Music, Stories, and Progress Clickers: Experiences Improving Classroom Climate with “Small” Socio-emotional Activities

Abstract

Online learning is typically viewed as demotivating, and, for some students, isolating. These same characterizations have been used to describe large undergraduate courses in which student individuality is less expressed. There is a need to improve the classroom climate, as learning is influenced by the environment in which it occurs. Developing a positive, centralizing, and supportive classroom climate requires an intentional approach. Socio-emotional activities that are “small” (i.e., lightweight, brief, or require little preparation) can be key to such an approach and easy to adopt in various contexts. This paper describes my experiences of incorporating music, stories, and progress clickers into an introductory computer science course. Analysis of students’ responses on both the instructor-administered and the university-administered surveys reveals that students mostly found the practices beneficial to improving classroom climate. In this experience report, I outline the interventions, share students’ perceptions of them, explore the resulting impact on the classroom atmosphere, and provide insights for instructors seeking to adopt such practices.