Inheriting the class culture
I read with interest about cohorts establishing in-depth knowledge of each other, much deeper than a new instructor can know from a first class meeting. Working with multiple cohorts, I now can see the "under-the-surface" knowledge brought into a new class by an established cohort. Have others in our group seen this phenomenon before?
Hello Kristin,
Thank you for sharing management strategy for cohorts. Indeed, the mixing is good. I am on both ends of understanding cohorts . . . as an instructor and as a student. In my current class as a student, I am called a "drop-in." A drop-in student did not begin with the cohort, nor does that person follow the cohort to its completion. Acceptance into the cohort may vary with openness, maturity, diversity, and other factors.
Our cohorts in the program where I instruct bond (or isolate students) early on, in the General Ed. courses. By the time they get to my classes, they can be a fairly cohesive and somewhat inpenetrable group. It is my job to discover the individual personalities in order to reach them and teach them. As has been said in some on-line teaching, the instructor can actually be the "intruder" until she or he proves to be worthy of acceptance by the cohort.
Hi Kristin,
This is a great strategy to use. This gets the cohorts mixed up a bit and you did it with a game rather than just assigning seats. I am sure this goes very well with your students as the get settled into the new course.
Gary
Actually our program has constant and consistent co-hort groupings. In order to change the culture of the co-horts and stir the classroom dynamic, I begin with a game which works as a seating chart for the class.
