“This is the first course I have ever taken that encouraged students to engage with each other on a very human level. This allows for much deeper connections to be made, and I was surprised at how quickly my peers began to feel more like friends.”
I have begun to begin and end my quarter with an Impromptu Networking activity to foster connection between students. It’s a low-stakes way to get folks meeting each other quickly, and it’s easy to take those 1:1 conversations and share them group-wide. Based on reflections from students, which are peppered throughout this post, it seems to have a powerful effect on how they see each other, and how they see themselves.
The Setup
First, I ask folks to stand up, if they’re able. This immediately infuses the space with energy. Then, I explain the rules.
Find a person to chat with. Raise your hand if you haven’t found someone so you can easily find someone without a partner.
When I say “begin,” one person in the pair should begin answering the question on the board (see below).
When I ring the bell once, switch so the other person in the pair shares their answer. (I use a bell because my voice doesn’t carry well in a loud room. If I don’t have a bell, I’ll knock an Expo marker against a whiteboard for the same effect.)
When I ring the bell twice, everyone look at me. (When I have everyone’s attention, I tell them to find a new partner.)
Repeat. (I go three rounds.)
For my class, we focus on designing restorative experiences for undergraduates, so the first conversation I want to seed is a conversation about why undergraduates need to be restored in the first place. I ask students to discuss their reactions to the following prompt, which I display on the class projector: “What, if anything, do you find stressful in your life and how do you cope?”
“I think through these deeply personal and vulnerable conversations about what we are going through (eg. stress) we can learn a lot from each other and grow closer to one another. ”
Mapping the Conversation
This activity generates a lot of energy. As a facilitator, you can transfer that energy into the next activity. It may seem scary, especially if you don’t feel confident with your handwriting or spelling, but I encourage you to take the question you’ve just asked the room, and chart out the answers on a whiteboard where the conversation can be visualized. This map becomes a way to generate more conversation and creates a co-created artifact of their one-on-one conversations. For example, for the prompt above, I drew two circles on the whiteboard and wrote “STRESS” in one and “COPING” in the other. I then asked students, “So, what’do you find stressful?” and started mapping out their answers. When the contributions began to slow, I asked, “What are we missing?” When that tapped out, I said, “Okay, so what sort of things do you do to cope?” and we started mapping that.
“As a student, sometimes I’ll have felt loneliness as I feel I’m the only one struggling while everyone’s a step forward. During the first week of class, I remembered when the class listed down what made them stressed as college students. I remember listening to my peers and I was surprised to resonate with their experiences and feelings.”
Scaffolding Conversations
Stress is a pretty easy thing to connect to and talk about for undergraduates, so I asked students to discuss that with each other without too much scaffolding. However some topics benefit from a solo activity beforehand. I do this in the hopes that the activity will enable them to approach each other with more confidence. This is, I suspect, a way to ensure more authenticity, for they aren’t approaching each other with as much fear.
For example, in the last class of the quarter, we had another series of conversations, but this time we discussed gratitude instead of stress. We’d been focusing on what’s wrong in the university all quarter, but there are many things right about it at the same time. Focusing on gratitude ends the class on an upbeat, generating positive (but complicated) feelings towards the system we’re a part of, and towards each other.
Since feeling and expressing gratitude can be a bit scary, I asked individuals to create a gratitude map before they talked with each other. Everyone grabbed an 11x17 piece of paper and a couple of Sharpies (red and black) and then drew a circle in the middle and labeled it UW. They then were asked to draw five spokes from the center: who, what, when, where, why.
I gave folks time to fill out the map and then they took the map with them to each round of conversation, which asked them to discuss, “Where does your gratitude reside within the system? What do you feel most connected to in this moment?” From those three rounds of conversation, we immediately transitioned into mapping the one-on-ones as a larger group, just as before.
“I have learned to be more open, not afraid of being myself in a classroom setting. ”
Trusting students into speech
Throughout this post, I have pasted quotes from my students’ reflections on how these conversations affect them. It’s these quotes that encourage me to keep creating opportunities for students to be real with each other. I want to also acknowledge that it can feel scary to ask a room that may or may not trust you yet to do something that requires vulnerability. We have probably all been witness to someone we didn’t trust trying to draw out of us what we weren’t willing to give. But be careful to not let those old experiences stop you. The way through is to trust that students are up for the task of being a “more open, not afraid” version of themselves. They can sense that I truly value and eagerly anticipate what they’re going to say (and I do!). While invisible, this perceivable quality of my intention infuses the room with trust. Students speak into that.