5 Advice on How to Incorporate Arrival Activities into Your Class
When planning and building arrival activities:
- Use the activity to set the tone that you would like to maintain for the rest of the session.
- Test out your instructions on someone else – someone not as tech-familiar – and on multiple operating systems.
- Imagine yourself entering a room about which you have no information. Who will be there? What will you be expected to do? Where will you ‘sit’? Then, build an activity that would put you at ease. You may also want to include a short welcome note, small instructions, or name tags – all of these elements can be translated into a remote class or an in-person class.
- Plan to change it up – don’t always start with the same type of activity.
- Formative feedback is a wonderful way to engage in arrival activities. You could end one class/lesson with formative feedback (e.g., start-stop-continue, one thing I learned/muddiest moment, if I could revisit 2 ideas from class today, I would like to learn more about) and then begin the next class with a summary. This system allows you to re-engage with important ideas that students have asked to hear more about, and lets you know if they have missed any main ideas. Using formative feedback as bridge-in allows students to bring their existing knowledge and experience to bear on the information about to be learned and have the chance to see how ideas/details are connected – seeing the forest for a few minutes before working with the trees.
- Arrival activities are also really useful in a lab setting (especially for first- and second-year classes where the lecture size is often over 500 people). In the lab, we usually have 30-40 students who are getting to know each other. Creating group-based arrival activities in these scenarios will help the students get to know each other and find friendly faces. For example, asking the students to solve a puzzle or a rhyme allows them to work together on an activity that isn’t too serious.
- Get students involved – a ‘group builder’ activity could be assigning groups to create and facilitate a meaningful icebreaker for each of the class meeting times. This creates additional motivation to engage in the activities.
- Take a mid-term barometer check on how the arrival activities are landing. This in itself could be an arrival activity, framed as: “Each week our class starts with an arrival activity. How helpful are these to your learning? What would you suggest I start doing? What would you suggest I stop doing? What would you suggest I continue doing?”
When introducing arrival activities to your students:
- Explain to the class what arrival activities are, what their purpose is, and why you have chosen to include them at the beginning of the class. That way, the students know what to expect when they come to class.
- Clearly communicate instructions in multiple ways – a slide, verbally, and if applicable, in the chat. This is particularly helpful if students arrive late (and they do!) and need to get up to speed quickly on what’s going on.
- Provide instructions not just for what to do, but also how to do it. For example, if you are asking students to annotate an image, give them the technical steps for how to do this.
- It is hard sometimes to give over class time to arrival activities, but there is plenty of evidence that supports the ways in which they promote enduring learning. Arrival activities are not busy work if they are designed specifically and intentionally. In your class, frame and provide the context and purpose of these activities, explain that they are for student to use what they already know, no matter how vast or little, and for them to think about the course content. Let students know that these activities are important for giving context to their learning – that you want them to apply, synthesize, understand, categorize, and put the information/facts/ideas that they learn into context, which they can then use in a variety of different ways. Arrival activities can also highlight how knowledge/ideas/statistical information can be framed differently based off of students’ diverse and varied knowledges and experiences.
- Student reluctance to participate can be framed as a desirable difficulty – discuss how learning is challenging and requires effort, but that these activities are designed to enhance enduring learning.
- Research highlights the importance of intellectual relationships in learning, and how small study groups support long learn learning and student retention. However, active learning and group work are often seen as barriers to grades rather than as integral to long-term learning. It is helpful for students to know why you want them to explore and discuss together.
During the arrival activity:
- Monitor the activity as it is happening and intervene if necessary.
- Invite students to identify themselves as the creator of a specific contribution if this contribution becomes the subject of the discussion, but do not force it.
- Allow students to engage however they want. For example, if you provide a colouring page, recognize that some will colour out of the lines, or doodle on the margin. Give them that space. It will be messy.
- Depending on the activity, engage with students while they are doing it. It helps build a positive rapport with students and creates a welcoming, relaxed environment that isn’t directly related to the course.
Following the arrival activity:
- Keep a record or notes on levels of student engagement. In the remote Zoom room, you could take a screenshot or keep a recording of the activity. You could then paste this screenshot into your slides so that when you review them the next time that you teach, you can make adjustments based on how students engaged.
- If students are asked to provide a response, try to incorporate that response into your next lecture. Students will feel heard – that something is actually happening with the information that they are providing.
- Gather feedback about the activities. You can ask students which ones they prefer and ask for suggestions, or allow students to choose which kinds of activities you include going forward.
- Be prepared that some of the activities are not going to be the success you envision. It is very rare to have all of them meet the outcomes you anticipate. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing – switch it up and try something different. When they hit the mark it is worth it!