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    33 Simple Strategies for Faculty: A Week-by-Week Resource for Teaching First-Year and First-Generation Students
    33 Simple Strategies for Faculty: A Week-by-Week Resource for Teaching First-Year and First-Generation Students
    33 Simple Strategies for Faculty: A Week-by-Week Resource for Teaching First-Year and First-Generation Students
    Ebook147 pages2 hours

    33 Simple Strategies for Faculty: A Week-by-Week Resource for Teaching First-Year and First-Generation Students

    By Lisa M. Nunn

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    About this ebook

    Winner of the 2020 Scholarly Contributions to Teaching and Learning Award from the American Sociological Association

    Many students struggle with the transition from high school to university life. This is especially true of first-generation college students, who are often unfamiliar with the norms and expectations of academia. College professors usually want to help, but many feel overwhelmed by the prospect of making extra time in their already hectic schedules to meet with these struggling students.

    33 Simple Strategies for Faculty is a guidebook filled with practical solutions to this problem. It gives college faculty concrete exercises and tools they can use both inside and outside of the classroom to effectively bolster the academic success and wellbeing of their students. To devise these strategies, educational sociologist Lisa M. Nunn talked with a variety of first-year college students, learning what they find baffling and frustrating about their classes, as well as what they love about their professors’ teaching.
     
    Combining student perspectives with the latest research on bridging the academic achievement gap, she shows how professors can make a difference by spending as little as fifteen minutes a week helping their students acculturate to college life. Whether you are a new faculty member or a tenured professor, you are sure to find 33 Simple Strategies for Faculty to be an invaluable resource.  
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRutgers University Press
    Release dateOct 12, 2018
    ISBN9780813599496
    33 Simple Strategies for Faculty: A Week-by-Week Resource for Teaching First-Year and First-Generation Students

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      Book preview

      33 Simple Strategies for Faculty - Lisa M. Nunn

      Faculty

      Introduction

      This book is a tool kit for faculty who are interested in bolstering the academic success and overall well-being of their first-year and first-generation* students. The 33 strategies I offer come out of a larger research study I conducted on first-year students’ sense of belonging as they make the transition to college. The study compares students at a large, most selective research university that I call Public University and a medium-sized, religiously affiliated, more selective university that I call Private University.† Both are urban universities in California; neither has a reputation as a party school, and both struggle to attract and retain ethnoracially diverse student bodies. Across the two campuses, I followed 67 students‡ in the entering class of 2015 over their first two years at college, interviewing them one-on-one at the start of their first year, at the end of their first year, and again at the end of their second year.

      During my first round of interviews, something wonderful happened. As I asked students questions about their courses, their favorite and least favorite professors, whether they attend office hours, and whether they are interested in building relationships with faculty, what I heard was story after story of things that students adored their professors for doing and things for which they resented their professors. I was delighted to be privy to so many classroom habits of the faculty members at these two schools. Before long, I had a growing list of do’s and don’ts that I planned to incorporate into my own teaching. My home university asked me to share these findings with faculty who teach special fall courses dedicated exclusively to incoming first-year students. And now I am sharing them with you. I hope you find them as useful as I have.

      Sit Down with Your Syllabus

      From where we stand at the front of the room, excellent K–12 education can look like intellectual talent in our students. Some students just seem to already have the hang of the kind of thinking our discipline requires and can recognize the kinds of evidence that matter. These students make a good impression on us. Indeed, they seem smart. It’s important to remember that what looks like intellectual talent is likely the product of excellent academic preparation from high school and earlier (Calarco 2014b; Lewis-McCoy 2014; Nunn 2014). A great number of U.S. high schools do not adequately prepare students for the demands of college academics (Duncan and Murnane 2014; Ward, Siegel, and Davenport 2012; Yee 2016; Yun and Moreno 2006). At average and low-performing high schools—the kinds of schools where many first-generation college students are likely to have attended—academic success is rooted in completing busywork assignments such as copying notes from the board and memorization without critical thinking. In interviews with me, many first-generation students told me that they earned strong grades in high school without ever having to read the textbook. These students were unchallenged by the low academic rigor of their high schools, and it makes the transition to college academics challenging because they are still building effective study habits as well as habits of critical thinking and application. Before the first college assignment is even given, they can already feel like they are behind their more affluent classmates who come from rigorous high schools and families with college-going histories.

      That is not to say that all first-generation students arrive at college underprepared, of course (Hand and Payne 2008; Reid and Moore 2008), but it is a pattern of which we can be mindful. Research shows that interventions with first-generation students can close the gap between their performance and that of their continuing-generation classmates (Harackiewicz et al. 2014; Stephens, Hamedani, and Destin 2014; Walton and Cohen 2011). Clearly first-generation and continuing-generation students are equally intellectually talented. First-generation students also bring many strengths with them. They are eager to learn and highly motivated to succeed. They are impressively self-reliant and independent. They take pride in their ability to attend to their families’ needs as well as their own. Some have already overcome adversity in their lives, and they bring the resulting confidence and resiliency with them too. As Jeff Davis phrases it, first-generation students bring vitality and new ideas to the college environment (2010, 54). Our goal should not be to make first-generation students become more like their continuing-generation counterparts, exactly. Rather, our goal should be to help transform the university—our own classrooms, if not beyond—to attend to the wider set of educational histories, adult responsibilities, and cultural sensibilities of our entire student body, rather than the narrower set of lived experiences that many of us imagine that a typical college student has had. This chapter suggests eight strategies that you can implement as you plan your syllabus before the semester begins to benefit all first-year students, both first and continuing generation.

      .   .   .

      STUDENT VOICES

      If I was better at math, everything would be easier here because that’s probably the thing I use the most for every class, except a writing class, and even then I might use it. . . . Everyone I’ve talked to that’s good at math here has had at least one extremely good math teacher in the past. And having a good math foundation is incredible. It’s invaluable. But I never really had any good teachers growing up—or at all, for that matter. So I don’t know, it’s really a struggle.

      Javier, first-generation student

      Public University

      Low income

      Ethnoracial identity: Latino—well, I’m American like everybody else here, but both my parents are from El Salvador. And keep in mind that Latino is very different from Chicano, because Latino is Latin America, anything in Central America, and Mexico is part of North America. A lot of people get that mixed up.

      .   .   .

      STUDENT VOICES

      "I had never even had this, two exams on the same day. So I started—it was on a Wednesday—and I started studying, like, maybe that weekend. But it wasn’t really studying. I was teaching myself everything in that unit, and there’s just no way I could have got to know it. I would take notes, put them away, and just leave. I didn’t even look at them and try to study, and I hadn’t opened the book. The bio book I hadn’t even opened. My chem one I had been reading a little, but I had to teach myself everything I had learned in that unit for both classes in five days. . . . I failed both [starts to cry]. I failed both exams. I have never got such a low score, and it was so sad. I even considered just changing majors or dropping the class. So then, after that, I was like, ‘Okay, I really need to learn how to

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