• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to footer

UP Teaching & Learning Community Blog

  • Home
  • About
    • Contributors
    • Become a Blogger
    • How To Blog
    • FAQ
  • Core Matters
  • Mentally Healthy
  • Subscribe
  • TL Hub

mental health

February 7, 2021 By Jeffrey White

Practicing What You Teach

The power of peer educators to help your students practice

We worked hard to become experts in our fields. We faculty work hard to plan and teach our classes. And now a pandemic has us working hard to continue and refine the shift to remote teaching. As professionals in teaching within higher education during trying times, we can leverage the Learning Commons’ peer educators to facilitate students’ practicing what we teach. Here’s both why we should make the benefits of trained peers helping peers visible to students and how we can best connect them with the Learning Commons’ highly trained peer staff.

The value of practice

Durable learning requires practice. In Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, and Mark McDaniel explain how the practice of mentally retrieving information supports durable learning. Deliberate practice involves effort, failure, and renewed attempts; it is necessary for acquiring, understanding, and applying new knowledge. Varying and spacing out practice also support learning, recall, and the ability to discriminate between different problems and techniques for solving them.

The Learning Commons offers opportunities for practicing a variety of tasks and content associated with classes that most faculty teach. Our trained peer educators tutor math, natural sciences, languages, and  a variety of business, economics, and nursing courses. Our peer-assisted learning (PAL) facilitators offer weekly collaborative learning sessions for specific courses in math, nursing, and physics. For faculty who teach courses that require written papers and oral presentations, our Writing Center and the Speech and Presentation Lab provide opportunities to practice writing and presenting. We also support students who want to develop more effective study strategies. Many faculty use group projects to support learning. The Group Work Lab offers students the opportunity to practice how to work well in a group to enhance learning and performance.

As students connect with our trained peer educators, they enter a relationship that involves practice with content, problem solving, and the written and oral communication of new knowledge. Our peer staff have been trained in deploying processes that involve initial assessment of student needs and abilities, the demonstration of strategies, and ample time to practice that is capped off with summative assessment and planning for success in both learning and presenting new material and big ideas. Students also experience and identify with a more knowledgeable peer who can listen and respond to their needs.

Image from Zoom training on community building with PAL facilitators
PAL facilitators offer weekly collaborative learning sessions for historically difficult courses.

When you leverage the Learning Commons to support student learning in your courses, you are also supporting yourself as a teaching faculty. Students who practice the material you teach will be better prepared to process actively the learning that you are working hard to facilitate. They will be more likely to retrieve concepts and problem solving approaches and with greater accuracy. Initial data from our PAL facilitation program reveals that students who participate in weekly PAL collaborative learning sessions are more likely to receive A and B grades and less likely to receive C and D grades or withdraw.

Attitudinally, students will likely be more confident and motivated to learn in your class, if they utilize our trained tutors and PAL facilitators. Our surveys of students using Learning Commons’ programs show that overwhelming majorities feel more confident with the tutored material (between 93% and 95% depending on the program) and more motivated to continue learning it (between 84% and 92%). Between 84 and 86% of respondents attribute improvements in course grades to their work with our peer educators. Based on our Writing Center surveys, 98% of respondents report feeling more confident with the writing assignment, 95% report feeling more confident with writing in general due to their work with writing assistants, and 91% report feeling more motivated to complete the assignment.

How you can support students practicing what you teach

A class culture develops in every course we teach, and we faculty can weave practicing with the Learning Commons’ peer educators into that culture. Means of doing so include:

  • Normalizing practice of the taught material and the use of peer educators as facilitators of learning and practice by promoting the Learning Commons and its programs that are relevant to your course;
  • Including a link to the Learning Commons on your Moodle page and with all or specific assignments;
  • Adding links to our Bookings Scheduler and our Writing Center Scheduler to your assignments, your Moodle page, or in your Zoom chat window during synchronous online sessions.
  • Inviting to your class a writing assistant or tutor who can explain how easy it is to connect with our peer educators. Use our visit request form to invite one of our peer staff to visit your class virtually;
  • Verbally encouraging students to use the Learning Commons. You can do this during class, when working with breakout groups, or during office hours;
  • Actively directing students to the Learning Commons’ information that is available in the most current syllabus statement.

There are many ways to connect your students to the Learning Commons’ peer educators. Most importantly, explaining how deliberate practice supports learning (and grades) along with your repeated encouragement and endorsement of continued practice with our trained writing assistants, tutors, PAL facilitators, and peer consultants will go a long way toward helping students reach higher levels of performance, confidence, and motivation. Now, as we are still in the early weeks of a new semester, is a good time to start encouraging practice as a learning strategy and the use of the Learning Commons as a place where trained peers can support your students’ deliberate practice of the material you teach.

Jeffrey White directs the Learning Commons at UP, where he collaborates with others to supervise and support over 60 tutors, writing assistants, and PAL facilitators. He also teaches courses in the Department of International Languages and Cultures. Currently, Jeffrey is the immediate past president of the Northwest College Reading and Learning Association.

Filed Under: Community Posts, Professional Development, Teaching Tips Tagged With: helping students, learning, learning commons, mental health, moodle, teaching, tutoring

July 15, 2019 By Andrew Guest

Mentally Healthy: The most common trauma experiences

plant seedling in a handThis post is an entry for Part III of the Mentally Healthy resource guide for UP faculty and academic staff working with students who might have mental health concerns.

While no one would ever wish a trauma experience on a student, the reality is that trauma experiences are common and often unavoidable. The question becomes how we respond. While ‘post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)’ has come into common parlance and helped people better recognize the possible long-term effects of trauma, psychologists are also very interested in ‘post-traumatic growth’ and encourage a recognition that with the right support trauma is not always debilitating.

The Portland-based Education Northwest organization makes available a broad guide on Trauma-Informed Practices for Postsecondary Education that covers a wide range of trauma experiences. The American Counseling Association also has information available about what to expect from “Distressed College Students Following Traumatic Events” including examples of effects that might include suicide threat, memory loss, comments trigger flashbacks, and survivor’s guilt.

Here I’ll also just briefly discuss two types of trauma experiences seem particularly common among college students: the death of a loved one, and experiences of sexual assault.

According to the University of California guide for Promoting Student Mental Health “Between 35 and 48 percent of college students have lost a family member or close friend within the last two years (Balk, 1997; Wrenn, 1999; Balk, Walker & Baker, 2010). Furthermore, 8.6 percent of college students’ academic performances have been affected by the death of a family member or close friend within the last year (Servaty-Seib & Hamilton, 2006). Research shows that a student’s GPA significantly decreases during the semester of loss, providing empirical support for the assertion that bereaved students are at risk for declined academic performance (Servaty-Seib, 2006).”

Beyond referring students with significant grief needs to the UP Health and Counseling Center and to the Early Alert / Care Team, there are quite a few resources for educators working with grieving students. While many of these are geared at K-12 educational contexts, an organization called Actively Moving Forward is specifically geared toward “connecting and empowering grieving college students” while also being part of a broader Coalition to Support Grieving Students offering resources such as these suggestions of “what not to say”:

what not to say

The University of California guide for faculty and staff also notes that “The statistics for the sexual assault of college women is staggering: one in four or five college women will be survivors of a sexual assault during their college career. While approximately 90 percent of sexual assault survivors are female, it is estimated that 10 percent of survivors are male. While most sexual assaults are committed by men against women, men are also assaulted by women, and same-sex assaults also occur. The transgender population is also at risk. The majority of sexual assaults are committed by someone known to the survivor (e.g., an acquaintance, date, partner or former partner, or family member) and most of these assaults go unreported.”

When faculty and academic staff are confronted with this type of trauma, the UP Title IX office offers a helpful guide elaborating on a five step model:

Step 1 – Support. Offer support non-judgmentally and with empathy.

Step 2 – Safety. Assess for safety. [contacting Public Safety at 503 943 7161 if necessary]

Step 3 – Confidentiality. Inform about the limits of confidentiality to conversation. [noting that with UP employees it cannot be completely confidential]

Step 4 – Resources. Refer to appropriate resources.

Step 5 – Report. Report to the Title IX Office.

 

Photo by Ravi Roshan on Unsplash

 

Filed Under: Community Posts Tagged With: mental health, mentally healthy

July 15, 2019 By Andrew Guest

Mentally Healthy: The most common mental health issues

stress graffitiThis post is an entry for Part III of the Mentally Healthy resource guide for UP faculty and academic staff working with students who might have mental health concerns.

The bad news: data suggests that colleges and counseling centers are finding increasing needs for mental health services in ways that stretch capacity and create concern about a “fragile” generation. The good news: much of this increase in need may relate to the destigmatization of mental health concerns among younger generations, and opportunities for students to persist with education in the face of challenges that may have previously gone unacknowledged. Working with college students thus requires a combination of concern, recognition, understanding, and encouragement.

While the story of mental health concerns among college students is multi-faceted, the increasing recognition of these concerns comes with an increasing value to mental health literacy among faculty and staff. While there are many educational opportunities to develop that literacy, here I’ll just highlight and offer a brief overview of the three most common. As reported in the Association for University and College Counseling Center Directors Annual Survey, these are: anxiety, depression, and relationships.

AUCCCD survey results

Anxiety concerns can range from relatively common concerns about academics, social situations, and finances to more profound psychological disorders – which often onset around the typical college age. One challenge with anxiety disorders is that some degree of anxiety is normal and adaptive  — feeling nervous about a big exam can help us prepare, while being anxious about unfamiliar social situations can keep us safe. But it is easy for these stressors to step over an imaginary line to become debilitating and disruptive.  Here’s how the American Psychological Association describes the most common ways anxiety manifests when it steps over that line:

anxiety disorders from the apa

Depression often overlaps with anxiety, and it too often starts with relatively normal experiences – a low mood or periods of sadness can be quite normal when dealing with the new challenges of college life. But major depression is often diagnosed when those moods are disproportionate to life events, and when they become disruptive to regular functioning. Depression is diagnosed based on a constellation of symptoms that do not necessarily look the same across individuals. But, as illustrated by a Huffington Post infographic, there are some common physical and emotional manifestations (not all of which need to be present for any one individual diagnosis):

depression infographic

Relationship concerns can also come in a wide range of forms – from romantic, to roommates, to parents, to professors. Jeffrey Jensen Arnett is a developmental psychologist who did much to define “Emerging Adulthood” as a new stage of the lifespan where many, including most traditional age college students, engage in intensive identity exploration around love, work, and worldview. He also argues that relationship expectations are less structured than in the past – parent-child relationships have to be re-normed when kids leave for college, but most are not just left on their own; romantic relationships are more diverse and less bound by cultural norms and expectations. This can be disorienting, and requires skill building. Some relationship issues relate to interpersonal violence, and need to by addressed through mechanisms including the Title IX office. In other cases, students simply need support for building skills to have healthy relationships.

More good news is that all these types of concerns can in fact be addressed through quality counseling and support. When we as faculty and academic staff recognize the need in our students, make the right referrals and know that the very commonness of these concerns means they can be, and regularly are, successfully navigated as part of the college experience.

 

Photo by George Pagan III on Unsplash

Filed Under: Community Posts Tagged With: mental health, mentally healthy

July 15, 2019 By Andrew Guest

Mentally Healthy: Education and training opportunities

chairsThis post is an entry for Part II of the Mentally Healthy resource guide for UP faculty and academic staff working with students who might have mental health concerns.

So you want to know more? Good. Developing an understanding of mental health may help you not only confront and address acute mental health concerns that students (or other people in your life) present, but may also improve your general ability as an educator to be inclusive in your work. The hope is that learning about mental health is not an additional burden, but instead an opportunity for professional development and growth. Below are several practical outlets toward that end.

As a low cost and modest effort way to learn more, you can always access on-line resources relevant to faculty and academic staff roles. This on-line guide book for UP is based partially on a thorough guide for faculty and academic staff produced by Cornell University, which in turn was adapted by the University of California system into a useful handbook. The Cornell guide no longer seems available on-line, but the California update is freely available and worth a read. For links and other more policy oriented information, the Jed Foundation has made extensive efforts to offer resources related to its specific mission of addressing college student mental health concerns.

Probably the best way to educate yourself, however, is through an in-person training. The UP Academic Network for Mental Health is planning to offer at least one such training on campus each academic year – so keep an eye out for those opportunities. But we are also fortunate in Portland to have an on-line hub called gettrainedtohelp.com specifically promoting local mental health trainings provided as the collaborative public health efforts of Multnomah County, Clackamas County, and Washington County. This resources locates a range of standardized and evidence-based training programs offered in the greater Portland area, often for free or at reduced cost.

Examples of the program offerings at gettrainedtohelp.com, which are also programs offered by national and international mental health / suicide prevention efforts, include:

ASIST – Applied Suicide Intervention Skills Training. As explained on the Get Trained to Help web-site, “ASIST is a two-day interactive workshop that teaches you how to recognize someone who may be at risk for suicide, how to intervene and promote safety and how to identify appropriate supports to help keep the person safe. Participants will receive an informational workbook and wallet card that summarizes the training as well as a list of community resources.”

Mental Health First Aid. The eight-hour introductory course (for which we have trained trainers on the UP campus) is explained on the Get Trained to Help web-site as “Essential first aid training for anyone age 18 and older who wants to learn how to help a person who may be experiencing a mental health related crisis or problem. This course teaches you to recognize signs and symptoms and provides the steps to take to provide help. Participants will come away with the skills and tools to offer help to others and increase their personal knowledge.”

QPR – Question, Persuade, & Refer. As explained on the Get Trained to Help web-site, “QPR is an educational program that teaches community members how to recognize that a person may be experiencing thoughts of suicide and offer first aid until more experienced help is available. Participants will learn about warning signs, risk factors, common myths about suicide and a three step suicide prevention first aid action plan.  Participants will receive a booklet and wallet card with summary information at the end of the training.”

CALM – Counseling on Access to Lethal Means. As explained on the Get Trained to Help web-site, “CALM is intended to assist helpers in offering strategies to help clients at risk of suicide and their families reduce access to lethal means, particularly (but not exclusively) firearms. The workshop will introduce participants to the knowledge and skill components included in the completed 2 hour, interactive workshop. CALM is a means reduction program developed at the Injury Prevention Center at Dartmouth and evaluated by researchers at the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. The CALM workshop includes: a power point presentation regarding why CALM is effective and a model videotaped attempt scenario.    CALM is recognized on the SPRC/AFSP Best Practice Registry, Section III. CALM is for anyone who works with people in a clinical/counseling situation such as health and mental health, veteran affairs, schools, peer support, clergy, domestic violence, etc.”

Finally, there are some on-line training programs to help people educate themselves on mental health – though at present none seem directly available to UP faculty and academic staff. There are some examples available at the web-site of the Suicide Prevention Resource Center, though these specific programs may be less relevant for faculty and academic staff. If you find other good on-line trainings, let us know and we can keep updating here on the Mentally Healthy portion of the TLC blog!

 

Photo by Jan Genge on Unsplash

Filed Under: Community Posts Tagged With: mental health, mentally healthy

July 15, 2019 By Andrew Guest

Mentally Healthy: Setting boundaries – balancing challenge and support

walking on a beachThis post is an entry for Part II of the Mentally Healthy resource guide for UP faculty and academic staff working with students who might have mental health concerns.

Just how flexible should we be in classrooms and in our academic work for students seem to be struggling with mental health concerns? This type of question came up a few years back during a UP Faculty Development Day on mental health: How much should we be willing to let assignment deadlines slip? How much adjusting should we do to our attendance policies? How much time should we give to students who seem to need extra attention outside of class?

While acknowledging nuance and variable circumstances, the then-director of UP Counseling Services Dr. Will Meek offered a general response that surprised me for erring on the side of inflexibility: it’s really important for faculty to set good boundaries and maintain high expectations when students have mental health concerns. His sense was that good boundaries and high expectations often give a reliable and helpful structure to the lives of students who are otherwise prone to drift and disengage. It is human to sympathize with the extra academic needs of students struggling with mental health concerns, but too much flexibility can sometimes encourage further disengagement.

There is no magic formula for setting perfect boundaries, but the suggestion here is that it is important for faculty and academic staff to think about intentionally and to draw on best practices. This is particularly true in two related domains: 1) class policies and procedures, and 2) interactions with students outside of the classroom.

What would it look like to think intentionally about these things? In an Inside Higher Ed article addressing the challenges of undertaking excess ‘emotional labor’, Kerry Ann Rockquemore offers the following:

“I encourage you to spend some time asking yourself: 1) What precisely are my responsibilities as a professor? 2) What are my students’ responsibilities? and 3) Where exactly does my responsibility end and my students’ responsibility begin? This clarity will help you to feel more comfortable defending your boundaries when students cross them, without any guilt whatsoever.”

In regard to class policies and procedures, one result of such thinking would be clear policies that are set out at the beginning of the semester with the right balance of challenge and support. Give students clear deadlines, and clear consequences. But also build in chances to learn from mistakes. Allow them to drop a quiz score or two, provide some choice on which writing assignments they submit, offer some free passes if they miss a class. And then be consistent and up front so that students know what to expect when, and be careful about exceptions.

As a ChronicleVitae article on the challenges of being an ‘empathic teacher’ by Tracey M. Lewis-Giggetts phrases it:

“I want to give students the benefit of the doubt each and every time. But I’ve come to learn that doing so doesn’t always help them. If anything, it enables them. So while I’ll offer second chances like extra-credit work or a make-up assignment — because I think those things really do exist in life — I never deviate from the initial rules of engagement in my classroom.”

In regard to interactions with students outside the classroom, remember that for academics best practice is to leave psychological counseling to the professionals. We can and should listen, care, and get to know our students. But we should also maintain boundaries that allow us to be effective at our own profession: teaching and learning. In the Inside Higher Ed essay cited above, Rockquemore suggests a stock phrase to manage situations where boundaries may be getting crossed:

“It sounds like you need a space to have a confidential conversation, and I can’t help you because I’m not trained as a _______ (therapist/crisis counselor/financial aid specialist, etc.). Do you know how to connect with the _______ on campus (insert appropriate support service)?”

There is no perfect formula, but the suggestion here is to think carefully about how to set boundaries “just right”: not too loose, but not too rigid. As explained by psychologist Amanda J. Wyrick in her article “Professor Goldilocks and the Three Boundaries”:

“Rigid boundaries, in which a professor does not try to build connections with students, may negatively impact student perception of the emotional support available to them. Conversely, loose boundaries, in which a professor fails to establish any kind of authority, takes student problems too personally, and shares too much personal information with students, may also damage the instructor-student relationship. Loose boundaries may confuse the student, potentially leading to a conceptualization of the professor as a friend rather than a teacher and mentor.”

Wyrick also draws from bell hooks writing in Teaching to Transgress for a useful summary of why sometimes erring on the side of good boundaries matters: “teachers must be actively committed to a process of self-actualization that promotes their own well-being if they are to teach in a manner that empowers students.”

 

Photo by Pierre Leverrier on Unsplash

Filed Under: Community Posts Tagged With: mental health, mentally healthy

  • Go to page 1
  • Go to page 2
  • Go to page 3
  • Go to page 4
  • Go to Next Page »

Footer

RSS Upbeat News

  • ¿Que Pasa Con DACA? Moving Forward and Ways to Advocate, March 24
  • ViaCrucis: La Via Dolorosa del Migrante, March 12
  • RSVP for “How to Be an Antiracist” Community Conversation by March 23
  • Racial and Social Justice 101 Webinar
  • Women’s History Month Keynote Speaker, Gabby Rivera, March 18
  • Updated Beauchamp Center Hours
  • St. Joseph’s Feast Day, March 19
  • Moment of Beauty: Vision of The Son of Man

Get Help

Help Desk
Phone: ext. 7000
Email: help@up.edu

Media Services
Phone: ext. 7774
Email: media@up.edu

Academic Technology Services & Innovation
Email: atsi@up.edu

Archives

Tags

assessment capturespace collaboration copyright core curriculum crowdsourcing digital literacy discussion forums edtech failure fair use fine arts flickr flipped classroom google helping students images learning learning commons media mental health mentally healthy microsoft office moodle office hours online Pedagogy PLN powerpoint presentations quiz resources screencasting student health student resources students study study skills teaching teaching and learning collaborative teaching circles tlc tutoring twitter video

[footer_backtotop]

Copyright © 2021 · University of Portland