Every month(ish) last year, I led Humanizing workshops with Renegade faculty. After exploring what humanizing is and how it can help us to act as warm demanders in our classes, faculty would participate in a virtual gallery walk where they shared and brainstormed their own strategies for humanizing their classes. These virtual gallery walks created a wealth of Renegade strategies for humanizing. If you're looking for a little inspiration for ways to humanize your course this year, check out this compilation of strategies our talented colleagues have implemented in their own teaching and shared in humanizing workshops.

Getting to Know Our Students

A foundational aspect of humanizing is getting to know the students who are in our courses. Some examples of strategies faculty have used to get to know students include:

  • Use introductory discussions or video discussions via Flipgrid
  • Integrate weekly discussions where students can share reactions/thoughts to that week's content
  • Pin discussions for students to ask questions 
  • Incorporate reflection discussions where students share what they learned and what they want to learn
  • Provide surveys or discussions to get a sense of what students are nervous about in the course and their preferred names, gender pronouns, and feedback preferences
  • Build in assessments where students can share personal experiences (e.g. personal narratives)

Building Relationships with Our Students

Relationships are foundational to our work as humanized educators. The following strategies offer some ideas for ways to build relationships in our courses:

  • Create a short welcome video
  • Give constructive feedback and positive feedback to recognize student achievements
  • Have weekly "coffee with the faculty"
  • Provide student choice on topic and modality
  • Integrate discussions with peer responses
  • Respond to discussion posts (especially early in the semester)
  • Provide feedback and build student response to feedback into assessment
  • Use Canvas SpeedGrader to give audio or video feedback 
  • Build trust by being fair and consistent
  • Integrate interaction in Zoom sessions
  • Make use of break-out rooms in Zoom
  • Create activities that foster student-student interactions and student-instructor interactions 
  • Share… let students get to know you 
  • Know students' preferred names and gender pronouns
  • Reply to emails in a timely fashion

Acting as Warm Demanders

By building meaningful relationships with our students, we can offer students both "care and push" as they work to achieve the high-standards of our courses (Hammond, 2014, p. 94). The following are some strategies for how we can act as warm demanders and leverage our relationships with students to help support student success.

  • Send weekly announcements
  • Chunk video lectures
  • Check in on students when they miss an assignment with an offer of help
  • Check-in after assignments 
  • Send friendly messages (via email, text, Remind, etc.)
  • Provide a make-up period for missing assignments
  • Message students who haven't submitted before the due date with a gentle reminder about the due date
  • Be available and responsive 
  • Have a rubric and guide students on how to use it to successfully complete the assignment
  • Keep the rigor, but be flexible 
  • Be culturally aware 
  • Connect students with campus resources

As we embark on a new semester, these strategies can help us to get to know our students, build relationships, and act as warm demanders. Whether we are teaching face-to-face or online this semester, humanizing the learning experience for students can help us to offer our students the care and support they need to succeed during these stressful times.

Hammond, Z. (2014). Culturally responsive teaching and the brain: Promoting authentic engagement and rigor among culturally and linguistically diverse students. Corwin Press.

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