Take a Moment for Some Humor

In this brave new world, one of the things we may be losing is our sense of humor. It is easy to do because this pandemic is a very serious and dangerous situation. Will we return to normal? What does the new normal look like? Will we ever go back to our classrooms? When will all of this be over? In the middle of all of our questions, one thing we may all agree on is how resilient we and our students are. The Zoom meetings that allow us to engage with students and colleagues are also a window into our worlds away from BRCC. Are you brave enough to go live with your video? How many times did you move your computer to get the right background? Some of us have decided to just put a picture of ourselves on the screen. Even that comes with anxiety. Which shot do I use? Should I create a new shot just for my courses? Wait, where did this all start? Oh yes, with some levity. Take a look at Kristie Kaiser's blog post about teaching online. Her message is on point but she also remembers to bring the humor in at the end.

First-Gen Does Not Mean One Size Fits All

Undergraduate retention and graduation are issues requiring critical attention from public universities across the nation. Degree attainment for first-generation college students (FGCS) in the United States is especially important to meeting future workforce demands, goals for national economic prosperity, and global competitiveness. Cynthia Demetriou, Judith Meece, Deborah Eaker-Rich, and Candice Powell in their research study The Activities, Roles, and Relationships of Successful First-Generation College Students examined the lived experience of students to explore how developmental situations in college are experienced by the people who participate in them. Their report supports previous research that indicates that students who are engaged in various opportunities, especially if they are first-generation, are highly likely to be successful. The report also suggests a number of opportunities that should be offered by colleges.

Light Touch Interventions Improve Student Success

Want to improve the student success in your classes this spring? Want to improve your student rating as well? The same approach can help both and it is something that is probably already in your teaching toolkit. Engagement is something that provides multiple benefits and while we know that it works, there are still some of us who struggle with implementing it effectively. Colleen Flaherty provides some good information in her article for Inside Higher Ed. She notes, "Students benefit from increased faculty engagement. Yet many professors still resist more student-centered teaching. Part of the problem is that graduate schools are slow to adopt pedagogical training, meaning that some professors may want to up their interaction with students but don’t know how. Another part of the problem is that becoming a better teacher takes time, an increasingly scarce faculty resource. What if engagement wasn’t complicated and didn’t take that much time? Preliminary research called 'My Professor Cares: Experimental Evidence on the Role of Faculty Engagement,' presented last week at the annual meeting of the American Economics Association, suggests that even 'light touch' interventions can make a difference to students." You can read the entire article here.