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For many instructors, we are lucky enough to teach the same courses more than once. As we do so, we start to identify common student patterns and which portions of the course or assignments are challenging for them. From term to term, we adjust elements of our classes, offer advice to students on what it takes to be successful, and try to figure out how to best engage and support students based on what we’ve learned from teaching previous iterations of the course. While students benefit from our careful attention to the course design and our advice on how to best prepare for success in the course, we may be missing opportunities to leverage student perspectives. One way to capture these perspectives is by assigning an exercise where current students write letters or notes to future students.

Why Use Letters/Notes to Future Students in the Classroom?

Asking current students to write letters, notes, or advice to future students is beneficial for both the instructor and the students. As shared, “by giving our current students the time to provide guidance to future incoming students, we not only learn how our students are experiencing our classes, but our students also take the opportunity to reflect personally on significant learning and develop a sense of empowerment as they can give a seasoned perspective to future students.” They also emphasized that while it’s commonly known that reflection is an important part of learning, it can be difficult for students to reflect on their experience simply for the sake of reflection. In James Lang shared several strategies for seeking feedback from successful students and using it to support future students, taken from the work of Joe Ben Hoyle from the University of Richmond. Hoyle asked students “to describe the study strategies they used that allowed them to achieve the grade they earned.” He then compiled the feedback and shared it with his next class. Lang argued that sharing this feedback with future students both “foster[s] self-efficacy and inspire[s] them to learn” (p. 150) and has reflective benefits for those that chose to share. He sought to support current students as they learned from previous students’ suggestions and explained that students are more likely to take this advice from their peers than they would from an instructor. Hoyle’s actions “reflect an awareness on his part that students need both tools and encouragement to succeed” (p. 151).

Babino and Riley (2020) as well as Lang (2013) shared the benefits of seeking these reflections and advice from students for their own instruction. By reading the documents, they better understood the student perspective and used this information to adjust their assignments, class structure or strategies for giving feedback.

How to Collect and Use Letters/Notes to Future Students

As you seek to learn about your students’ experiences in your classes, it is important to think carefully about what you want to learn and what you think will be mutually beneficial for both your future students and for yourself. Occasionally you might want to learn about the course as a whole and you may plan to ask students a general question like: “what advice do you have for future students in this class?” Other times you might try a new approach in the classroom for a given term so that you can collect specific feedback on what worked best for your students.

Babino and Riley shared their approach to this process. They selected a prompt connected to their goals, shared their intent for the exercise with their students, and then allotted about 5-minutes for students to compose their responses before collecting them. Allowing for time in class to do this work both communicates to students that the work is important and gives them ample time to complete the task. If you want to designate time in the schedule for students to think about their responses, you could share the purpose of the assignment and the prompt in one class and then collect advice and recommendations in the next class.

Hoyle specifically sought advice from students who were successful in his course, and wrote “at the end of each semester, he sends an email to all of the students in his course who received an A. The email contained his congratulations for their effort and asks them to describe the study strategies they used that allow them to achieve the grade they earned” (p. 150). Hoyle then looked through the information gathered and considered if the feedback would be useful for future students or more appropriately used to improve the course (e.g., if cramming for exams works for students, perhaps you should shift the nature of your exams).

How to Share Letters/Notes with Future Students

Once you’ve collected this feedback, think about how it can be helpful for you and for your students. It’s important to think about the best approach for sharing it with future students enrolled in your courses. Some faculty have chosen to include the letters or advice from students in a handout on the first day of class, others have featured it on the syllabi or even included this advice with assignment directives. The students’ advice can also be included in Blackboard as a resource for other students. Additional strategies involve creating a handout for students to read as well as a discussion board for them to share their responses to the advice, or you can develop an icebreaker exercise where students share which advice they have chosen to use. Finally, it is important that instructors communicate that student advice is a valuable resource intended to support their success in the class.