ICYMI: Welcome Week Workshop Highlights
CETL hosted three workshops for instructors in the week before classes started. Here are some highlights.
As we all gear up for UM classes to begin August 26, our team has offered three welcome-week workshops to give instructors just-in-time information, resources, and advice on preparing for a successful fall semester. For those who couldn’t make it—and our friends on other campuses—we wanted to share a few of the key takeaways from these workshops.
Who Are Our Students?
Instructors are subject-matter experts in their disciplines, no question. That said, teaching is an inherently human enterprise, and we are teaching students about our disciplines. That means some awareness of who our students are can be quite helpful in thinking through how we design and teach our courses.
The office of Institutional Research, Effectiveness, and Planning (IREP) shares demographic and statistical data about our students in a few easily accessible ways, including the UM Fact Book (HTML), the Mini-Fact Book (PDF), and the Tableau interface (UM login required).
For Fall 2023 (census data), there were 21,596 students enrolled. That includes:
57% identifying as female
47% Mississippi residents
4% international students
91% full-time students
9% self-identified first-generation students (though there were a large number of non-responses on this figure, so it’s almost certainly higher)
22% in STEM majors
20% identifying as an underrepresented minority (including 10% Black, 5% Hispanic/Latino, 3% listing 2+ racial identities, 2% Asian)
We also know that a significant number—around 48% —of UM students participate in Greek life (fraternities/sororities). An article in The Daily Mississippian notes that, “Like it or not, Greek life culture is Ole Miss.”
Thankfully, IREP Director Katie Busby was in attendance at this workshop, so when someone asked about legacy students (those who have one or more parents who attended UM), she was able to share that 23% of incoming first-year students this fall have an immediate family member (i.e., sibling or parent) who attends/attended UM. (Katie notes that this does not account for extended family.)
We also shared the latest (spring 2024) data on UM student mental health from the Healthy Minds survey, which is a national effort to understand college students’ mental health. Nearly 550 UM undergrads provided information on the status of their mental health, with some stark findings:
37% met the diagnostic criteria for moderate to severe generalized anxiety,
39% met the diagnostic criteria for moderate to severe depression,
49% met the criteria for depression or anxiety disorder, and
12% had experienced suicidal ideation.
When asked how frequently they had experienced academic impairment because of their mental health in the prior four weeks, the results showed
No impact on academic work: 25%
Impacted 1-2 days: 35%
Impacted 3-5 days: 24%
Impacted 6+ days: 16%
Nationally, about 21% (or 1 in 5) of students report having some kind of disability, according to the Postsecondary National Policy Institute data from the 2019-2020 academic year. It is quite likely that these numbers are underreported.
We also know that students in a similar institutional context (a large, public university in the southeast) experience high levels of basic needs and financial insecurity. A 2022 survey of graduate and undergraduate students (excluding freshmen) found that 37.1% of students experienced food, housing, or financial insecurity. At UM, the Healthy Minds data shared that 34% of students are often or always stressed about their current financial situation (37% reported feeling stressed sometimes).
What can we glean from these data? Emily Pitts Donahoe frames this nicely for UM instructors:
Based on these and other statistics, a UM classroom of 20 students might contain…
At least 2 first-generation students
4 students from a historically marginalized racial group
3 students who identify as LGBTQ+ (publicly or privately)
4 students with a disability (visible or invisible, documented or undocumented)
4 students who receive federal Pell Grants (need-based financial aid)
6 students who will experience basic needs insecurity during their college career
12 students who meet the criteria for one or more mental health problems
9 students who will not graduate within four years and 6 who will not graduate within six
20 students whose classroom experiences were disrupted by the pandemic
While many of these data are quite bleak, we encourage instructors to take an asset-minded approach to student differences. As Smit writes, “Employing a deficit mindset to frame student difficulties perpetuates stereotypes, alienates students from higher education and disregards the role of higher education in perpetuating barriers to student success.”
Crafting Your Syllabus
CETL Director Josh Eyler facilitated a robust session on crafting a purposeful and useful syllabus document (slides here), beginning with an invitation for us to reflect on what the syllabus is. How would you complete this sentence?
A syllabus is a/an/the ____________________.
Josh suggests we think of the syllabus in this way:
A syllabus is an invitation.
A syllabus is an intellectual provocation.
A syllabus is an articulation of your teaching philosophy.
A syllabus is an expression of care.
A syllabus is a promise but is *not* a contract.
Things you might consider:
If you’re worried about “syllabus bloat,” you can move the policy sections to an appendix or to a section in Blackboard. We are required to share those policies with students, but they don’t have to be a part of the syllabus document itself.
Consider one or more of the following activities related to the syllabus:
Ask students to annotate it using Google Docs, Perusall, or another tool.
Design a syllabus scavenger hunt that asks students to find key information.
Save the syllabus for the second day—use the first day to get to know your students and introduce them to the exciting work of your course. (See the next section!)
In the chat, we covered a number of additional tips or strategies, including:
Consider using welcoming, first-/second-person language (I’m the instructor, you should attend class, we will explore this material…)
An alternative to a document (Word/Google Doc) syllabus is a liquid syllabus, a term that originated with Michelle Pacansky-Brock and is described on her website. Liz shared an example from her former institution.
Don Unger in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric introduced us to the concept of a Shadow Syllabus—basically, the unwritten assumptions and expectations we bring into our classes, developed by Sonya Huber.
One of our UM colleagues contributed to the article, “Best Practices in Syllabus Design,” for the American Journal of Pharmacy Education.
CETL has developed a syllabus template, which you can access from our Resources page or download directly with this link.
Access slides from Crafting Your Syllabus here.
Making the First Day Count
When we think about the first day of a college class, we often default to a discussion of the syllabus and an early dismissal… but as Josh suggested in his syllabus crafting workshop, there are other ways to spend our first day with students. Indeed, our team believes that the first day is an important tone-/norm-setting day that can make all the difference in how our semester unfolds with a particular group of students (slides here).
Take a moment and imagine what’s on your students’ minds as they walk into your first class meeting. What are they wondering? What do they want to know?
For many students, it’s probably not what your office hours are or what will be on the final exam. It’s more likely something like:
Will I be able to handle the workload for this class?
Will my teacher like me?
Will I know anyone in this class—and if I don’t, will I fit in?
Do I have enough time to get to my next class/work/eat lunch/take a nap?
Am I smart enough to be here? Is everyone going to find out I’m a fraud?
Meanwhile, pause for another moment and try to remember what goes through your mind on the first day of class. What are you wondering? What do you want to know?
It’s probably something like:
If I ask a question, will this group of students respond or stare at me blankly?
Will this many people ever be here again, or are they going to slowly disappear?
What if someone asks a question that I don’t know the answer to? Will they think I’m unqualified? (especially for early-career instructors)
Will they respect me? (especially for women and instructors with minoritized identities)
Will they try to cheat, use AI, or engage in academic dishonesty?
Why am I so tired? How will I get everything done?
Why are there so many students in this room?
To help build community and create an environment that facilitates learning, builds trust, and feels sustainable, we recommend the following priorities as you’re designing your first day of class:
Inclusion: As Hogan and Sathy (2022) write, “A culture of inclusion centers on a genuine interest and care for students’ success, confidence in their ability, and treating all students with dignity and respect.” How can you communicate these beliefs to your students?
Belonging: Students flourish when they feel their presence is noticed, valued, and meaningful. Brené Brown (2017) writes, “Stop walking through the world looking for confirmation that you don’t belong. You will always find it because you’ve made that your mission. Our call to courage is to protect our wild heart against constant evaluation, especially our own. No one belongs here more than you.” How can you communicate this to students?
Trust: We must extend and build trust—between our students and us, and among students in the class. It doesn’t matter how fancy your technology or how evidence-based your pedagogy might be, if there isn’t trust, learning will suffer. Zaretta Hammond writes in Culturally Responsive Teaching & the Brain about trust generators.
Psychological safety: To feel psychologically safe, we need to know that we can make mistakes or display vulnerability without fear of being shamed or rejected. In a classroom, psychological safety allows students to feel comfortable making mistakes and taking intellectual risks—which requires us to build trust.
Showing you care: At a basic level, our students need to feel like we care about them as individuals with value, regardless of their academic performance. Can you decouple your positive regard for your students as people from your judgment of their mastery of your discipline? Imagine if we understood their academic work as their choices, not reflecting on their thoughts or feelings about us, and just assumed they were making choices using their values, not ours? How might that unlock greater empathy and grace in our student/teacher relationships?
Access the slides from Making the First Day Count here.
Resources shared in the workshops
We had active chats in all three workshops, with multiple resources and links shared. Here’s a quick collection of them.
Browse our upcoming CETL events. (available for UM affiliated instructors, students, and staff only)
The Academic Support Programs put together a fantastic directory of student resources and services.
Find out more about Flagship First-Gen, the collection of resources and information about first-generation students (and faculty/staff who were first-gen students themselves).
The Academic Innovations Group is hosting a number of sessions on AI in the classroom. You can find info about them on CETL’s events page, under “Other Teaching-Related Events.” (available for UM affiliated instructors, students, and staff only)
Reach out!
Our team supports instructors at all levels and of all classifications—and those who are teaching outside the classroom, too!—throughout the year. Feel free to investigate our services and upcoming workshops/events on our website.
And have a great semester!