Communications: Teacher-Student, Teacher-Mentor, Teacher-Parent, and Student-Student

Out of these four categories, I selected Teacher-Student communications as my strength and Student-Student communications as my weakness. I think that I do a wonderful job of communicating with my students, not only important class information but also fun, get-to-know-each-other conversations. I think that I do a pretty good job in communicating with mentors and parents as well. But I know that my classes lack student-to-student communication. So, I am going to try and take the strategies I use to talk to my students, to get them to talk to each other.

The main strategy I use to connect with students is finding the similar interests we have. I talk to the students in the Grand Rapids area what they like to do around here (especially since I am new to the city), I talk to fellow Marvel fans about their favorite Avenger (mine is Iron Man, even though my dog’s name is Captain America), and I find other things to talk to students about as well baking, hiking, favorite books or movies, etc…). I am going to try to identify those things that students have in common with each other and get them to connect in that way. I am still figuring out a way to do this, but I am leaning towards creating a Discussion Board where students can chat about their interests with each other. I could start out by making a few posts for students to respond to, and then opening it up to allow students to create threads about their own interests (as long as it is school appropriate of course!).

I think that students getting to know each other better will help with academic discussion board responses. If they know each other then I think they will be more willing to comment back and forth about a class-relevant topic.

I will also be making more padlets where students can write back and forth to each other using comments. I think that my padlets have been very successful in the past because they are located right on the announcements page and they are attention grabbing.