We have recently hosted the Thrive event, Design Lab: Let’s talk teaching practices and student wellbeing. Using a dotmocracy, we asked students to rate which teaching practices they felt were important to their wellbeing and found that the two most important teaching practices that students identified as instrumental to their wellbeing are:
- Subject matter is relevant/valuable/meaningful to me, and
- The instructor recognizes that students have a life outside academics.
Our audience consisted of students, faculty, and staff alike. We engaged our audience with discussions about how teaching methods impact student wellbeing. Our qualitative results identified teaching practices that were not included in our UES surveys, so we decided to ask students whether they found the teachings practices identified from the qualitative data important to their wellbeing (for more information on qualitative interviews please visit here). During the event, students and instructors both commented on how having research evidence that these simple and yet effective methods promote student wellbeing is a positive progress towards enhancing student wellbeing on campus.
Stay tuned for the results from our study! Next week we will be sharing the final set of findings from the 2016 UES, and following that we will be sharing integrated results from the project. Hope you’ve enjoyed reading our blog so far – please feel free to comment and provide any suggestions!
Findings remind me of the human dimension of Fink’s significant learning. He says: when students learn something important about their own Self and/or about Others, it enables them to interact more effectively with themselves or with others, to discover the personal and/or social implications of what they have learned.