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Student Mental Health: What Faculty (Might?) Need to Know

An empty lecture hall.What do UP faculty, and staff on the academic side of the University, need to know about student mental health? This question has been much on my mind the last few years as discussions about mental health in college has seemed to accelerate both locally and nationally.

At UP the issue particularly came to the fore during the 2015-2016 academic year after a tragic constellation of three student and one staff deaths by suicide. This was followed by a burst of concerted attention: Fr. Poorman created an Ad Hoc Panel on Mental Health to audit, consult, and recommend mental health services and supports for students; the organizing theme for the 2016 Faculty Development Day program was mental health; the University increased staff at the Health and Counseling Center and for related programs such as Early Alert.

There is no doubt that progress has been made. But the start of a new academic year, and the classrooms full of new faces, also offers a reminder that the challenges of educating students in head, hands, and heart are ongoing and dynamic; there is always more to do.

One thing I hope to do this year is to start integrating information about student mental health into the work of the Teaching and Learning Collaborative—and I’d love to hear from others on the academic side of the University about what would be most helpful. With the generous cooperation of Karen Eifler and others, the hope is to regularly make information available on this blog, to host periodic brownbag discussions about specific student mental health issues, and to better communicate among faculty and academic staff about ways of attending to the mental health of our students as a part of good teaching and learning.

As I noted during the 2016 Faculty Development Day program, faculty and academic staff do not need to (and really should not) become paraprofessional counselors – we have an excellent staff of real professional counselors on campus, and many other resources devoted to the mental health of our students. But if we are to truly educate our students as whole people, we do need to be aware of what we can and should do to connect students to services and supports they may sometimes need (as just one example, hopefully most faculty now know that submitting an ‘early alert’ for a student of concern is an important first step in getting access to appropriate help).

One of the important realizations I had while working on the 2015-2016 Ad Hoc Panel on Mental Health was that while there are many great support services for students across the University in departments ranging from athletics, to residence life, to public safety, to campus ministry, the faculty are the only group that will inevitably interact with every single UP student. Our classes are the one thing every UP student must do.

As such, there may also be ways to think about the educational environments we create on the academic side of the University in relation to mental health promotion. What, for example, can we do in the ways we communicate with students to help destigmatize mental health concerns? How can we help students separate their grades in courses from their value as people? What are best practices in higher education for helping faculty to be allies in creating healthy campus climates?

But this is also where I need your help; I’d love to hear from others what questions, and what insights, you have (please feel free to email me directly at guesta@up.edu). What can we on the academic side do to better open lines of communication that build off the good work done in recent years at UP related to student mental health? As a starting point, look for more in this blog space through the coming year.

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It’s About Time

students working together at a tableWelcome to the fifth week of the semester. By this time, students are dealing with the reality of just how much they have to do for their courses. Those who successfully navigate their busy course loads will likely have developed approaches to managing their time and learning. In the Learning Commons, we’re training our peer assistants, in addition to tutoring content, to support students’ relationship with time and tasks. As faculty, we can also address time management during office hours and at various points in the semester. Here are a few tips that I can share with you from our new tutor training program.

Campus resources

Direct students to the Shepard Academic Resource Center: Here they can pick up copies of the Time Budget Sheet and the Semester Planner. They can also meet with SARC staff to discuss their plans and use of time management. Asking students how they are going about learning for your class can reveal a lot about their management of time for learning. From there, you can also help them to manage their time better.

Use the study cycle

How students go about studying is also important. In their training, Learning Commons peer assistants also learn how to present students with Frank Christ’s Study Cycle model. This approach includes a preview prior to each class session, debriefing after each class, and the use of goal-oriented “intensive study sessions” that are short and that build in a break and reward. The Study Cycle model help students avoid “binge studying” on days when they have fewer classes. An excellent faculty resource for learning more about the Study Cycle, integrating it into students’ time management planning, and many other approaches to improving student learning is Saundra McGuire’s Teach Students How to Learn.

Encourage social learning

The Learning Commons is built on the idea that learning is social and more accomplished peers can support individual and group learning of difficult and abstract material. Students who schedule in time for group learning can enhance the learning experience while making it more efficient. As faculty, we can help students to connect with each other and explicitly encourage group learning.

Prescription for procrastinators

Break the procrastination cycle with the Pomodoro Technique. We use this short snappy video as part of our tutor training program so that our peer assistants can help students start tasks that may seem daunting. It may even help you to jump start work on your research projects.

Focus explicitly on the changing brain

As students are developing a better sense of time for learning and how to use time, they can also improve their learning by thinking in terms of what Stanford researcher Carol Dweck refers to as mindset. We all can believe at times that our learning potential is fixed, but we can also believe that we possess the ability to grow and learn. Such a growth mindset seeks challenges and considers difficulties as revealing that we have not yet learned how such obstacles are to be overcome. As faculty, we can also remind students that challenges commonly take time and learning how better to learn is an ongoing process for us all. Dweck’s Mindset: The New Psychology of Success and Janet Zadina’s Multiple Pathways to the Student Brain are both helpful resources for faculty who wish to find ways to support positive changes in student beliefs about learning and their own brains.

These are just some of the topics that we cover in our eleven hours of peer assistant training, and, of course, there is much more to learning and supporting student growth. In the Learning Commons, we will continue to develop our training and use of observation to grow our own potential to overcome challenges inherent to the work we do. I invite you to encourage your students to come to the Learning Commons to work with our peer assistants, and our door is always open for you to come see our peer assistants in action or to talk with me about student learning and how peer assistance can help student learning in your courses.

Jeffrey White is an instructor of German and the Learning Commons administrator in Buckley Center 163. He can be contacted at white@up.edu.