SPEAKER_00
Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. By all accounts, the students who arrive on college campuses today are less prepared in almost every way than students from 5, 10, or 20 years ago. Our experts discuss a program they launched at Montclair State University to engage faculty and staff to provide not only academic wellness and other supports, but also to help students acquire some basic study skills and time management habits that they never learned in high school.
So give these folks a listen and enjoy.
SPEAKER_01
Hello and welcome to Office Hours with EAB. My name is Alexa Silverman. I'm the Senior Director overseeing our student experience and wellbeing research here at EAB.
My team works on all of our research related to student success and the current student readiness challenge that a lot of colleges are facing. I've been having a lot of these conversations lately with college and university leaders focused on some of the challenges they're seeing on campus. Really a little bit before the pandemic, but really accelerating after that period of remote instruction in 2020.
A big part of what colleges have to do is to help students adapt to the demands of college. And that's always been a tough transition from high school. But what I've been hearing lately is that that's been getting a lot more challenging in the past few years.
A lot of institutions, a lot of campuses are struggling with that transition, trying to figure out what is the role of faculty in instilling some of these skills. I've kind of heard it in terms of students have forgotten how to be students. But I've talked to at least one institution that has really been focusing in on this issue and seems to have some really promising strategies to address it in the classroom and outside the classroom.
And that's Montclair State University. So I'm really excited today that two of the leaders at Montclair State were able to join us to talk a little bit about their work and how they're addressing some of these challenges on their own campus. So let's start with you, Emily.
Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your role at Montclair State?
SPEAKER_02
Yeah. Hi. I'm a longtime professor here at Montclair State. I'm a writing professor and an English professor.
My background is in teaching underprepared writers. That's what I did my work at UMass Amherst many years ago. And it continues to be a real passion for me and why Montclair has been a great place for me to work.
We're a very diverse institution and we support all sorts of learners. Now I've been in lots of different roles here at Montclair, but I run the Office for Faculty Excellence and we're working to help faculty be excellent. And a lot of that is around teaching.
And I've been working here in this particular role since the beginning of the pandemic and have watched the transition and the challenges that you're speaking about.
SPEAKER_01
Thanks, Emily. And Danielle, could you introduce yourself and talk a little bit about your role?
SPEAKER_03
Sure. I'm Danielle in Salako Egan. I'm the Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education as well as the Acting Dean of our University College, which is a college that supports students who have not yet declared a major.
And my role on the Associate Provost side is really to support all of the high impact initiatives that we undertake to support our entire undergraduate student population. So academic advising, career services, first year seminar, peer mentoring and a variety of other programs, general education reform. I also support our honors program and a number of other high achieving opportunities for students.
And so that's the encompassing aspect of my role.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. So between the two of you, you kind of do it all. Well, not really.
Well, anyway, thank you both so much for joining us today. I talked a little bit about how colleges have been seeing some new challenges lately in reaction to the pandemic. Some people saying maybe students feel a little bit less prepared for college or don't have all of the skills they need to succeed.
Danielle and Vicarious, first of all, do you agree with that statement generally? And if so, can you speak to how that's changed a little bit, maybe in the last five to 10 years? You know, people always say transition to college is tough, but I think there is something maybe different now.
SPEAKER_03
Right. And I see that in a couple of different ways. One is, of course, the pandemic.
So this podcast is not about learning loss in particular, but that has definitely been a factor. More to the point, really, I think here is the social skills impact that the pandemic has had. So feelings of isolation and that students are experiencing feelings of not knowing where to turn for help and also fear of asking for help, as well as just navigating in online worlds, you know, is impacting all of us in many different ways.
But we see this in our students, I think. In addition, over the last five to 10 years, many institutions, including our own, have eliminated developmental skills, education courses. And there was a great reason for that, right? They take a lot of financial aid and a lot of money for students to take courses for zero credit.
But turns out they probably needed them in many cases. And I don't know that all of our instruction has necessarily been able to embrace and embed the needs that students have coming to the table in the first place successfully. So we see our students are struggling academically for the same reasons they did that enabled or required us to have more developmental skills courses in the past.
I'd be curious to know, really, from you, what you're hearing from other institutions on that same question and whether you have additional data to share that we could think about as we're trying to look at our first year students entering in and what we think they might need as they start with us.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, you know, it's interesting. I think people have started talking about the ACT scores. That's where all of the conversations focus.
So we've seen this decline in ACT scores over the past six years. So actually starting before 2020, but hitting a 30 year low in fall 2023. So we're now at an average 19.
5 ACT out of 36. But, you know, that's just the data. That's just what the numbers tell us.
I think a lot of the stories that I'm hearing kind of reflect what you said, Danielle. It's not just about academic preparation, but it's about some of the social skills or social development that got paused or got lost during that period of isolation. So what I'm hearing in the classroom is a lot of students who will show up, but not really engage in the classroom, not complete the work.
They just seem kind of out of it, kind of disengaged. And I hear similar things when I talk to advising leaders, students who will show up to the advising appointment, but they'll say something like, oh, I don't know what I want to major and you tell me what's a good major. What courses should I take? It's sort of that sense that they've lost that self-efficacy, that self-direction.
There's probably a lot of elements of coping and resilience skills to this. And our research has touched on those topics for a number of years now. But I think this is probably a time to really narrow in there and look at what it looks like to bounce back when you encounter a step back in college.
And that's probably a good segue into Emily, you were, you know, instrumental in launching a program at Montclair that really focuses on a lot of those successful skills and habits that students need to stay on track academically and develop some of those more, you know, emotional behavioral skills. So we'd love to hear a little bit more about the program, how it got started and how you're getting it up and running.
SPEAKER_02
So thank you. It's probably been a concern. Strong students' skills have been a concern for me from, you know, the beginning of my career, because as I said, I work with underprepared students and teaching students how to be successful students is really a major focus of writing instruction, which is what I've done most of my career.
And so, but I guess it came to a fore when instructors were talking to us. A member instructor said something to this effect. Emily, if I were to grade everybody in my class, according to my syllabus policy, about half of my students would fail.
And when I asked more about why that was, they said, well, they don't come to class. They don't they don't complete their assignments or they complete them late, etc. etc. And what it sounded like to me was she was really taught caught in that flexibility bind, right? She probably was being too flexible throughout the semester, right? And so she was stuck, right, at the end, where if she really went through it, you know, when the student said, oh, I'm sorry, I can't make it. She said, OK, and suddenly it came to seven, ten absences, right? And that's really you can't succeed.
There's good research on the value of attendance. So listening to that and listening to a lot of, you know, a lot of faculty would talk about it and senior leadership was talking about it as well. I kind of just came with this idea of work we've always been doing in this office.
I said, instructors have a hard time teaching those skills, right? Shifting the position, as I said, in that Chronicle article, from, you know, like kind of a, from a disseminator of knowledge to somebody who's helping students become students. And that was the big shift I was asking instructors to take. Because it's hard, we pulled together a group of people to create strong student campaign, which has many ways in which we try to reach students.
But the principal one is a group of eight slides, Google Slides, that instructors have downloaded they can show in their class so that they don't have to be the one to say to students things like, hey, get out your earbuds, shut down your computer, put your cell phone away, complete your homework on time. All these kinds of things that sort of interrupt the flow of a class, but in which you are running through instructors heads as they sit there watching a room full of students, some of whom are highly engaged and some of whom are highly disengaged. And they, it's hard to address those students that are highly disengaged in the middle of your class.
So again, we have these slides. So that's one primary message that we're asking instructors to do that work. We have tips every week that we send to instructors.
Today's tip was manage absences effectively, right? So the big difference between a student who misses class and then comes back to the next day and says, hey, what happened last week? And the student who misses class writes the professor figures out what the homework is and gets the notes, right? Those are those are totally different absences. So that was this week's tip. We reminded instructors what they were.
We gave them the slide again. Meanwhile, the same time the campaign is running on all of our student partners. So they're on this digital screen in the library where I work.
They're all over campus, some version of it. Clever folks that work in social media are doing a lot of work on social media in this reiterating the same at the same theme of the week, which we have going throughout the whole semester. So I hope that was enough of an answer.
Maybe it was more than you wanted.
SPEAKER_01
No, absolutely. Really helpful. And I love that there are both those student and faculty components to the program.
Emily, you know, you spoke to this is a shift in the way that faculty think about teaching and what their role is. So, you know, I think whenever academic leaders think about launching a new program like this, that faculty engagement piece is always top of mind. So could you speak to a little bit the faculty development, faculty engagement side of the program and what's been really helpful there?
SPEAKER_02
So email is still what faculty use most. So we write to faculty twice a week. We also have several sessions on the kind of that we workshop.
We talk about how we do these sorts of skills, how we can integrate it. We have a website which is heavily visited counted every year. This is now our most visited website within my office.
It's a strong student campaign. Faculty are pretty anxious about it. I'll say because it's gone, you know, people have heard about the strong student campaign.
I get I've gotten over 100 requests for access to our slides. I think that people are trying to figure out something. So our instructors are really pretty present.
We've just surveyed our students and we begun that survey. And actually, students are pretty positive about what students are doing in terms of providing support and being supportive. And we're going to be surveying our faculty pretty soon to see what they think of the campaign, whether they've enacted it and whether they think it's effective.
SPEAKER_01
Sounds like those early signs, just in terms of engagement with the website and the Google Doc are really positive. You spoke a little bit to the student side. Danielle, I'd love to hear a little more from you about that.
You know, I think one of the things that often comes up when I talk about student readiness and building some of these skills with EAV's partners is how much is the students' responsibility versus the institution? You know, how do you balance those messages, offering help with those messages, motivating students to become more soft, sufficient, develop some of those softer-acted skills?
SPEAKER_03
Right. Well, at Montclair, we're utilizing the CIP model of support. So based on the Columbia's Community College Research Center research on integrating planning and advising into student success, CIP is Sustained Strategic Integrated, and that's the piece I'll come back to, proactive and personalized support.
So what we've been teaching students over the last several years is how important it is to reach out to trusted individuals. And here, I'll use the example of the academic advisor, and then I'll talk about coaching as well, to get help for all of their needs. So by setting up a program where advising is really baked into the student experience, as opposed to just a task that needs to be checked off, we've really started getting students used to a lot of communication.
And I can talk about some examples about that later. A lot of communication at all different points in the term. We also have some kind of striated, based on students' levels of support, as predicted through the Navigate Platform, striated communication.
So some students that we can see may have potential or need more support. They get additional messages and motivation. And our academic coaches, which is another program that Emily and I have worked on with Emily being the generator of this wonderful idea.
Of bringing academic coaching to the institution as its own support type, separate from other types of academic support, as well as academic advising. Our coaches spend a lot of time thinking not just about how they're going to help the students that are in their caseloads, because they need the kind of help we're talking about in the strong student campaign. How do I read the syllabus and understand it? How many times a week should I be studying for this class, et cetera? They just don't have the skills.
But they also spend a lot of time crafting those motivating messages. So on a weekly basis, several times a week, it's a, you're doing great this semester. Keep up the good work.
And it's really, really having an impact, as we're seeing in our student surveys for that program as well. So we, I think we're learning the balance as we go. And as we continue to build these intervention programs, we see that what students are responding to is not just the, oh my God, I need help.
But also, thank God somebody cares about me and is paying attention to me. So the balance is really the word. And how you do it is you just make sure that you have equal amounts of challenge and support, I suppose.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, absolutely. I love that you mentioned coaching. We've heard a lot of institutions rolling out or expanding, coaching a lot in response to some of these newer challenges.
Also, I love that you mentioned what we call a differentiated care over here at EAB. It's been a big part of our philosophy behind our best practice research and navigate for a number of years. That idea that you want to understand who are your higher needs students in your caseload and have a different strategy for quote unquote caring for them, maybe pushing more messages to them, maybe having more offices or more supports that engage with them.
Speaking of which, let's let's lean into that question on communication. We'd love to hear about some of the ways that you reach students and motivate them to follow the recommendations in the strong student campaign.
SPEAKER_03
Sure. So again, email is still utilized on our campus pretty heavily. We send emails through Navigate, primarily through the academic advisor and the academic coach, but also we have a proactive approach with academic support as well.
So if students receive alerts and navigate from instructors indicating that they recommend that they seek tutoring, the tutoring center reaches out to those students directly, which is not something I've seen at other institutions that I've worked at where we've integrated a student success platform into the efforts. The offices typically are more receivers of students rather than being proactive and reaching out, making again that personal connection between students. So we use a lot of text messaging through Navigate as well.
And a lot of that really initiates from the academic advisor or the academic coach, checking in reminders of deadlines, invitations to come in for appointments. We saw in since July 1st, we've had 56,000 appointments. After tutoring, advising and coaching as well.
And we have other types of connections and Navigate as well. So students can be referred to the library and get help from a librarian and such. And so we utilize Navigate primarily for that type of communication.
And then of course, we also have a very detailed outreach plan for students who receive alerts. Sometimes we see positive alerts, which is really great for me. That's another way to motivate students and to engage them.
We did see even in these early data that we just pulled from the survey we just launched on Thursday, right, Emily? For the Strong Student Campaign, some of those responses from students really indicated that their professors are inspiring them. And so they are motivated to come to class because they see their professors showing up on time and role modeling the behaviors that they want to emulate as in order to be strong students. So that was really great.
So we do the same with advising, reach, send motivating messages and try to help students understand that we're here to educate them on how to be a successful student. And, you know, coming in for advising, again, it's about building a relationship with the student, not just figuring out what courses I need to take next semester. So that is the underpinning of all the communication that we do for students.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so it's not, it doesn't just feel transactional, which is another huge theme in a lot of the conversations I've been having lately. Right. Danielle, what you said was it kind of starts with faculty submitting that alert. Love that they're submitting the positive alerts.
You know, also important that they're submitting the alert when a student needs more help. So that really speaks to you. There are some faculty responsibilities as part of the Strong Student Campaign.
So Emily, can you speak to you a little bit what some of those roles and responsibilities for faculty are?
SPEAKER_02
I think it's clarity in their communications. That's probably number one. Clarity but expectations.
Clarity about their availability and their their essential role of supportive individuals. I think faculty have to figure out how to, some faculty probably have been too flexible, right? And they are not meeting the student learning outcomes because of the flexibility. You know, you know, forget about the past, let's move forward and come up to make sure the students are really meeting their learning objectives.
And that's where we're really got to anchor in all of our teaching work. These are the expectations of the course. It's figuring out how students get there and I have to figure out how to assess them along those student learning objectives or outcomes that we've set.
Probably some instructors are not doing enough scaffolding, right? So that's the challenge is, is that just the way our students are really diverse, so are our instructors. So some instructor probably need to do some more scaffolding, right? Need to make it so that, you know, that one mistake has a consequence, but it isn't what we call like a fatal consequence, right? Or if I don't come, if I don't do my pre-work for my lab, right, my chemistry lab, probably can't do the lab that day. Absolutely.
Guess what? I didn't do the pre-work. I'm not ready. But does that mean that 20% of my grade is now a zero or is there some kind of an in-between stance, right? Where I can recover, though not recover completely because we need to keep rewarding, you know, ideal behavior, but also making, you know, teachable moments out of poor behavior.
So I think the problem is, is that our instructors, just like students, it's not the same message. So I don't want to hear students that are faculty that are already really, really tough and demanding to say, oh, I got to push it up a notch. You know, that would be a concern.
Though as a whole, do we as a, as a faculty need to make really clear that we have high expectations? Absolutely. And I, and I think we can probably do more of that across the nation, you know, and in K through 12 too, you probably saw the New York Times articles that I saw where students talked about why they were no longer motivated. And they, many of them said they didn't feel like they need to come to class.
They still would get an A. They didn't come to class. They're going to school, became kind of optional.
It was always forgiven. Obviously that's not going to get anywhere, any of us anywhere. And so we want to make sure that it's, that school is important and it's valuable.
Yeah.
SPEAKER_03
That really speaks to the, the issue of how the pandemic, I think, affected students. That idea that, you know, you, you can always be forgiven. And there's always a workaround and there's a way to, you know, because of the things that happened during the pandemic that were so hard for students and also for faculty, right, for all of us.
People seem a lot kinder and gentler than they used to, I would say, in many cases. And so they are being more flexible because, and I think in some ways that's a good thing, right? Our, our faculty are much more empathic than they may have been prior to the pandemic, because they also had to struggle and had to deal with all the things that students had to deal with. And so they're starting to understand students better.
But Emily's right. Then the pendulum is swinging the other way. And then the student doesn't understand that they have accountability.
We had our Dean of Students pull together kind of an emergency meeting in the fall because the number of referrals she was receiving was astronomical for very small things. Like the students says they can't come to class because they need to go celebrate a relative's birthday or something like that. And so they need to go out of town and they wanted an excused absence for that.
So students don't quite, you know, they're, they're losing these skills because they're always forgiven. And so when a faculty tries to hard, you know, hold the line, they want to know if they can speak to the manager, right? The next, the next level, right? That's kind of the mimics what we see, I think, in the outside of the Academy as well. So all of those things are really coming into play.
And, and, you know, Emily's work to really provide faculty with the support they need to, to be able to hold those lines, I think has been really impactful for our campus.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I actually wanted to talk about that a little bit, supporting faculty. You know, my colleagues at EAB have been talking about this sort of parallel epidemic of faculty burnout. It's affecting both faculty and staff.
But I think in particular, this conversation has just gotten startin' about how, as faculty members responding to, first of all, that really rapid pivot to remote instruction, adding that flexibility and then now coming back to campus and meeting a student body who's pretty different from who they're used to teaching and serving. That's been really tough. And so faculty are feeling like anything else being added to their plate might just be that straw that broke the camel's back.
So one of the things that I really liked when I first heard about the Strong Student Campaign is that there's an element of trying to figure out what work you can centralize and take off faculty's plates a little bit. Emily, could you speak to that a little bit, how Strong Student Campaign helps relieve some of that burden on faculty?
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, thanks. First, we made the slides. All you have to do is show them.
So that makes it a lot easier. Two, if we can raise the bar collectively, then all of us that teach have less work to do in reinforcing these campaigns. So that's why having them on all the digital screens, have it on social media.
So you as an instructor don't feel alone with your expectations. We have launched a new syllabus platform, which essentially makes the syllabus a lot easier to make. And when we have multi-section courses, everybody can have the same student learning outcomes.
They can have the same absentee policy if they so choose. They can do a lot of things. The more we can be kind of baseline similar, the less work there is for individuals to do.
It's also really important that our higher ed administrators support the faculty, you know, that they understand that all not all courses are going to have the same grade range. That's not reasonable. Some courses are going to have higher, low grades than others.
I think it's really great when higher ed administrators teach. When you teach in the classroom, you know, it just looks different. You know, you know, when you're actually with students, you suddenly see some of what the faculty may be experiencing.
So when higher ed professionals and higher ed leaders, deans and provost and everybody else can get into the classroom sometimes, they're going to see it and they're going to have more compassion for their instructors. And I think instructors appreciate that a lot. So we're trying to make it just as easy as possible.
It's still work. Teaching is hard today. There are certain challenges of it.
It is also, of course, incredibly rewarding. When looking through these student surveys, students are pretty appreciative of the faculty overall right now. I mean, we enjoy really high student evaluations.
And I imagine that's true at most institutions like ours, that students are pretty appreciative of their faculty. It's easy to get focused on the couple of students that seem to be, you know, really not engaged. So, you know, providing community where we can convince about that a little bit and then also talk about the wins that we receive is really important.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, absolutely. Daniel, one thing I wanted to make sure we talk about is the connection between academics and mental health. You know, there's a reason that we say the student experience and well-being at EAB and that's because they really are two sides of the same coin.
And there's kind of a cyclical relationship between students overall well-being and their academic success. So I know that part of the strong student campaign is connecting mental health, overall well-being and a healthy college experience. So how does strong student campaign kind of encourage students to practice some of those just good mental health and well-being hygiene behaviors? And also, you know, as we talked about, seek help when things do get tough.
SPEAKER_03
Well, the campaign itself, in addition to the slides and also the social media side of it, which is directly student facing and our campus screens and things like that has slides that and weeks where we really don't actually talk about the classroom, but rather talk about specifically those healthy habits. So getting a good night's sleep, eating well, taking time to exercise, taking time to meditate, taking time for yourself to just reflect on how you're doing, not necessarily always hammering things like attendance and time management and the like. And we felt that that balance was really important.
And for students to hear that from faculty or at least see the slide in the class, right, speaking to what Emily was talking about before, it adds a whole different layer of people care about me. So the messaging isn't just coming from the student affairs division, right, or just from the counseling center. Of course, their partners with us on the campaign.
It's coming, hitting a student everywhere they are, whether they're looking at a screen on their way to the cafeteria and maybe they'll make a healthier choice for lunch or they are seeing the slides on social media or seeing the slides in the classroom and having faculty emphasize and reinforce those habits. It's definitely been a game changer as we're seeing with our survey results. Students are paying attention.
I also wanted to call out another way that we partnered with faculty specifically on supporting and understanding mental health challenges for students. We received during the pandemic a FIPSI grant for the federal competition called institutional resilience educational post secondary opportunity. I repo.
Essentially, it was her money packaged in a composition competition to give institutions an opportunity to think about how they can teach better during the pandemic and support students better during the pandemic. And we use some of those funds to compensate faculty to attend mental health first aid training, which the institution has been participating in the last couple of years. And we've got tons of folks on campus who became trained the trainers.
And now we are going out to faculty and inviting them in to the conversation, how to recognize the signs of mental health challenges with students, what to do about it. I think even to this day, we have many faculty on every campus that says, I don't know where to send the student or the student tells me they can't get an appointment. So now what do I do? So working through those in an intensive training with faculty, and now we've got dozens of faculty that are trained and are excited about finding new ways to support their students.
That's definitely helping a lot with that the visibility and acceptance of understanding mental health on the campus.
SPEAKER_01
That's wonderful. And you know, it kind of brings me back to the research that came out of Gallup and Purdue a few years ago that said that faculty caring about students as individuals was not only a predictor of college success, but a kind of lifelong fulfillment and well-being. And so so important to educate faculty on their role there, how they can help how to make it easier for them to help.
Well, you know, I know we could talk about this all day. This is one of my favorite topics to talk about. But of course, I do want to be respectful of your time.
So as we wrap up just one last question. What is your advice for other university leaders who might be interested in on their own campuses, taking a look at how they help students acquire those so called studenting skills to be successful? Emily, let's start with you.
SPEAKER_02
I think it'd be great to get together a group of faculty and folks that work with students more directly from the student development side and start brainstorming that work. Obviously, you can look at our website and our resources and we'll share them. But I think that you could generate some that are more specific to your institution.
And in our college, our university, some of the colleges are working to make them more specific to their disciplines. So I think it's coming together and developing shared practices and instituting across the board is what would be very helpful. And I'd be happy to talk to folks about it or they can just look at the website.
SPEAKER_01
Wonderful. Thank you, Emily. Daniel, anything you'd add to that?
SPEAKER_03
I would ask students. So over the past several years, many years in our new student seminar, we conducted kind of an internal survey to ask students if they're adjusting to campus. And then we share those results with residents life and many other areas of the campus to get support.
We also recently started a cyclical sense of belonging survey, which has yielded a lot of really interesting information and ties nicely together with strong student. So including students in the conversation about what we think students need, I think is a critical piece as well.
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, we've been doing the long next. Sorry, we've been doing belonging activities with a couple of faculty groups working on belonging, a couple interventions that to try to increase student belonging.
SPEAKER_01
I'm just going to say I hope that we can stay in touch as that work continues. Sensible Longing has been a big focus for my research too. So really excited to hear where that lands and already so excited by what I've heard about the strong student campaign so far.
So thank you both again so much for joining me on the podcast today and sharing a little bit about what you do and how you support students and faculty.
SPEAKER_03
Thanks for the opportunity. Thank you.