Attendees will participate in a collaborative activity they can use with students the very first day of class to: • Communicate five tips for success • Get students talking about their own success • Build a sense of community • Establish class expectations • Provide a basis for feedback and encouragement all semester

Attendees will be able to facilitate a collaborative activity on the first day of class to get students focused on success and coach students throughout the course using common language and concepts.

Participants will receive printed instructions and one of five student success tips when they enter the room. They will introduce themselves to one another and share insights on their success tips, making notes of the names of people they meet and what they learn from them. Later, volunteers will report to the group what they learned during the activity, leading to discussion of each success tip. The success tips come from a Brookhaven College initiative aimed at promoting student success. In a qualitative survey, faculty, administrators, and staff were asked what they wish students knew on the first day of class in order to be more successful. To produce quantifiable results, the responses were organized into general topics, and a second survey asked the same respondents to rank the topics by importance. The results were published with the suggestion that we teach the top five success tips on the first day of class. Using cooperative learning concepts from Cooperation in the Classroom, by Johnson, Johnson, & Holubec, combined with Harry Wong’s insights on creating positive expectations, classroom management, and effective lesson planning from First Days of School: How to Be an Effective Teacher, I developed this activity to teach the top five success tips on the first day of class. It is always well-received by students, establishes many important course expectations from the beginning, and provides a surprisingly robust foundation for feedback and coaching later in the course. Therefore, it has become a permanent part of my first day every semester. Attendees will participate in the activity pretty much as my students do, but I will interject observations directed at how to run the activity effectively, why certain things are done the way they are, and how to accommodate variances between classes. We will discuss the research underlying the activity from two dimensions: the value of cooperative learning, and the importance of creating expectations for successful behavior early and explicitly. Attendees will also participate in a guided reflection followed by discussion about ways the basic cooperative learning activity might be used to teach other, course-specific learning objectives in their own discipline. Attendees will receive a link to the PowerPoints developed for the workshop, the PowerPoints I use in my own class, a word document I use to produce the hand-outs, a copy of the original Brookhaven research, and citations.