Classroom Challenge: Breaking the Ice

With the beginning of the semester just around the corner, many instructors are strategizing about how best to start productive classroom conversations. Students who speak even briefly at the beginning of a class meeting are more likely to participate in discussions going forward, and a well-chosen icebreaker can help everyone join in. As quick, low-stakes, and often fun activities that involve students at the beginning of a session, icebreakers can be a good way to learn about who's in the classroom, reduce anxiety, and begin thinking together about course content.  

CRLT provides examples of icebreakers and guidance for using them in Chapter Three of the GSI Guidebook. We also recently polled our Graduate Teaching Consultants (GTCs) to gather a list of their favorites. Here are some good ideas we received when we asked the GTCs to "tweet" us a particularly effective icebreaker they have used, seen, or heard about:

• Write a key term from the course title on the board and have students write, then share, a sentence about the first idea it brings to mind for them. 
• Ask a quirky question about preferences: What do you like to eat on toast? What's your favorite mode of transportation? What month do you enjoy most and why?
• Find pennies from recent years and have each student pull one out of a cup and tell a story from that year of her/his life.
• In pairs: students conduct interviews (these might focus on their experience with course content). They introduce one another.
• Small groups: find one thing you all have in common, one thing none of you have in common.
• Around the room: tell us something (a fact, a story) about yourself that you're certain you don't have in common with anyone else in the room.
• Each student writes down a unique fact or story about themselves; everyone draws a fact out of a pile then circulates, trying to find the person who wrote it. 
• Students empty their backpacks, keeping with them anything they don't want others to see; everyone goes to a stranger's pile of stuff and writes a profile of them.

Follow this link for additional resources about the First Days of Class.  Follow this link to learn more about our Graduate Teaching Consultant program.