What are you obsessed with?
This question has the power to completely change the game in classroom community-building.
Building community: why and first attempts
Community is more than just hot chocolate for a teacher’s heart—it has immense benefits for students:
Community building is vital to active student engagement in a course across all modalities. Research shows that when students feel that they belong to their academic community, that they matter to one another, and that they can find emotional, social, and cognitive support for one another, they are able to engage in dialogue and reflection more actively and take ownership and responsibility of their own learning.
Source: Columbia University, Center for Teaching and Learning
Building community has never been easy. I teach at a small college where small group activities are the primary venues for peer connection, and every semester students point out that group work is a space for improvement: some of their groups just didn’t mesh.
I get it. The mix of different personalities, identities, experiences, and motivations in a classroom lead to substantial variability in the success of group activities. The remedies that I’ve tried have been transformative for a handful of students but have had close to no effect on my courses as a whole: setting community guidelines on the first day of class (and reminding students of key guidelines throughout the semester), including emotional check-in prompts at the start of each class, using collaborative group roles, and requiring weekly reflections on group work.
I want to try something radically different.
What are you obsessed with?
Imagine being asked this right off the bat in any potentially awkward social situation (e.g., meeting new people, the first day of class). Imagine someone saying those magical two words: “Me too."
"What are you obsessed with?” is a lightning lure of a question. The sparks that fly when a connection crackles into existence could set the world ablaze.
A framework called the “12 favorite problems” (12FP) is a series of lightning rods for channeling that electrifying question.
The 12 favorite problems framework
Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman once said:
You have to keep a dozen of your favorite problems constantly present in your mind, although by and large they will lay in a dormant state. Every time you hear or read a new trick or a new result, test it against each of your twelve problems to see whether it helps. Every once in a while there will be a hit, and people will say, “How did [they] do it? [They] must be a genius!” Source: Forte Labs (pronoun changes are mine)
Essentially, Feynman kept a dozen profound, open-ended questions in the back of his mind all the time. Every learning experience was a chance to explore: could this help solve one of my favorite problems?
Generally, the answer was no. But the occasional yes’s resulted in monumental breakthroughs in physics, computing, and other problems he found beautiful.
12 favorite problems: classroom edition
In the classroom, the 12 favorite problems framework has the power to build community through genuine thought partnership. Here’s how:
- Brainstorm: Have students brainstorm their favorite problems as early as possible in the semester. This guide by Tiago Forte contains excellent prompts (Steps 1 and 2).
- Share: Have students post their (draft) favorite problems on a course discussion board and enthusiastically comment on their peers’ posts. (I like Slack for the absolute bonanza of emojis available to accompany this process.)
- Connect “thought partners”: First, group students who have connected via the discussion board to identify thought partners. Dedicate time in class shortly afterward for thought partners to give feedback on each other’s favorite problems. Tiago Forte’s guide (Step 3) provides guidance on making the favorite questions specific, counterintuitive, or cross-disciplinary.
- Anchor: Use the favorite problems framework to anchor assignments and reflections throughout the remainder of the semester.
- Projects: In my statistics courses, one or more of a student’s favorite problems can directly lead to the topic for a long-term course project. In my statistics courses, it’s completely ok if a student wants to pursue a project that doesn’t have data. For one, it opens an opportunity to connect students with our campus librarians to attempt to find data. Secondly, if that search doesn’t pan out, the student can still plan a study and advocate for future data collection. Mimi Onouha’s Library of Missing Datasets is a powerful example in this regard.
- Open-ended questions on regular homework assignments: These are questions pertaining to current course concepts that can be investigated in the context of students’ favorite problems. (e.g., Discuss the ethics of data collection in the context of one of your 12FP. How might confounding play a role in an analysis related to one of your 12FPs?)
- Regular feedback with thought partners: Most importantly, whatever 12FP-anchoring strategies you choose, build in regular opportunities for thought partners to provide feedback. For individual students, this feedback sustains the energy of working on something meaningful, but because the dialogue is part of a thought partnership, that energy is automatically shared. Every student will have a peer invested in their success and be that peer to others.
I am beyond pumped to use the 12 favorite problems framework to foster community in my courses next semester. It’s the perfect supplement to my thoughts on passion as an explicit course objective—it’s the recharge station that sustains passion’s wonder sprints.
LFG