Thriving in Academe

Taking Responsibility for Student Learning
Learning how to learn is a serious part of student work—and when faculty and staff make it a serious part of their work, students thrive.

At Alverno College, we believe that learning is a collective responsibility. In contrast to our approach, where both faculty and staff are responsible for the needs of all students, many institutions assign specialized staff to work with students struggling with study skills, organizational and time management skills, and basic academic skills. But we've found that learning improves in a variety of ways when faculty and staff can collaborate in the interests of serving underprepared students.

For instance, following their Friday lunch discussion, the faculty group discussing the first-year student will join the rest of the faculty and academic staff for collaboration around issues of teaching, learning, and assessment. No classes are scheduled on Friday afternoons at Alverno so that faculty and academic staff can participate in this kind of discourse together in workshops, department meetings, or sessions involving other groupings.

The faculty and staff also hold an institute at the beginning of each semester and at the end of the academic year to engage in similar work. Some recent sessions have engaged faculty and staff in work on student self-assessment, effective feedback to students at various developmental levels, responding to different kinds of learning needs, and teaching for active listening.

Although not all of this collaborative work focuses on underprepared students, it is clear to everyone at the college that the responsibility of helping underprepared students cannot rest solely with the staff.

To have staff alone teaching study and management skills, sends a false message to those students. It says that what they are doing isn't really academic. After all, "real professors" aren't teaching these skills. To other students, segregating these academic skills courses suggests that learning how to learn isn't a serious part of academic work because the faculty don't treat it as such in their courses.

Student Learning in the First Year and Beyond
We do have a college transition program at Alverno for students who are not quite ready for some of the rigors of college study, and it is taught by members of the Instructional Services staff. The program focuses on developing the analytic tools and learning skills that students will need in their studies.

But, at the same time, faculty design and teach their first-year courses with the assumption that most students need assistance in learning how to learn.

One of our educational assumptions at Alverno is that learning is a developmental process and that our design and practice of teaching should reflect this. Faculty build learning experiences into their teaching that are appropriate for the different learning needs of individual students.

For example, giving a reading assignment in an introductory course without analytic questions to guide students is rare here. As students become more capable, they need less guidance, but even at the more advanced levels of the curriculum, faculty design their courses to create the conditions for learning.

Having students become independent as learners is the aim, but helping students get there requires attention to stages of development—work that stretches beyond the first year.

Some students may actually be quite successful in the first stages of their college studies and later show signs of struggle. We have found, for example, that when students begin dealing with the more abstract and conceptually challenging dimensions of their majors, their writing ability can regress.

Students who demonstrate little difficulty in exploring or explaining concepts or principles early in their studies may not be as adept at using disciplinary frameworks or addressing the complexity of issues in different contexts. Much of the collaboration at Alverno focuses on how faculty can create learning experiences that address learning challenges at all levels of the curriculum, not just in the first year. We recognize that students may be "underprepared" for the different kinds of learning required at different points in their studies. Therefore, we try to design learning experiences accordingly.

Learning in the Disciplines
Emphasizing disciplines as frameworks for student learning is an important part of how we think about teaching at Alverno. We focus not only on what students should understand about our respective disciplines, but also on how they should be able to think and what they should be able to do as a result of study within a discipline.

In this context, initiating students into the discipline is more a matter of engaging them in the practice of the discipline than introducing them to some of the ideas of that discipline.

As the tale of the philosopher buying the computer suggests, students bring varying degrees of preparedness to the practice of any discipline. As a result, the challenge is to create learning experiences that will assist students to actually engage in the practice of the disciplines.

This has been the topic of discussion at several faculty and staff meetings and workshops during the past few years at our college and has led to some innovative approaches to teaching the disciplines.

A learning strategy that seems effective in all areas is connecting the new idea or skill to be learned to something the learner already knows or has experienced. For example, a student who is asked to engage in making comparisons in philosophy—or history or psychology—might make a quicker connection to the process by being encouraged to realize that he or she has made comparisons elsewhere when buying a car or choosing a college. Even students who might be underprepared in a discipline new to them can more readily carry over skills if they realize they already have them in some contexts.

Asking students to identify problems they faced in the past that were really opportunities to use a particular discipline is another strategy to draw on the experience of students as they engage a discipline for the first time.

Has there ever been a time when you were trying to make a difficult choice between two things you cared about? Have you ever heard people using statistics to convince you of an idea? How do you make decisions about how to raise your child? These are questions grounded in common experience, and they can also be effective ways of introducing students to the kinds of thinking involved in philosophy, mathematics, and psychology.

Conclusion
Making the teaching of the underprepared student a responsibility shared among faculty and academic staff has provided us with a richer and deeper resource in our efforts to educate our students. We have learned that there are many ways in which students might be challenged, and we have tried to create the kinds of learning environments at all levels of the curriculum that incorporate these ways.

Finally, we have come to see that even our own disciplines, which seem so interesting and comprehensible to us, might make some of our students feel "unprepared."

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