Provide your mentees, advisees, and students with opportunities to share their backgrounds and experiences to create opportunities to connect interpersonally.
Come to meetings with research students strategically unprepared so that it’s easier to work with them as collaborators.
Follow up the question “How are you?” with asking your students deeper questions, like “How’s your stress level?”, to show you care and to dig below the surface-level small talk when you bump into your students.
Stretch your students to help them improve their skills by asking them what they are most struggling with and making them do that regularly.
Have students complete a weekly log about what they accomplished this week, what they hope to accomplish next week, and what might hold them back from accomplishing these things.
Publicize positions for undergraduate research through formal channels so that they’re accessible to a wider variety of students.
Have your research students maintain a weekly blog so they can share what they complete each week and serve as an example for other, curious students.
Make all students say “I don’t understand” out loud, in front of the class to show them that nothing bad will happen to help them feel more comfortable saying something when they don’t understand something in the future.
Create a program where local high school students come to your elementary school to teach younger students computer science in order to give your students relatable role models.
Use the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) resources for evaluating the accessibility of a website to ensure that your course website is accessible to all of your students.
Point out why a concept is important, useful, and interesting to show students how the content they’re learning connects to higher-level concepts.
Provide more than one solution when explaining how to solve a problem to the class to emphasize that there is never just one way to do things.
Put more time into explaining content than you think is necessary because students may not retain all the material the first time you explain it.
Reach out to incoming students who have expressed an interest being a CS major in order to begin building relationships with and advising these students to help them become a part of the CS community.
Moderate a group discussion with teams that have trouble working together to resolve disagreements and encourage collaboration in a constructive way.
Create a code of conduct for unpaid teaching assistants (TAs) to make department and institution expectations clear so violations are easily acted on.
Train teaching assistants on how to provide feedback using the growth mindset so they can keep their students motivated to improve their skills and understanding.
Create an environment where students feel safe approaching teaching assistants for help to ensure they get all the support they need to succeed in the course.