If you answered yes, keep reading. Our second session of Keep on Teaching, a two-part virtual forum, offered strategies to support your students without burning yourself out. That includes leaning into campus-based support services, talking openly about mental health in class, designing a syllabus that supports you as well as your students — and saying no more often.
“It doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game, where we’re either giving to students or we’re taking care of ourselves,” said Rebecca Glazier, a professor in the School of Public Affairs at University of Arkansas at Little Rock, and one of three teaching experts on our panel. “Those two things can co-exist.”
If you want to watch the session on demand, follow this link. But if you’re short on time, here’s a quick rundown of their advice.
Make ‘yes’ a choice
Setting limits on what you’re willing to do came up in several ways during the hour-long discussion. Instructors who consider themselves student-centered are usually the ones on the leading edge of burnout, panelists noted, because they may think that means always being available for students.
But you’re not doing them any favors if you don’t create a sustainable work environment, said Lindsay Masland, interim lead for transformative teaching and learning in the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning for Student Success at Appalachian State University. “The irony is that if you exhaust yourself in pursuit of student-centered teaching, you will actually be a worse teacher than if you had set some boundaries, some parameters.”
Last year at her university, a community of people at different career stages and career types came together and started to function, she says, “as each other’s ‘no’ committee.” When someone was asked to do something new or extra, the member would bring it to the group to discuss, which helped them think through the pros and cons. “Even for those in the least powerful positions in our university environment, those folks still realized they could say no to a lot more things than they were saying no to,’’ said Masland. That includes saying no to students.
Masland, an associate professor of psychology, noted, for example, that she does not respond to emails after 5 p.m. or on weekends, and explains to her students why that helps both her and them. She also quoted adrienne maree brown
, a writer and activist: “Your no makes the way for your yes. Boundaries create the container within which your yes is authentic. Being able to say no makes yes a choice.”
Engagement helps mitigate feelings of burnout
Glazier and others talked about the benefits of creating an engaging classroom environment. Teaching, after all, is what many academics love to do. And a well-structured course built on authentic relationships with students will help you as well.
“When we create classrooms where we really are connected and have a community of learning and have high rapport and build relationships with students,” Glazier said, “that can be a re-energizing and revitalizing experience. That can be the opposite of burnout. To have a really good discussion and super-engaged students.”
The roots of burnout are systemic — not individual
Bryan Dewsbury, associate director of the STEM Transformation Institute at Florida International University, brought this up several times, including around the challenges facing nontenure-track faculty members. They can’t, after all, say no to teaching another course if that’s what puts food on their table.
So, in addition to giving advice on streamlining parts of the teaching process, our panelists talked about emerging institutional strategies that hold promise. That includes reforming promotion and tenure policies to reward the work embedded in student-centered teaching, providing grants and course release for faculty members who want to redesign their courses, and offering sabbaticals for work other than research. Dewsbury also noted that colleges would do well to hire new instructors in June and July — not August — to create time for them to design their courses.
Accept that students have changed, and adapt accordingly
More students are arriving at college lacking the skills that instructors took for granted even just a few years ago. They struggle with time management, are resistant to feedback, and seem deeply afraid of failure. Rather than get frustrated, panelists said, instructors would be better off by accepting that this is the new reality.
That might mean spending less time on content and more time on skill building. You might scaffold projects, so that, for example, students write a practice essay before writing the one that counts. “That sounds a little hand-holdy, I understand,” said Dewsbury, an associate professor of biological sciences. “But we are where we are.”
Glazier, who wrote Connecting in the Online Classroom: Building Rapport Between Teachers and Students, said she uses a mail-merge function to send tailored emails to students two weeks into the semester, letting them know where they stand and encouraging those who are struggling.
Dewsbury also encouraged instructors to tap into their campus student-success centers for support like tutoring. “You don’t need to solve all of these things that now come with this new flavor of student,” he said.
The same holds true for mental-health issues. The panelists suggested that instructors look at mental health as something that needs to be worked on and supported, like physical health. That might include designing a syllabus with thoughtfully spaced deadlines and then talking to students about why you designed your course this way.
For students who have greater mental-health needs, it’s important to recognize when to hand them off to the professionals on campus. “It’s a nice exhale,” said Masland. You can tell your students: “I will help you get that, but it cannot be me.”
Further Reading — Burnout and Engagement
Here are some of the readings we recommended to viewers in the forum, plus a few that our panelists suggested.
Chronicle articles, advice and opinion pieces:
8 Strategies to Prevent Teaching Burnout
Faculty Members Are Suffering Burnout. These Strategies Could Help
The Great Faculty Disengagement
Books recommended by our panelists:
The Norton Guide to Equity-Minded Teaching, by Isis Artze-Vega, Flower Darby, Bryan Dewsbury, and Mays Imad
Unraveling Faculty Burnout: Pathways to Reckoning and Renewal, by Rebecca Pope-Ruark
The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy, by Maggie Berg and Barbara K. Seeber
Relationship-Rich Education: How Human Connections Drives Success in College, by Peter Felten and Leo M. Lambert:
Tackling High-Fail Courses
The University Innovation Alliance, a consortium of large public research universities focused on improving equity and graduation rates, announced a $3.5-million project to increase student success in gateway courses, which often have relatively high rates of Ds, Fs and withdrawals. Member institutions will encourage students struggling in those courses to retake them at a subsidized cost — and with an incentive grant — that will include supplemental instruction, coaching, and group tutoring. The project, which will run for two and a half years, will use strategies devised by Georgia State University’s Accelerator Academy, which was created to address increases in DFW rates during the pandemic.
The alliance will also create a playbook to help colleges make improvements in their own high DFW courses. The project is supported by Ascendium and the Frederick A. DeLuca Foundation.
Anna Drake Warshaw, managing director of the alliance, said that while redesigning high-fail courses is beyond the scope of this project, the organization plans to work toward that by collectively identifying barriers in these courses and then moving toward course design “in partnership with faculty.”
Another Look at Immersive Education
My latest story, on why immersive education may be the answer to the student-disengagement crisis, came out this week. I’d like to hear from readers about their own experiences teaching immersive courses, such as experiential learning projects, or interdisciplinary classes that tackled big challenges like climate change or homelessness. What was your experience like? How did students respond? What worked and what didn’t? Write to me at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com, and your story may appear in a future newsletter
Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com or beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.
— Beth
Learn more about our Teaching newsletter, including how to contact us, at the Teaching newsletter archive page.
