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From: Beckie Supiano
Subject: Teaching: Could these courses help students make the most of college?
This week I:
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This week, I:
As my Chronicle colleagues and I have been reporting on in our Teaching Gen Z series, students are arriving at college less prepared than instructors expect, often with mental-health challenges and responsibilities that pull their attention off of their coursework. Many don’t seem particularly convinced that education is an intrinsic good and are instead laser-focused on building their résumés.
Our coverage frequently features professors who’ve made significant changes in their teaching to better support students and help them adjust to college work. Whenever these stories come out, we hear from other professors who feel strongly that it’s not their job to help students learn to read, write, and study at a college level.
Against this backdrop, it’s interesting to see a number of colleges offer new courses that are meant to help students both academically and in terms of their wellbeing, under the umbrella of thriving. Could courses like this make a difference?
Take, for example, “Thriving in the Classroom and Beyond,” a psychology course that is among the First-Year Course program offerings at Hamilton College. Rachel White, an associate professor of psychology who created the course and is teaching it for the first time this fall, said it enables students to apply psychology research to their own lives, helping them study more effectively, navigate college successfully, and attend to their own wellbeing. It pushes students to “know thyself,” as the college’s motto directs.
White, who has training in positive psychology, has long been interested in helping students flourish, she says. Watching the student body become more anxious over time, especially since Covid, White felt her discipline had something useful to offer — and found examples of similar offerings at other colleges. Her approach covers similar ground to an introductory psychology course, but all of the topics are connected back to students’ lives. Ideally, White says, a course like this would help students succeed not only academically but socially and emotionally, building skills they could draw on in college and after.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has taken a different approach, with a one-credit, pass/fail course, “College Thriving,” that all new students are required to take as part of its new general-education curriculum. Like White’s course, it is steeped in psychology research and aims to help students get off on the right foot academically, socially, and emotionally.
The Chapel Hill course has a particular emphasis on revealing the “hidden curriculum” of college, something that two of its designers, Viji Sathy, an associate dean of evaluation and assessment in the office of undergraduate education and a professor of the practice in psychology and neuroscience, and her frequent collaborator Kelly Hogan (now at Duke University) emphasize in their work on inclusive teaching.
Students take the course in the fall or spring of their first year, in classes of about 19 to 22. Many of the sections are taught by academic advisers.
To some students, much of what’s covered in the course might not feel new, Sathy said. But requiring the course was a matter of equity, she said, because otherwise students’ understanding of all that is available to them at Carolina would hinge on their family background or their happening upon the right people or resources on campus.
The team behind the Carolina course is also studying it with an eye to making evidence-based adjustments. A paper describing the course and sharing some early findings was published in Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in Psychology.
Has your college taken a new approach to helping first-year students understand their learning and/or wellbeing, and put that information into action? If so, how is it going? Among other things, I wonder if classes like these might take some of the pressure off of professors teaching traditional courses, if students come in with a better sense of how to study and where to go for outside help. Share your thoughts and experiences with me at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com
One section of my recent story on the challenges students face in working independently described the bumpy social adjustment of going from online high school to in-person college through the experience of Vivian Irving, a student at Oregon State University. For Irving, things got better sophomore year, in part because of a large psychology course where the professor (it was Regan A.R. Gurung, as at least one reader put together) knew her name and followed up by email after she made a comment in class.
Irving was not the first student who’s told me that a professor’s use of her name was meaningful. And I’ve spoken to professors, including some who teach large-enrollment courses, who work hard to learn and use students’ names as part of creating an inclusive classroom where students experience belonging. How do they do it?
After speaking with Irving, I started to poke around for more on learning students’ names. I was excited to see that Michelle D. Miller, a professor in psychological sciences at Northern Arizona University, has a book answering that very question coming out later this fall. For Miller, the project brings together her research background in memory with her work in faculty development. I interviewed Miller about how and why professors can learn and use students’ names for a recent Chronicle Q&A, which you can read here.
Miller’s book, A Teacher’s Guide to Learning Student Names: Why You Should, Why It’s Hard, How You Can, is to be published in November by the University of Oklahoma Press.
Our colleagues need your help! A group of Chronicle reporters and editors are working on a project that examines professors’ salaries across the country. As part of that work, which will also include an interactive data feature, we’re talking to a few faculty members about their relationship to money. We’ve spoken to several professors at public institutions but want to be sure private institutions are represented, too. If you’re willing to talk to a reporter about what getting by in academe looks like for you, send Megan Zahneis an email at megan.zahneis@chronicle.com. We’d love to hear from you!
Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com or beckie.supiano@chronicle.com.
—Beckie
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