that shares many strategies for learning those names. Check out the contribution from our own Rudi Aksim.
More Helpful Tips for the First Few Weeks of Class
http://www.brown.edu/Administration/Sheridan_Center/teaching/teaching_tips.html
From the Harriet W. Sheridan Centre for Teaching and Learning, "Teaching Tips: The First Day of Class."
http://ftad.osu.edu/Publications/TeachingHandbook/chap-4.pdf
From the Office of Faculty and TA Development of Ohio State University, a teaching handbook that includes, in their chapter on "Course Preparation", tips regarding the first day of class (pages 35 - 37).
http://honolulu.hawaii.edu/intranet/committees/FacDevCom/guidebk/teachtip/101thing.htm
This article entitled "101 Things You Can Do The First Three Weeks of Class", from Joyce T. Povlacs, takes you a little further into the semester.
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Maintaining Close Communication with Your Learners
Keeping an "open door" both literally and figuratively can be a power tool to maintain rapport with your students throughout the entire semester.
http://cet.usc.edu/resources/teaching_learning/docs/teaching_nuggets_docs/2.3_Communicating_with_Students.pdf
One of the teaching nuggets from the University of Southern California, this article provides good tips for communicating with students in ways that engage and motivate them both in the classroom and in online environments.
http://honolulu.hawaii.edu/intranet/committees/FacDevCom/guidebk/teachtip/commun-1.htm
For tips specifically with respect to your non-verbal communication skills, "Six Ways to Improve Your Nonverbal Communications" from St. Louis Community College is worth the read.
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Incorporating Humour into your Learning Space
http://www.tedi.uq.edu.au/conferences/teach_conference00/papers/doring.html
One approach to add humour to your teaching is to use cartoons. To find out more about this use of humour, click on this link to Allan Doring's article.
How do Your Colleagues Use Humour to Engage and Motivate Students?
Devon Galway, School of Advanced Technology, has been using cartoons to
motivate his students for some time now. Here is an interesting,
interactive article with his reflections on the use of humour in the
classroom. Thanks, Devon!
http://academic.algonquincollege.com/staff/galwayd/cartoon/
Tell Us More
Do you have a special technique that adds humour to the learning process? If you would like to share it, please contact Gail Allan.
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Creating an Atmosphere of Trust
http://gallery.carnegiefoundation.org/kaustin/Concept_Pages/Building_Trust/building_trust.html
Although this article is geared to journalism students, these tips for building trust in the classroom have broad applications.
Building Trust in Virtual Teams
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-04/njio-eto041105.php
This research study explored the concept of "swift trust" in online courses. This is a very interesting concept, and study is well worth examining. Particularly interesting are the scales used to measure the development of both student-professor trust, and student-student trust.
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