While I agree that knowing students’ names is critical to building a thriving classroom community, I consider it a starting point toward the bigger and broader goal: creating a learning environment where students trust you, are willing to take risks, and are invested in what happens and classroom outcomes. In my experience, the latter work requires much deeper and more deliberate effort on the instructor’s part.

I designed an activity to address these challenges by encouraging students to provide their perspective on a shared experience during the first week of class. The activity, called the RiceBreaker, asks students to answer a straightforward question: “how does your family or your culture cook rice?” By using the example of a simple ingredient found across the globe, the activity demonstrates how students can hold different perspectives on the same topic based on their own experiences, and models for the class how to approach conversation throughout the semester when perspectives on a given topic may vary. This activity encourages students to develop a framework for incorporating differing viewpoints and engage with ideas to which they may have had limited exposure.

Building a strong classroom community requires that students not only know how to speak—but how to truly listen to one another. In this TEDx Talk, journalist Celeste Headlee shares 10 practical, memorable rules that center active listening, thoughtful questioning, and staying present. I assign this video at the start of the semester to spark a conversation with my students regarding what it means to engage in dialogue that strengthens—not splinters—our learning environment. When breakdowns occur, we now have a common language to name what’s happening and troubleshoot together. This lowers the stakes of disagreement and offers us a clear, compassionate path forward when conflict arises.

How should we respond to access friction that arises in our classrooms? How should faculty developers address the existence of access friction with instructors? A point that I have learned from disability justice organizers is that access needs may appear to be opposing or conflicting, but we do not need to view them as “in competition” as long as all members of the community are willing to work towards a solution together.

Trust must be felt on the part of an instructor who makes evidence-based decisions about pedagogy rooted in the scholarship of teaching and learning, between instructors in co-teaching course contexts, between instructors and students (i.e., instructors trusting students), between students and instructors (i.e., students trusting instructors), and between the students and their peers. While instructors can make specific, intentional moves to develop the trust of their students (Felten et al., 2023), in the ungraded CCTL classroom, trust needs to be reciprocal and shared amongst all course participants.

I noticed several students staring into the air, erasing and rewriting their responses.

I asked one student who looked especially invested, and she explained, “I was certain I could do it when you asked, but now that I’m doing it, I realize it’s more tricky than I realized.” TEACHING WIN!