5 Advice on How to Incorporate Arrival Activities into Your Class
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