Recap: Teaching Today’s Students
“Pedagogy for a New Era” and “The Undergraduate Perspective”
When CETL spoke to UM departments last fall, one of the most persistent pedagogical challenges they reported was a sense of estrangement from today’s students—a feeling that teaching today was different than it had been in the past and that it was getting harder to understand and engage the students in our classrooms.
We decided to address this challenge by organizing a two-part series on “Teaching Today’s Students.” The first part, which took place on February 14, was called “Pedagogy for a New Era.” The second part, on February 28, was a student panel on “The Undergraduate Perspective.” With around 50 instructors present at both events, the series has been one of our most popular offerings this semester. I’ll share some highlights from the sessions below.
Part 1: Pedagogy for a New Era
When Josh and I were organizing the first session, we thought it was important to put our impressions of today’s students in historical perspective. We started with a piece from Science Advances called “Kids these days: Why the youth of today seem lacking.” The authors note, unsurprisingly, that most generations have a tendency to believe that younger people are deficient in a variety of ways. But more to the point, “these perceptions are associated with people’s standing on those traits.” For example, “intelligent people especially think youth are less intelligent, and well-read people especially think youth enjoy reading less.”
We wanted to bear this phenomenon in mind before making any big claims about how “kids these days” might differ from previous generations. That said: students in 2024 are facing new challenges and may, accordingly, be responding differently to setbacks than they have in the past. To understand these challenges, we took a deep dive into the demographics of students here at the University of Mississippi and nationwide.
Race, socioeconomic status, and rurality play important roles in the experiences of Mississippi students specifically. Our campus has a significant disparity in terms of the proportion of Black students who graduate from Mississippi high schools and the number who go on to enroll at the state flagship university. Many of our students also come from rural schools that are poorly-resourced. As of 2021, Mississippi’s legislature spent less than all but two other states on rural instruction. Additionally, our students may lack access to the bare necessities they need to survive and thrive in college: a 2022 survey of students enrolled at a large, public university in the Southeast (a context very similar to our own) found that 37.1% of respondents were facing basic needs insecurity.
Mental health is also a concern at UM, mirroring national trends. More than 60% of students nationally meet the criteria for one or more mental health issues. On our campus, 39% struggle with anxiety and 46% with depression. Counseling centers all over the nation are also seeing a rise in traumatized students—which is unsurprising given that somewhere between 66 and 85% of youth report lifetime traumatic event exposure and as many as 50% are exposed to a potentially traumatic event in the first year of college.
Additionally, students nationwide are facing discrimination and other challenges because of their gender identity, sexuality, and/or disability status. One 2020 survey reported that nearly 17% of undergraduate and graduate students identified as gay, lesbian, bisexual, asexual, queer, or questioning and 1.7% identified their gender as transgender, nonbinary, or questioning. In recent surveys, 21% of undergraduate students report having a disability.
Any conversation about today’s students should recognize the many hurdles they have faced to get to higher ed and the hurdles they face during their time here. Given these challenges, our goal as instructors should not be to “fix” student “deficits”; rather, we should aim to address the structural barriers that stand in their way.
Obviously, there are many of these barriers to address and even more ways to address them. But Josh and I came up with three day-to-day approaches that we thought would be particularly useful.
The first is simply working to provide students with “on-ramps” to learning. Many young people spent formative years of their education in the midst of a global pandemic. When we returned to in-person settings, neither instructors nor students were fully prepared to address the fallout from that crisis. Josh suggested that we should help students readjust to the expectations of an in-person learning experience by focusing on engagement:
(re)connecting the purpose of our course to students’ lives and the larger world
fostering relatedness among students and instructors, and
empowering students as our allies and agents in the classroom.
Given the recent rise in students reporting trauma, we also thought trauma-informed approaches would be especially helpful. That means cultivating environments that promote…
Safety
Trustworthiness & transparency
Peer support
Collaboration & mutuality, and
Empowerment
In addition to these principles, as Phyllis Thompson and Janice Carello note, we should also acknowledge and address the structural failings that hamper student thriving and “interrogate the ways in which our own course policies, practices, and cultures inadvertently recapitulate inequality, abusive relationship dynamics, or oppressive power dynamics.”
Finally, given the high number of students on our campuses reporting disabilities, we thought Universal Design for Learning, a framework created with accessibility in mind, would be especially useful. Offering multiple means of student engagement, multiple means of representation in course materials, and multiple means of action & expression in student work is one way to help increase the chances that students will thrive in our courses.
Part 2: The Undergraduate Perspective
The second session in our series featured a panel of UM undergraduates drawn from our Supplemental Instruction program. The four students—Jane Patrick, Trent Smith, Alyssa Stoner, and Caroline Sturgis—are SI leaders who facilitate weekly structured review sessions for students enrolled in historically challenging courses at UM. We asked them a variety of questions about their experiences in the classroom, and they were able to speak from their positions both as SI leaders and as students themselves.
When asked about their impressions of professors, they had favorable things to say: panelists indicated the vast majority of instructors they’ve had at UM were enthusiastic about their subject matter and wanted to see their students succeed. That said, the panelists also noted that they tend to seek out the best course experiences possible by reviewing publicly available student evaluations of professors before signing up for classes. They want to be challenged but also to feel supported by their instructors. As for the obstacles profs face: they suspected that burnout was as bad for faculty as it is for students.
They also had a lot of interesting things to say about how the pandemic has affected their own academic performance or that of the students they work with. For example, some students seem to have lost foundational test-taking and essay-writing skills while others struggle to connect their learning across the various units of a course, much less from one course to another. Socially, they observed, many students are eager to be involved in in-person extracurriculars and likely to overload themselves, perhaps because of a lack of awareness about how much time those activities will take. Remote instruction may have also made it more difficult for students to connect with professors outside the classroom.
On the struggles many instructors have faced with student attendance, the panelists emphasized how stretched students are with academic and extracurricular pursuits. Some recalled skipping class to study for an upcoming test or being technically present in one lecture while trying to complete the homework for another. Because they’re balancing so many demands on their time, many students simply don’t attend lectures if they think they can succeed in the class without them. As solutions to this problem, panelists proposed keeping students engaged through interactive lectures and group work. They also suggested making attendance mandatory, simply because students will prioritize something they’re required to do over something optional. Items that aren’t urgent tend to fall to the bottom of their to-do lists.
Another major theme was the amount of pressure students put on themselves to excel in their academic and professional pursuits and the persistent feeling that they have to be “more than perfect” to attain the post-graduate opportunities they want. Many are scared to miss class or exams even when they’re sick and contagious. Many feel intimidated by the prospect of attending office hours or admitting that they’re struggling with the course material. And many sense that there is a stigma around mental health issues, especially among their peers.
In light of these pressures, panelists suggested that instructors take time to talk with students about the importance of mental and physical health and to remind students often about campus resources. They also agreed that transparency, at the beginning of a course, about professors’ expectations is key, as is minimizing high-pressure exams that can make or break a student’s course grade. Most importantly, simply being human and acknowledging that students have lives outside the classroom can help them feel comfortable enough to admit when they have an issue and seek out the assistance they need.
As someone who thinks a lot about motivation and grading, I was especially struck by how strategically students approached their studies, seeking to maximize the chances that they’ll leave a course with the highest grade possible. That might mean students bypass valuable but un-assessed learning opportunities, like attending lectures when attendance isn’t mandatory. But it might also mean that they invest heavily in learning tasks that don’t seem valuable to them. For example, while one student expressed dislike for course “busywork,” another said they were happy to complete seemingly trivial tasks if it meant more opportunities to raise their grade. One of my takeaways was that students are under immense pressure to maintain their GPAs and that pressure is a big motivating factor in their academic decision-making—and, at least for some students, a factor that affects their mental health as well.
During the Q&A session, both the student panelists and the instructors present expressed appreciation for each other. Given the many demands on our time, taking an hour or two to connect with others and share classroom experiences can be a challenge. We’re grateful, at CETL, that so many students and instructors were willing to gather with us this month to think about how we can enhance teaching and learning at UM.
“Teaching Today’s Students” was a great series, but we’re not done talking about the issues these sessions raised. If you’re a member of the UM community, we invite you to join us Wednesday, March 20 for a workshop on “Supporting Neurodivergent Students” and Wednesday, March 27 for “Supporting Students’ Mental Health.” Register at the links above or on our website.
Thanks for this data about our students, and for some suggestions about how to deal with these challenges that "today's students" may be facing. My question, however, concerns the premise at the beginning of the post. You start off by suggesting that there is a constant idea that "intelligent" and "well read" adults look upon the youth as underperforming in comparison to their generation. Thus, we should be skeptical of this narrative. I agree with this and try to remind myself of that constantly before falling into that trap. But I was wonder why you only presented data from the present, rather than demonstrate this point by showing some time-series data on these issues. Are students facing similar or different challenges today as they were in the past? We kind of lose that strand of the argument along the way. Anyway, thank you for this substack. I always read it and appreciate its insights.