Peer Review

Engaging Students from Day One: A Practical Guide for Educators

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Reviewed:: Feb 3, 2026 by Faculty Development

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Ratings

Overall Rating:

Content Quality:

Effectiveness:

Ease of Use:

Overview:

This educational resource provides a collection of practical strategies and digital tools designed to foster student engagement from the first day of class. The guide organizes engagement methods, offers approaches to promote curiosity, collaboration, and community building, and lists example tools. Use of these strategies and tools can assist with sustaining student participation throughout classes.

Engaging Students from Day 1: A Practical Guide for Educators is a curated collection of activity ideas that can be implemented during the first day of class to foster student engagement and create a dynamic learning environment. Faculty using this guide will familiarize themselves with a range of activity types, pedagogical outcomes, and technological support tools to promote participation and active learning. This is an excellent resource for use in teaching workshops, faculty meetings or teacher training courses.

Type of Material:

Reference Material

Recommended Uses:

Lesson planning
Training
Education courses

Technical Requirements:

Google Doc accessed using Brave Browser. The file is available for download.

Identify Major Learning Goals:

Identify various first-day engagement strategies and their corresponding digital tools
Adapt provided strategies to fit specific courses and student populations
Develop student engagement approaches with digital tools

Target Student Population:

Novice or experienced instructors across all disciplines at the high school or college level

Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:

Basic pedagogy information for focus examples

Content Quality

Rating:

Strengths:

This guide for faculty is very easy to use and clearly organized into a table format highlighting how the suggested activities can be used to foster different outcomes. All of the activities are excellent ideas for fostering student engagement and connecting them to the course materials from the very first class meeting.

Well organized
Consistent
Flexible
Great introduction

Concerns:

No references

Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool

Rating:

Strengths:

This tool offers a range of creative and high-impact classroom activities for implementation during the first day of class. The activity ideas are extremely flexible and customizable for different academic subjects and teaching styles. This practical guide also includes usage instructions to aid in adoption of the strategies presented.

Multiple examples provided
Could be easily adapted to many courses
Information is easy to review to see examples

Concerns:

No learning objectives or prerequisite knowledge provided, but I am unsure if that is really needed

Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty

Rating:

Strengths:

This material is presented clearly and organized into easy-to-follow sections: an introduction and usage guide, an activity table, and a resource list with links to online tools. The activity table allows readers to quickly identify possible in-class exercises appropriate for their discipline and desired motivational outcomes.

Well organized and easy to read through
Links out appropriately to tools
Provides enough description without being overwhelming

Other Issues and Comments:

Google based tools could be unusable by Microsoft based schools

Creative Commons: