On-campus jobs tend to be born from necessity, largely transactional, and not viewed as particularly meaningful. But what if brewing coffee in the campus cafe, or making calls in the development office, could be supported by mentors and learning modules that made these experiences an integral part of students’ educations and careers? At Arizona State University (ASU), a few innovative thinkers started asking that question.
“So many students are engaged in work while they’re going to school,” said Brandee Popaden-Smith, director of the Work+ Learn program at ASU. “How do we help those students get every bit that they can out of that experience?”
Students may work because they need to, says Popaden-Smith, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t gain high-quality employment experience in the process. She and her team imagined student employment could be fulfilling in more ways than one—not only for the coinciding paycheck, but for providing students critical professional development skills and complimenting their studies in the classroom.
In 2020, Work+ was piloted and then developed at ASU’s University College as an initiative supporting student success. Focused on students currently employed by the university, Work+ is, at a minimum, a win-win strategy to help busy student-employees get the most out of their dual roles. At its core, it’s about equity and access.
Around 40% of full-time college students and closer to three-quarters of part-time students in the U.S. are “working learners,” or those employed during the school year as they complete their degrees. The majority are lower-income or first generation students. At ASU, the largest public university in the country, 35% of their approximately 140,000 students (undergraduate and graduate) are the first in their families to go to college. Around 11,000 are working learners, teeing Work+ up to be a program with wide-reaching impact, both locally and nationally.
Work+ offers several online modules, or “levels,” for student employees to gain critical career skills and contemplate professional pathways. This content responds in part to the 2019 study from Gallup and Bates College, “Forging Pathways to Purposeful Work: The Role of Higher Education,” which suggests students who participate in a course or program encouraging them to think about pursuing meaning in their work are more likely to secure this type of employment. The same research established a positive correlation between college graduates who find purpose in their work and their overall well-being.
Sukhwant Jhaj is ASU’s vice provost for Academic Innovation and Student Achievement and is the point person on the project for ASU Provost Nancy Gonzales. “I focus on issues of institutional strategy as they connect with questions of academic innovation and student success,” Jhaj said. “Things like, “What’s next?’”
According to Jhaj, Work+ targets three questions, with a particular focus on the second. “How do you end achievement disparities that exist? How might we redesign for an integrated work and learning future? And how might we design services using design thinking analytics?” These objectives then align with the larger university’s charter, which emphasizes not only academic excellence and innovation as a research institution, but the fundamental importance of access and inclusion to that end.
Part of this accessibility mission is to elevate on-campus work to the status of the often-sought-after-but-less-widely-available internship. “For a long time, internships were kind of the main high value work experience that students could get while they were pursuing their degree program,” said Popaden-Smith. “But they’re not easily scalable, especially for an institution our size where we’re trying to ensure that every single learner has these types of opportunities.”
Making work more integral to education also creates a sticking factor for students at risk of stopping out. “When you take a look at our working learner populations broadly across the nation, they’re highly representative of historically marginalized groups, and they are the ones facing the significant barriers to persisting through their educational experience,” said Popaden-Smith. She said programs like Work+ that infuse employment with education help students, who might otherwise be forced to choose one over the other, to stay in school.
Crystal Woods, a psychology major in her last semester at ASU, said she has appreciated participating in Work+ through her job as an academic peer advisor, especially in anticipation of her upcoming graduation. “I feel like the closer you get to graduating, the harder it gets to really decide what you want to do.” Even though she had amassed plenty of professional experience already, working since she was 16 and often two jobs throughout college, Woods said Work+ modules helped her develop career skills she wouldn’t have known how to approach otherwise. She has taken quizzes to learn more about potential career paths that could suit her and kept a record of all her progress along the way.
“So many students are engaged in work while they’re going to school. How do we help those students get every bit that they can out of that experience?”
Woods believes ASU offers a supportive environment in general for first-gen students like herself, and engaging with Work+ boosted her confidence further. “Entering school, I never thought I could be doing what I’m doing or getting the grades or even graduating early. And so reflecting back on it, I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh. I did do it as a first-generation [student].” The work experience helped her shift from a deficit to an asset mindset. “I don’t walk into interviews as nervous as I was. I kind of walk in [with the attitude of] ‘they need me more than I need them’—even if I really do need them.”
A critical part of making Work+ effective for students comes down to the role of their employers. Supervisors who engage with Work+ help lead their students through their online modules, providing continuous support and feedback to reinforce the coursework on professional development in practice. These advisors also gain access to a wealth of resources designed to facilitate their own experience, from approaching the hiring process to navigating a mentorship relationship.
For Kate Armbruster, who is not only a student-employee supervisor but a doctoral student at ASU researching working learners, the impact of student-supervisor relationships is hard to overstate. “This is not just about student employment, student-employees,” Armbruster said of Work+, which she engages with as both a supervisor and researcher. “It’s very much about the supervisor, as well, because we need the supervisor to have buy-in and be motivated and understand how important their role is in student success—how much of an impact they have on student employees.”
Crystal Woods attributes much of her progress as a working learner to her boss and mentor, Amanda, who introduced her to Work+ and also comes from a first-generation background. “Since she was the person who encouraged me, I was able to get research opportunities and work in labs, which I didn’t even think I was smart enough to do. But here I am.”
As successful as it has been for her, Woods admits Work+ is not always an easy sell for students with little time left in their already-strapped schedules. “I know that when you’re already at work and you’re a student and you have homework, it’s just so much on your mind. Work, work, work. Why would they want to do another sort of work? But it’s beneficial at the end of the day.” That’s what she tells other students.
Meanwhile, Work+ Learn Director Popaden-Smith plans to continue trying to reach as many students as possible, if not all of them, with opportunities Work+ offers. “We’re actually in the process, in order to scale to the entirety of the institution, of shifting to, ‘How are the values and how is the framework of Work+ the foundation for all student employment at ASU?” she said. She envisions the larger Work+ philosophy permeating all student employment experiences and benefiting each and every student employee and supervisor.
For Vice Provost Jhaj, the destiny of Work+ extends well beyond his ASU. “We are focused on how we might reimagine the experience of students that we employ and, in doing so, help rethink work-study nationally,” he said.
A dozen years ago, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa published what was–as academic books go–a blockbuster. In it, they argued that students weren’t learning a whole lot during their first two years of college. And, beyond that, they weren’t particularly engaged with their professors. Indeed, they often drifted through campuses, anchored neither by academic knowledge nor by relationships with potential mentors.
Academically Adrift not only captured the attention of those in higher ed; it also garnered national headlines. The book tracked more than 2,300 students at 24 four-year colleges and universities who took the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) in the fall of 2005 and again in the spring of 2007. Nearly half of them showed no improvement at all on critical thinking, complex reasoning, and writing skills.
It raised deep concerns for lots of folks. If students weren’t learning, and didn’t feel engaged, what was going on? Those concerns have shaped Arum’s thinking, though his quest to understand the undergraduate experience has become more multifaceted in the years since.
Arum is now a professor of sociology and education at the University of California, Irvine, and has devoted a large part of his career to sorting through massive amounts of data, trying to understand what makes college meaningful, useful, and enduring. At UCI, he’s working on an enormous data collection effort, which aims to understand what decisions contribute to undergraduate flourishing.
And he’s come to the conclusion that colleges have lost a sense of purpose, and their unmooring has, to some degree, also unmoored students. Many colleges, he argues, have become less connected to their communities and to the world around them.
When Academically Adrift came out, one of its striking findings was that student disengagement went far beyond standardized tests. Multiple surveys found that time studying had declined radically between the 1960s and the early 2000s, dropping from roughly 25 hours a week to 12-13 hours a week.
Arum says that some who heard those numbers wondered whether technology might have changed things (students can look things up more quickly), or whether students in the 1960s tended to inflate the amount of time that they studied. Arum thought neither of those theories were particularly likely. In a follow-up book, Aspiring Adults Adrift (2014), he and Roksa tried to contextualize US college students by examining international data on studying. “And the US was lower than almost every country,” Arum says. “Rock bottom.”
Aspiring Adults Adrift also addressed the question of whether focusing on the first two years of college might be misleading. Perhaps students were skating through freshman and sophomore years, but then buckling down after that? Perhaps junior and senior years were when the real learning and engagement took place? It was a hopeful notion, but wrong, as Arum and Roksa discovered. Indeed, the drift not only continued through junior and senior years, but it kept right on going after graduation.
And where does that drift come from? The top, Arum argues. “I think there has been institutional drift, in terms of what college means and how students understand and experience it. The institution is focusing a lot more on a lot of other stuff, and a lot less on the traditional academic function. And that’s true if you just look at higher ed budgets.”
Arum says that colleges frequently talk about “career preparation” – and that has always been true, to some degree. But he worries that “credentialism,” as he puts, is not a positive development and tends to exclude higher ideals. “College is about finding meaning and purpose in life and developing orientations around civic engagement and civic responsibility,” Arum notes. “If it’s just about making extra money, it may not be sufficient in terms of meaning and purpose for all students.”
“What we know from research is that when people find meaning and purpose in their work, and in their studies, they persist. They achieve. It’s central to understanding people’s behavior. And the institutions that have dropped that discourse have done a real disservice to students.”
To Arum, this has had a profound spillover effect on civic engagement. His research found that more than a third of college graduates said they read the newspaper either monthly or never. Even more graduates said they discuss public affairs with family or friends either monthly or never.
“Where does that drift come from? The top, Arum argues. “I think there has been institutional drift, in terms of what college means and how students understand and experience it.’”
And feeling adrift in the world–not anchored to a community or the civic debates within it–can play into deep feelings of loneliness. It’s a phenomenon that the political scientist Robert Putnam famously explored in his 2000 book Bowling Alone, and that has become commonplace in America over the past few decades.
At colleges, between 2013 and 2021, students reporting anxiety and depression almost doubled. “Campuses have responded by increasing the number of counseling support services on campus,” Arum says. “But guess what? They can’t increase them enough to deal with the increasing problems. So the solution can’t simply be that–it has to also be helping the students find meaning, purpose, community, connections, and attachments that will lead to mental health wellbeing and flourishing.”
So what does Arum believe would work to amp up student engagement? For teachers, he says, it’s essential to explain why a course is relevant. Many students sign up for courses to check a box; they don’t arrive with a sense of the potential impact of various bodies of knowledge. Less lecturing and more active learning are also critical, he believes.
But he argues that institutions also have to talk about meaning and purpose as a central rationale. They should answer questions like: “What are you doing for the community? What are you doing for the schools that are struggling down the street? What’s your responsibility to them? How are you engaging with local industry? In a society that’s plagued with mass incarceration, what are you doing about getting into the prisons and educating incarcerated individuals there, so that they can lead productive, meaningful lives in the future?”
With his new project at UCI–Measuring Undergraduate Success Trajectories (MUST)–Arum is diving deeper into the question of how you make college work for students. How can it make their lives better? MUST started in 2019, with a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Arum hopes it will prove to be a model for colleges and universities across the US.
The project merges a huge variety of data, including info from a student’s college application, courses that a student takes, who takes those courses alongside them, when they use academic support, who their roommates are, what clubs they’re joining, and who’s in those clubs. Plus, there’s clickstream data from Learning Management Systems like Canvas.
Then there’s a subset of students who are frequently questioned on topics like friends, mentorship, experiences with discrimination, critical thinking, and problem solving. And a couple of weeks a year, some students will get texted 50 times a week to find out: Right at this moment, what are you doing? Who are you with? Do you feel psychologically engaged or disengaged?
In 2021, Arum noted that President Biden has talked frequently about infrastructure. But, he said, the “infrastructure we need in this country today is… infrastructure about how to deliver, measure, iterate, and improve higher education. I can think of no greater infrastructure need than that. Because individuals alone can’t do this.” He believes that the federal government is missing an enormous opportunity to improve education, and to ensure that it does what every other industry does: “use data to better improve its performance.”
Trying to understand well-being and progress during college, Arum argues, is essential to both expanding access and ensuring success. He notes that “our country is falling behind in educational completion rates, relative to other advanced economies.” And as more Americans question the value of higher education, it’s imperative to understand what works and what doesn’t. If we don’t use data to improve outcomes, Arum says, “it’s a failure of imagination.”
Kara Miller writes The Big Idea column for The Boston Globe, which examines game-changing ideas in everything from traffic, to education, to housing. Kara has worked across radio, TV, and print for the past 15 years. From 2011-2021, she hosted and served as the Executive Editor of the public radio program Innovation Hub, which she launched. She has taught at Babson College and at the University of Massachusetts.
In 2005, Georgetown professor Joan Riley was walking across campus when she had an epiphany that would change the way she thought about teaching. Riley has just been to an evening meeting of the “Friends” group—an intradepartmental team of administrators, students, and faculty members who were working together on harm reduction strategies to combat student alcohol misuse. The silo-crossing activity was unusual for higher ed and got Riley thinking from a different perspective.
“I remember stopping in the middle of campus and asking myself, ‘What can I, as a professor, do to help address this problem?” The next day, she told the undergraduate students in her Health Promotion and Disease Prevention course to throw away their syllabi. For the rest of the semester, they studied the effects of alcohol throughout one’s lifetime, from the metabolic breakdown of alcohol, to familial alcohol patterns, to binge drinking, all in a way that engaged students both academically and personally.
“When you bring topics like these into the academic setting and use evidence to describe them, students listen in a way they don’t with other interventions,” said Riley. “I started asking, ‘Why aren’t we talking about these subjects inside the classroom?’”
Riley’s seemingly simple question would lead to a precedent-setting initiative in curriculum infusion called the Engelhard Project for Connecting Life and Learning. Launched in 2005, out of Georgetown’s Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS), the Engelhard Project engages faculty in making connections between students’ academic studies and their broader life experiences, especially in the areas of well-being, flourishing, and mental health. You don’t have to be in health studies or psychology to teach an “Engelhard course,” as it is not so much about the topic as it is about the technique of combining learning with personal growth. While this approach is often touted, it is reluctantly applied in higher education, even at schools like Georgetown that seek to teach to the whole person.
“The tradition of academe, especially in highly competitive settings, was the radical mind-body split,” said Randy Bass, who led the creation of Engelhard as executive director of CNDLS and now oversees an education innovation unit at the school. “Classrooms were places for your head and the rest of the campus was the place for your body and soul.”
Building the Bridge
For Georgetown, the Engelhard Project’s effort to fuse these personal dimensions has been a steady progression, starting shortly after Riley’s course shake-up, and continuing to this day with the full weight of the president’s office behind it. Georgetown President John J. DeGioia sees the project as the embodiment of the Jesuit school’s mission and is quick to thank the other woman who made it possible. Sally Engelhard Pingree funded CNDLS’ first proposal to infuse wellbeing into the classroom through Bringing Theory to Practice (BT2P), a fund she launched with Don Harward, who was, at the time, president of Bates College. Motivated by the personal experiences of Pingree’s daughter when she was a student at Bates, BT2P seeded campuses with the support to craft programs that focus on the intersection of student well-being, engaged learning, and civic engagement.
At an early BT2P conference, Riley met a faculty colleague in the Department of Philosophy named Alisa Carse and learned that she, too, was doing similar integration. Together with a student and the head of the counseling center, the Georgetown team began to explore how to make curriculum infusion its own program. Under the leadership of Professor Randy Bass and Todd Olson, who was then vice president of Student Affairs, and others, Georgetown sought and received two rounds of multi-year funding to establish the framework, staff, and criteria for the new inter-disciplinary program. They named the program the Engelhard Faculty Fellows, with a nod to the professors who were recruited to mold the classes to their own design and comfort level. In 2010, they received an endowment gift from Pingree for what is now called The Engelhard Project for Connecting Life and Learning.
“The tradition of academe, especially in highly competitive settings, was the radical mind-body split. Classrooms were places for your head and the rest of the campus was the place for your body and soul.”
“I wanted students to be healthier and supported and Georgetown was a perfect fit as a campus already dedicated to looking at the whole person,” said Pingree. “I feel very lucky to be included and able to interact with faculty and staff doing this work in the Engelhard community of practice and to witness the positive impacts on faculty and the Georgetown community.”
“Georgetown leaned into something that was deeply connected to their mission and then went about engaging faculty in ways that honored their time and seeded ownership,” said Ashley Finley, who was a national evaluator for BT2P and is now vice president for research and senior advisor to the president for the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). In addition to the “faculty first” mentality, Finley said the intra-departmental nature of the work, led by an advisory committee of faculty, staff, and administrators, created a unique and powerful learning community.
What began as five original classes has grown to over 500 courses in a wide variety of disciplines, with a combined student enrollment of 25,000 and the involvement of over 150 faculty members. Joselyn Lewis was a graduate associate at Georgetown when Engelhard first launched and she now leads the project as part of her education development work for faculty and graduate students at CNDLS.
Lewis is responsible for a large portion of faculty coming into the program and is adept at identifying the “sweet spot” that might get them engaged in designing or redesigning their course to integrate an element of student wellbeing. Part of the recruitment involves reassuring faculty members who worry they will cross a boundary by bringing personal issues into the classroom or will “screw up” the unfamiliar approach. Lewis addresses this by offering a robust orientation session and continued support along the way. Monthly meetings and social gatherings for all Engelhard participants, past and present, are another level of security and offer friendships with colleagues one might not otherwise get to know.
Part of reducing the barrier to entry is the program’s intentionally simple criteria. Faculty are asked to choose a wellbeing topic that connects to the course they teach. For one course meeting, they bring in a partner from a student-facing service area. This can be a clinician from Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS), an expert in healthy eating, a Title IX coordinator, a DEI officer, even a financial aid advisor. They then ask students to do a reflective writing piece about the experience.
What does this look like for students? Lewis said most are unaware that they are in an Engelhard course as the wellbeing topics are so well integrated into the subject matter. They may study mental health within Foundations of Biology; examine sexual assault as part of Introduction to Ethics; or discuss anxiety in The Physics of Climate Change. The difference, whether they know it or not, is that the courses are designed to make connections that build relationships with their professors and with each other.
Lewis said while the student affairs professionals appreciate the effectiveness of sharing important information inside the classroom, the program’s effects on teaching and learning at Georgetown have been profound. She said some faculty choose to do just the basics which allows students to make a connection between the content they are learning and their own wellbeing. Others do “All Engelhard, all the time,” embracing a full pedagogical shift that welcomes students’ interior lives into the learning process.
“I have faculty say to me ‘Engelhard gives me permission to teach the way I’ve always wanted to,” said Lewis. “I just didn’t know that it would be valued.’”
Just Breathe
Jennifer Woolard was one of the first faculty members to teach an Engelhard course at Georgetown and continues to do so today. As a psychology professor, she was eager to find a way to humanize mental health topics and found that forging a partnership with a professional from CAPS was a powerful statement that said, “Mental health is part of life.” She begins every class with a breathing exercise as a way to ground students and ask that they pause and be present. For high achieving “perfectionists” like many of those who attend Georgetown, taking a moment like this can mean a lot.
“For me, Engelhard is about modeling,” said Woolard. “Taking the time out of class to discuss these issues, to invite colleagues from other departments in to join me, says to my students that I care about their wellbeing.” Woolard said that the student reflections confirm this. One student reported, “I felt cared for—like the professor was genuinely interested in our wellbeing rather than us just churning out good grades.”
“I think the most powerful thing about being an Engelhard faculty member is that it allows you to communicate to your students that you care about them as people,” said Bass.
“I have faculty say to me, ‘Engelhard gives me permission to teach the way I’ve always wanted to,’” said Lewis. “‘I just didn’t know that it would be valued.’”
In the near two decades since Engelhard was launched, rates of anxiety and depression reported by college students have nearly doubled. During the 2020–2021 school year, more than 60% of college students met the criteria for at least one mental health problem, a near 50% increase from 2013, according to the Healthy Minds Study. The stress and isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated these issues. A 2021 survey of over 1,000 faculty across 12 diverse institutions by the Mary Christie Institute, the Boston University School of Public Health and the Healthy Minds Network found a strong majority (87%) believed that student mental health had “worsened” or “significantly worsened” during COVID-19. Almost 80% had one-on-one phone, video, or email conversations with students about their mental health.
“There isn’t a faculty member in this country that doesn’t see that our students are struggling,” said Riley, pointing to a list over her door of the mental health issues she asked her students to identify having experienced. Loneliness topped the list.
“At the beginning, we didn’t talk a lot about addressing mental health issues in recruiting professors,” said Lewis. “They were really concerned about crossing that line into counseling, which is why our early work focused more on awareness of the campus safety net and referring students to CAPS.” Now, she said, faculty are becoming more comfortable with discussing mental health with their students; many open up about their own struggles. “A lot of our faculty say, ‘If I’m asking my students to come as whole people, I have to be able to model that.’”
While many professors value the Engelhard Project’s role in prioritizing mental health issues amidst alarming prevalence numbers, others resonate with decades of strong evidence on the impact of relationship-based learning on a range of positive student outcomes. In their book, Relationship-Rich Education: How Human Connections Drive Success in College, Peter Felten and Leo M. Lambert cite ample evidence of this, including Mathew Mayhew’s book How College Affects Students, and write, “Students’ interactions with peers, faculty, and staff positively influence the breadth and depth of student learning, retention and graduation rates, and a wide range of other outcomes, including critical thinking, identity development, communication skills, and leadership abilities.”
Lewis said referencing literature on the strength of the pedagogy has convinced many professors to join the Engelhard Project and is one reason its appeal has crossed over into numerous departments. While the faculty representation skews heavily female, the program has a good ratio of humanities and STEM courses. One neuroscience professor told Lewis, “It’s not my job to know who my students are, but I am open to doing this because I believe it will make them better scientists.”
Randy Bass said that some of the places the Engelhard Project has worked the best are those that are the least obvious, like in the sciences. “If you ask students to examine the biological basis of any mental health issue,” as they do in a long-running Engelhard course taught by Heidi Elmendorf, “they will choose topics such as their mother’s alcoholism, their brother’s autism, their own eating disorder, or someone they know who was suicidal. These are unbelievably personal connections that deepen their knowledge and appreciation of what it means to study biology.”
Can this Idea be Scaled?
Engelhard leaders are not aware of the existence of another wellbeing curriculum infusion program, to this degree, on any other US campus. They receive a fair amount of requests for information from other schools and try to respond among limited time and information. Outcomes for the project are largely anecdotal, but they have begun a check list for other schools on what needs to be in place for a program like this to gain traction, starting with a multi-stakeholder leadership team, an academic orientation, and the availability of willing student affairs professionals. This last category can be a problem for schools with fewer resources, but for the most part, the project is low cost, particularly when compared to more direct mental health interventions. It is an important equity consideration as advocates like Felton and Lambert argue that high-impact practices, like those within the Engelhard Project, are particularly beneficial for first-generation, low-income students, and students of color.
At Georgetown, enrollment in the project has stayed about the same for several years despite a growing acknowledgement of its many benefits. Part of the plateau may be a continued reluctance, on the part of some faculty, to embrace the personal side of students. While this appears to be changing, Woolard says professors who view Engelhard as too “touchy feely” should probably sit out. “There may be some faculty members for whom this is not a good option,” she said.
Riley, who also recruits for the Engelhard Project, said professors are worried the project will take time away from their many responsibilities. “The irony is the Engelhard method makes you a better teacher—like exercising over time—and that works in your favor when it comes to managing multiple roles.”
Another theory is that the Engelhard Project may still be ahead of its time. “I think what education will become about is the development of the inner self in relationship to the capacity to do external work, what we’ve called “the inner/outer” problem,” said Bass. “That’s the next frontier in higher education, but most of higher education doesn’t know that yet.”
As faculty consider which technology tools to try this school year, they may be interested to know there is now one available that helps their students speak up in class. AskClass is a simple teaching tool that gets students talking and lets professors know who to call on next. Part AI and part behavioral science, AskClass may appear rudimentary, but founders hope that it can help higher education address new concerns about academic disengagement and social anxiety among Gen Z students.
Damon Moon, a management consultant turned adjunct business professor at San Jose State University, created AskClass with a development partner. He uses the tool in all his classes and has made it available as a commercial product for professors across the country. Moon said the absence of normal conversation caused by students’ preoccupation with phones and social media, coupled with the emotional side-effects of the pandemic, served as motivation to create a tool that would bring robust conversation back into the classroom.
“Today’s students can go for hours without talking and the first thing they’ll likely ask is, ‘Do you have a charger?’” Moon joked, though he believes the ramifications of this are serious from both a teaching and a mental health perspective.
He described the tool as a combination of gamification, data analytics, and a little bit of nudging. The formula is simple and straightforward. When students enter class, they are met with classical piano music and an “icebreaker” question projected on the AskClass screen, often side-by-side with class content. The question could be anything from “If you have $100 to donate, where would you give it and why?” to “What is your favorite movie?” Students are asked to discuss their answers with their classmates, as music continues in the background. Those that share with the entire class are given points that are tallied in real time on the roster on the AskClass screen which displays all of the students’ first and last names.
The point system continues throughout the lecture with many opportunities for students to speak up and get credit. Professors are encouraged to create class experiences that naturally lead to discussion, like team projects that require a “report out,” providing another chance at points. A timer helps guide the more introverted students, letting them know there’s a start and finish to their efforts. Professors, acting more like coaches, yell motivational instructions like “Lucas, you have two minutes to recap the discussion. Go!”
An advantage for faculty, particularly those teaching in large lecture halls, is that they can see who has not participated and can welcome them into the conversation. Another tactic, the Random Person Selector, calls on students indiscriminately, removing any perception of bias on the professor’s part.
“Raising your hand can be really uncomfortable for some students, particularly those from Eastern Asian countries where it is contrary to our culture,” said Moon, who is from Korea. “But at the same time, being asked to participate, or having your name randomly come up on the screen, can be the onramp many students need to join the conversation.”
Outcome data from Moon’s classes show that 96% of students said they are more comfortable speaking up in class; and 95% of students said they had better team dynamics compared to other classes. Additionally, 98% of students made a new friend as a result of AskClass.
“AskClass is pretty much your best friend starting the conversation for you in a group of kids,” said Diamon, a senior at San Jose State who is originally from East Africa. “And the points are awesome,” he said.
Moon said the point system is a reinforcing mechanism that works well with students in direct and subtle ways. Students are familiar with “rewards” programs, like those at Starbucks or their credit cards, and are comfortable competing in digital games. For classes where professors offer participation credit toward grades, as Moon does, it is a significant motivator.
Outcome data show that 96% of students said they are more comfortable speaking up in class; and 95% of students said they had better team dynamics compared to other classes. Additionally, 98% of students made a new friend as a result of AskClass.
“I am a very competitive person, so for me to be able to see in real time the points I get, made me really want to participate every single day,” said Lily, a student at San Jose State. “It makes participation fun; It’s like a game.”
Bob DuBois, PhD, known as ‘Dr. Bob,” is associate director of undergraduate studies and a senior lecturer in the psychology department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He said any way to get students talking in class was of interest to him as a professor. When he heard about AskClass from a podcast featuring Moon, he decided to pilot it in his classroom. He now says it has played a big role in building community in his class.
“It just changed the entire dynamic,” he said. “What was once the same three or four students dominating the discussion suddenly became everybody wanting to join in because they could see that they were getting credit for that and watching their points go up.”
DuBois believes students learn more as a result, particularly first-generation students (of which he was one), who often lack the confidence to take risks within the classroom. He also sees AskClass as a way for busy students to make friends in a place where they spend so much of their time. “I see AskClass as kind of a scaffolding for building relationships, which is incredibly important on modern campuses where students are so busy that they are not prioritizing making friends.”
Building relationships that lead to better mental health is an intended benefit of AskClass and one that Moon talks about in his sales pitch. Keith, a recent San Jose State graduate who met his girlfriend through Moon’s class said, “Just being able to put yourself out there in a low stakes environment, especially a learning environment, is so good for your mental wellbeing.”
“You no longer feel like a spectator. You’re not just sitting there, getting the information and storing it in your brain. Instead, you feel a part of everything.”
Nareg, a former student in Moon’s class, said AskClass creates an environment where people can freely share what’s going on in their lives. “I think it really creates a sense of belonging for students of any kind of background. Anyone can come into engagement and find something to talk about, something they have in common with the person next to them. And then when the professor ties it all together, it creates a holistic environment where everyone has a sense of belonging.”
For Julia, who is from Brazil, the five-minute icebreaker that gets students talking doubles as a stress reliever when moving from one content-rich class to the next. But what she appreciates most about AskClass is the way it gives students agency in the classroom.
“You no longer feel like a spectator,” she said. “You’re not just sitting there, getting the information and storing it in your brain. Instead, you feel a part of everything.”
AskClass is now being used by 700 professors at 130 institutions across the country, and Moon is eager for it to expand even more. The tech entrepreneur and business professor said generating a profit from the relatively modest licensing fee is not his motivation, and it is unclear if his technology-based engagement tool is the real differentiator in the satisfaction his students so eagerly reported. Is it good technology or just good teaching?
Dr. Bob said, “AskClass makes the process of asking questions and soliciting answers structured in a way that we don’t forget how important that is.”
The Bucknell University seniors trod onto the grassy quad outside the Breakiron Engineering Building. Their professor, Joseph Tranquillo, explained the rules of the game, which were straightforward, though not necessarily intuitive: Make a human chain with your teammates without touching them. The students eyed each other nervously, waiting for someone else to kick things off.
One walked out and turned to face the others, striking a pose before them. Then another moved to his side, making a shape with her body that linked with his. The rest of the class followed suit, sticking hands under bent elbows and air-hugging arms around ankles. Eventually their tangle of shapes came together to form a sculpture of limbs and torsos.
Professor Tranquillo then asked them to complete the task more quickly, requiring a higher level of teamwork and a lower threshold for awkwardness. They met the challenge and got into a rhythm that taught them instinctively what Tranquillo was hoping to impart: When entering an existing situation, always look for the open opportunity. On a new team or organization, consider: “What can I learn here and how can I leave my own mark behind?”
This exercise was part of “Bucknell-on-Purpose,” a Senior Dinner Seminar Tranquillo, associate provost for Transformative Teaching and Learning, co-teaches with Keith Buffinton, dean emeritus of Engineering at Bucknell. Part of the university’s Residential College Program, Bucknell’s Senior Dinner Seminars bring together an intimate group, in this case 17, once a week for an hour-and-a-half. Over two semesters, the students build trust and connection with each other and their instructors, while eating and exploring their course topic of choice.
In Tranquillo and Buffinton’s class, this topic—“purpose”—required students to reflect on their college experiences and, as those came to an end, their futures beyond just post-graduate jobs or degrees. Even Tranquillo’s warm-up exercises, like the game of allegorical Twister, emphasized collaboration and letting go of self-consciousness, but also prompted them to consider how they envision contributing to the wider world.
“We spend a lot of time preparing students academically for their professional lives after graduation but less so on their human development—their values and sense of purpose and how those align with what they decide to do,” said Keith Buffinton. “We chose to offer this seminar so seniors will ask themselves these important questions before they leave here.”
An emphasis on discovering purpose has become more prevalent in educational and professional spheres as a way to combat personal and professional discontent and increase engagement. Another driving force is its effect on wellbeing for an emerging generation experiencing widespread mental health issues. A 2019 report, “Forging Pathways to Purposeful Work: The Role of Higher Education,” produced by Gallup and Bates College, showed 80% of college graduates believed having purpose in their work was important, but less than 50% had actually found it. Graduates who reported having high purpose in their work were nearly ten times more likely than their low purpose peers to have high overall wellbeing.
“We spend a lot of time preparing students academically for their professional lives after graduation but less so on their human development—their values and sense of purpose and how those align with what they decide to do.”
The object of Tranquillo and Buffinton’s course was not necessarily to help students decide what career path would be most satisfying but to help them conceive of a more general blueprint by which to live their lives. Stanford University engineering professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans popularized this work—taking an intentional approach to plotting the future—with their course, “Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life.” In “Bucknell-on-Purpose,” students read excerpts and participated in activities from the Palo Alto team’s book by the same name.
“We looked, in particular, at balancing ‘Workview’ and ‘Lifeview’ and asked the students to complete worksheets from the book to better understand and to reconcile their ‘philosophy of work’ and their ‘philosophy of life,’” Buffinton wrote in his report on the class for Bucknell President John Bravman.
Coursework for the Bucknell seminar ventured beyond the “Designing Your Life” curriculum. In the first session, the seniors determined three major themes to guide the class: Discovering the Purpose Within, Exploring Purpose in Others, and Finding Purpose in Community. To explore these areas, they engaged in activities, including using body outlines and post-it notes to map their “external self” (how the outside world views them from surface-level interactions) compared to their “internal self” (more hidden thoughts or elements of who they are); and research and interviews to develop insight into and empathy for the unique experiences and senses of purpose of others. Guest speakers included Rev. Kurt Nelson, director of Religious and Spiritual Life at Bucknell, who talked about finding purpose through communal connection; and President Bravman, who participated in the external/internal mapping exercise.
“Engaging students in any way that’s not their typical structure is difficult,” Tranquillo said of the course’s variable structure and emphasis on self-exploration. The instructors said they enjoyed allowing students to dictate the material, moving away from putting restrictions on what or how they choose to learn. Students also encountered a space, rare in most classrooms, to focus on better understanding themselves, rather than scholarly concepts. “We have faculty willing to go there [help students through questions of self or identity], but that’s not the point of their courses,” Tranquillo added. He and Buffinton hope similar, less traditionally “academic” forums will become available for not only seniors but all classes in the future.
As for teaching “purpose,” those interested in expanding the work may need to clarify what it entails for not only faculty but students. Some seniors in “Bucknell-on-Purpose” admitted to enrolling for the free dinner or because they already knew a friend or professor involved. “I had zero expectations. Someone I respected told me about it, so I took it,” one student revealed. He ended up getting more than he bargained for. “It surpassed my expectations because I thought I would just kind of learn facts, and it’s actually made me think about the world in a different way.”
The experiential nature of the course helps with understanding and internalizing purpose. One guest speaker asked the seniors, “When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?” One student grew up an aspiring car salesman, with a sister who planned to open a bakery attached to his dealership, but is now pursuing computer engineering to pay off tuition debt. Another was an animal lover whose veterinary dreams ended when she realized she wasn’t interested in dealing with blood but evolved into her current plans to build prosthetics for humans. One young man, David, talked about how his experience as an immigrant from Soweto, South Africa influenced his identity, how he thinks of himself, and what he hopes to do.
“I migrated to the inner cities of the U.S., and the question I always asked myself, growing up in Crenshaw, Los Angeles, was, ‘What would an average Black man who lived in the inner city, what could they see themselves becoming?’” David shared. He described feeling like his parents’ perspective as immigrants prompted him to envision a future outside the neighborhood where he grew up. Their encouragement continues to shape his plans for the future. “I think some form of the idea of stability has always been important to me—the idea of, ‘How do I make sure that if anything were to happen, my family comes first?’”
One of the ways in which the course changed students’ outlooks involved reframing the pressures they’ve internalized around professional success. “I feel like if you don’t have a job post-grad right now, it’s seen as a failure on your part,” Maya, who was also in the seminar, said. “This class really framed it more as a reflection of maybe that you don’t know what you want to do—and that’s okay. It’s okay to be kind of floundering or looking for new opportunities.”
“I think in our society, we correlate purpose with career a lot, and this class has opened up my perspective to show it’s more about the relationships that you make,” Emma, another student, added. “You can make relationships through your career, but other things outside of your career can also relate to purpose.”
While the prospect of graduating remains daunting, this course gave students tools to combat the uncertainty, even after they leave. “It has made me realize that I need to make space for these conversations in the future, regardless of where I am,” Maya said. She envisions herself carving out room for similar discussions when she matriculates to graduate school in the fall.
“I don’t think it needs to be this exact same structure of a class, but I think the idea of ‘Let’s think about things critically when we think about our future and our purpose’ is something I will be able to recreate, and want to, after this course.”
Sometimes first experiences can last a lifetime, which is why colleges and universities are raising the bar on programs that start before students begin school and continue throughout that important first year. From camping to community service, these experiential learning programs double as socializing opportunities to acclimate students to college life and to each other.
The University of Maine System (UMS) has a track record of investing in first-year experiences, many involving the state’s rural environment. The University of Maine at Farmington’s popular “Fusion Week” includes overnights spent lakeside for the class “Freshwater in the Anthropocene” or in the woods hunting Sasquatch for “Bigfoot.” These early experience courses offered throughout the UMaine System are now expanding with the launch of a student success and retention initiative called UMS TRANSFORMS. This initiative has three programs, with two of the three focused primarily on the initial two years of a student’s college experiences, given their outsize influence over a student’s college trajectory as well as their ability to serve as a key retention driver. The first program within UMS TRANSFORMS, launched at the flagship, UMaine, is called “Research Learning Experiences” (RLEs) and consists of research-based experiential learning courses that have the added value of exposing young minds to research, a domain previously reserved for more senior undergraduate and graduate students.
“We know that engaging in research makes you a part of something bigger, something important, and it allows you to form relationships with peers and professors who are in this with you,” said John Volin, executive vice president for Academic Affairs and provost at UMaine-Orono, who spearheaded the effort. “Why wouldn’t we want students to experience this right as they enter college?”
UMS TRANSFORMS is a $20 million initiative that is only a part of a much larger endeavor fueled by an extraordinary gift from the Harold Alfond Foundation aimed at reinvigorating public higher education in Maine. In October 2020, the foundation gifted $240 million to the UMaine System to be allocated over 12 years. At the time, it was the largest investment in a public institution of higher education in New England and the eighth largest in such an institution anywhere in the United States.
Investing in the retention and advancement of the next generation is particularly critical in the Pine Tree State. Today, Maine has the highest median age in the country. Between 1990 and 2019, the largest segment of the Maine population shifted from the 25- to 44-year-old to the 55- to 74-year-old age group. As of 2018, the number of residents between 16-24 and 25-34 was projected to continue declining through 2028, while the number of those 65 and over increases. The trends don’t bode well for enrollment in the public higher education system, and to make matters worse, just 54% of the dwindling high school graduates in Maine are going on to higher education afterward, whether in state or out.
“We know that engaging in research makes you a part of something bigger, something important, and it allows you to form relationships with peers and professors who are in this with you. Why wouldn’t we want students to experience this right as they enter college?”
The quarter billion-dollar investment stands to help ensure those students who do matriculate at UMS make it to graduation, bolstering the ranks of young professionals within Maine’s workforce. Given the early success of the RLEs in the first two years of its implementation, the initiative could make a big impact. Already by the second year, two of the universities, UMaine and UMFarmington (UMF), had 20% of their first-year students participating in an RLE.
In the fall of 2023, the other two programs in the initiative, Gateways to Success (GTS) and Pathways to Careers (PTC), will also launch. The ultimate plan is for all three to be offered throughout students’ four years and across all seven universities. Could these efforts succeed in improving outcomes for young people as well as influencing the economic fate of a state struggling to retain young citizens? And, in the process, could “creative student success” programs become the “UMaine thing”—a model for similar systems to retain and engage students for the sake of the individuals, their campuses, and the wider community?
Personal Research
The website for Research and Learning Experiences (RLEs) at the University of Maine is engaging and student-friendly, using active language to advertise courses like “Print in 3D and Explore Off-Shore Wind,” “Hunt for Viruses,” and “Explore What you Eat.” These subjects, and many others, are the first installments of a large, collaborative process involving the provost’s office at the flagship and faculty and leadership throughout the UMaine System.
“When we first started, for each one of these programs (RLEs, GTS, PTC) we established three very large committees of 18 or more faculty and staff from all seven universities. Since then, hundreds of people have been involved and built it together,” said Volin.
Shalin called the class “the biggest head start I could get.”
The provost’s office determined that the major reasons for students leaving college before graduation are academic success and finances, as well as social factors, including a low sense of belonging and mental health issues. To start, UMS prioritized building belonging. In 2021, faculty submitted proposals for the RLEs—small, one-credit seminars that would introduce first-year students to each other by having them do research together. While the intimate setting of the classes aims to bond classmates and their instructors, curricula focus on exploring open-ended questions geared toward less structured, college-style learning. A pre-orientation “Bridge Week,” following the model of UMF’s “Fusion week,” also immerses students in the work before the official start of the school year.
“RLEs have basically two distinct goals,” said Brian Olsen, professor of Ornithology at UMaine and executive director of UMS TRANSFORMS. “One is a wellness goal, which is a student success goal, and the other one is a preparation goal for more of a research or scholarship mindset.”
Indeed, the crux of RLEs is the personal connections they cultivate. The success of the students both socially and academically depends on “the same base relationships,” Olsen said, “because that’s just the way that humans work.” Confronting the uncertainty of making friends or working through a complicated research question require talking and turning to others for support. “All of those things come down to sitting in a strong social network, where you’re supported by your peers, you’re supported by your faculty, you’re supported by the staff,” Olsen added. “You know where to go when you need help. You expect to run into snags now and again. You expect that everybody in that network runs into snags now and again. And you are neither doing any worse or any better necessarily than anyone around you.”
Olsen said that the key to this level of support is the dynamic built between professor and student, which is often determined by the way in which the class is taught. “There’s nothing an instructor wants more than their students to succeed, but to do that, you have to be able to understand them and empathize with them,” he said. “That takes repeated interactions, and not repeated actions while standing in front of the classroom. For really good teachers to function at their best, they have to understand the students that they’re working with, and they have to be able to have conversations with them and realize, ‘Whoa, you were thinking about it like that? That’s cool.’”
Though they may not have been part of the design, students within RLEs report appreciating the pedagogical difference. Dom, a first-year student at UMaine, participated in Phage Genomics RLE, or “Phage,” this past academic year, and said it was one of the most important experiences he has had at UMaine. “Most freshman courses are these huge lecture halls, and you don’t really get to talk to anyone. But in my Phage course, there were like 15 students, and we sat at small tables, and you have a single partner for the rest of the year, and it allows you to build connections that are otherwise hard to make.”
The research component of the RLEs is a unique and added benefit, giving students who are drawn to the specific area of study offered in an RLE a leg up in their academic careers while exposing others to a field they may not have thought about. “I don’t know another university in the U.S. that gives the opportunity for all students to authentically engage in the very first semester in a research project across every discipline at the university,” said Volin.
The research work students are exposed to in the RLEs provide research experience a first-year student would not otherwise get, and it also gives students agency—something that has shown to increase wellbeing. “It is a really amazing opportunity,” said Dom. “By the end of the year, you will have written two manuscripts. You’ll have at least one publication, possibly two or more, and you get all sorts of experience that is so beneficial for your future. I would say 90% of the students in the class as freshmen are now working in labs. And they are not pressured to do it.”
Students are confirming that the impact of RLEs on support and belonging are their greatest strength as well on their academic mindset. Asked in surveys about the benefits of taking RLEs, students often referred to acclimating to campus and making friends during Bridge Week, or Fusion week as it’s known at UMF. Compared to those who didn’t participate, students in RLEs were also more likely to report feeling supported or strongly supported by their classmates (68% of RLE students, compared to 45% of non-RLE students). Shalin, one of the first-year students at UMF who participated in the RLE “Urban Maine: The Stories and Sounds,” called the class “the biggest head-start I could get.”
One of the challenges of RLEs comes down to the opt-in nature of the program. Because the courses emphasize college-level research training, the academic intimidation factor seems to be turning some students away. Students with GPAs over 3.5 have been more likely to sign up for RLEs than those with lower scores, while those eligible for Pell Grants and first-generation students have been less likely to enroll than their counterparts. “Our preliminary data from last year really made it seem like those who have the most anxiety about college were the least likely to sign up,” Olsen said. He recognizes why students concerned about failure would be apprehensive to take on extra work, but laments that the students who might benefit most from the hands-on support aren’t getting it. “They end up then self-selecting into a very difficult social environment and academic environment because they’re only doing the necessary things. Those necessary things are only the large-scale things.”
Compared to those who didn’t participate, students in RLEs were also more likely to report feeling supported or strongly supported by their classmates (68% of RLE students, compared to 45% of non-RLE ones).
To ensure that RLEs bring together as diverse a group of students as possible, the program directors decided to test out a new marketing strategy. For incoming students this fall, half will receive the same information about RLEs published in past years, emphasizing “research,” while the other half will see new content emphasizing “connection.” The goal is to determine whether the traditional, research-forward advertising pushes prospective students away.
Starting this fall, exactly two years since RLEs first launched at UMaine, the courses will be active at all seven universities in the system, with over 1,000 seats available for students. More than two-thirds will also now earn students more than one credit. In addition, the system plans to replicate the small-class, experiential format to courses offered throughout all four years. The cumulative effect of this on retention and, by extension, on the state’s economy and workforce, will not be realized for several years. But for Volin, this is only part of the equation. In his view, what began as a way to address Maine’s retention problems has become a catalyst for a new dimension of the student experience.
“Being able to expand this approach and scale it across a system of very different institutions is pretty remarkable,” he said. “It demonstrates a deep desire for something new, something that helps students understand who they are and what they are capable of.”
In his first-year seminar class, Commencing Character, Professor Michael Lamb asks his students to consider how seven strategies for character development are exemplified in some of history’s most memorable commencement speeches. At the end of the semester, the students are asked to write their own addresses, revealing the virtues they have internalized, or at least found most salient. Lamb’s class is not about speechwriting. It is about learning how to become a better person, a concept that may seem naïve, unattainable, or even inappropriate in 2023 America, but it is one Lamb believes students and society urgently need.
“We’re facing a crisis of leadership in our country where we don’t have many leaders that are embodying the kind of virtues and values that we need to lead with courage, humility, justice and compassion,” said Lamb. “At the same time, institutions that once served as training grounds for moral formation are now playing less influential roles, leaving a gap for colleges and universities to shape the character of students, many of whom want guidance on how to live.”
Lamb argues that college is an important time to teach character since emerging adults are already experiencing existential angst and self-discovery. He and his colleague, Kenneth Townsend, run the Program for Leadership and Character at Wake Forest University, a multi-dimensional center of curricular and co-curricular activities, scholarship, training, and public engagement focused on creating leaders of good character in a range of disciplines and fields. While character education is not new (it was central to much American higher education in the past), Lamb, Townsend, and their team have revitalized a focus on character as they integrate it into leadership development, positing character as a catalyst for flourishing both within a person and for a community. With early funding from the Kern Family Foundation and a recent infusion of $30 million from the Lilly Endowment, Inc., the program is poised to grow into a national center on character education. To get there, it is focused on two key questions: Can character be taught? And if so, why aren’t we teaching it everywhere?
“We’re facing a crisis of leadership in our country where we don’t have many leaders that are embodying the kind of virtues and values that we need to lead with courage, humility, justice and compassion.”
Pro Humanitate
It is no coincidence that Wake Forest is now among the country’s leading institutions in character-based leadership. The founding motto of the liberal arts school in North Carolina is Pro Humanitate (“For Humanity”), connoting both a holistic approach to teaching and “a beyond the self” dimension. With a long tradition of study in this area, Wake Forest faculty like Christian B. Miller, Eranda Jayawickreme, William Fleeson, and R. Michael Furr are worldwide experts on character. In 2017, then President Nathan Hatch, a longtime advocate of this work, cemented the distinction by launching the Program for Leadership and Character and recruiting Lamb to run it.
Lamb grew up on a farm in Tennessee. Though his parents did not graduate from college, they taught him how to live with integrity. He did community service 10 hours a week in Memphis as part of his scholarship to college. He later became a Rhodes Scholar and went to Princeton University for his doctorate. “That experience of connecting deep exploration of how we ought to live with practical engagement in the community really helped me see the ways in which a liberal arts education could inform how I think and live,” he said.
As a postdoctoral fellow at Oxford, Lamb helped launch the Oxford Global Leadership Initiative within the Oxford Character Project, where he gained recognition as an expert on the subject with a distinctively pragmatic approach. He argues that leadership steered by virtues of character has enormous benefits, including building trust among citizens and employees, making institutions stronger, and improving results. He cites research showing that, despite the current tolerance for disinformation, people value leaders who can make ethical decisions and are trustworthy.
Like Lamb, Kenneth Townsend’s decision to teach character to the next generation of leaders is deeply personal. Townsend also rose from humble roots in the rural south and went on to receive dual degrees in law and divinity at Yale University. Townsend and Lamb met twenty years ago when Townsend was also a Rhodes Scholar, and the two became friends. “My commitment to my work at Wake Forest is very much rooted in what I learned from my own education—the sense that students need to have an opportunity to live, think, and act in holistic sorts of ways; where their lives and work can be integrated and they’re not forced to separate who they are from what they do,” he said.
Townsend oversees the program’s work with the university’s professional schools and programs—law, medicine, engineering, and divinity—where the absence of character in leadership can have enormous consequences. He views what they teach in the program as far beyond ethics-as-compliance. “For this to stick and for people not to just roll their eyes, we have to make the case for how having empathy, for example, will make law students better lawyers,” he said. “If this is viewed as just another box to check, it won’t be taken seriously, and it won’t have as great of an impact in students’ lives.”
Photo provided by Wake Forest University
Christopher Stawski, senior program director and senior fellow of the Kern Family Foundation, said the foundation had its eye on Wake Forest’s character work for some time, given its own mission “to build flourishing lives anchored in strong character.” After productive conversations with President Hatch, they arrived at supporting a new engineering program at the school that would explicitly integrate character into the curriculum. In 2021, with strong support from the current Wake Forest President Susan R. Wente, Kern invested $8.6 million in the Program for Leadership and Character that would expand this approach into the professional schools and pre-professional programs at Wake Forest, reflecting a philosophy already underway at the Kern National Network for Flourishing in Medicine.
“You want to embed character into the educational process early so people are considering this at the onset of their professional journeys,” said Stawski. “‘What kind of lawyer, or doctor, or engineer do I want to be?’ And they need to have that vision of themselves when they confront difficult decisions, whether it’s in medical ethics or artificial intelligence.”
Overall, Wake Forest’s Program for Leadership and Character is divided into three pillars that, taken together, create a prototype for how to teach, test, and scale character-based leadership. The student experience includes courses within both undergraduate and graduate schools, discussion groups focused on topics such as the “purpose of college” and the “role of friendship,” and creative programming that explores leadership and character through art, athletics, and religious life. Rounding this out are the Leadership and Character Scholars, an annual cohort of students from diverse racial and socioeconomic backgrounds who have exhibited leadership and character in high school and receive merit and need-based scholarships to participate in the program’s activities throughout their four years at Wake Forest.
The second pillar is the curriculum development work that is done in a series of workshops and trainings of varying intensity with faculty. This allows interested faculty in every school or department within the university to incorporate character into what they are teaching, in some instances redesigning courses, be they in communication or computer science. In many ways, this is the most transformative element of the program in that it puts character-based leadership in any domain, grounding it into the pedagogy.
The third component involves a research and assessment team tasked with evaluating the strategies that are used to promote character growth in the programming and courses. This involves continuously collecting data on student outcomes.
Lamb’s Commencing Character course informs the faculty training and is where the foundational learning takes place for many undergraduates. The course uses seven strategies that are consistent with an Aristotelian approach to character development and supported by research in education, philosophy, and psychology. Each strategy gets unpacked with relatable language and comes with practical exercises that students apply to their own lives with the goal of attaining virtues such as purpose, justice, courage, and gratitude.
“You want to embed character into the educational process early so people are considering this at the onset of their professional journeys. ‘What kind of lawyer, or doctor, or engineer do I want to be?’”
The course is proactive and self-reflective. The first strategy, “habituation through practice,” suggests you can’t just read about virtues, you must learn them by performing virtuous actions. “Engagement with virtuous exemplars” involves examining role models who have exhibited good judgment in challenging situations—the proverbial “What would Jesus/my mother/Ted Lasso do?” Another, “reflection on personal experience,” asks students how and why they act in a certain way under certain circumstances. With “increasing awareness of influence and biases,” students are shown examples of how to understand their own assumptions and develop curiosity about differences. One of the weightier ones is “moral reminders”—psychological alerts that keep us from doing the wrong thing by recalling a commitment to important values or norms.
The course is open to anyone but is a requirement for the Leadership and Character Scholars, the undergraduates who have been given the challenge and the privilege of becoming people of good character. Here is also where the importance of embedding character development into leadership is personified. “These students are the ones that, by and large, are going to have some measure of power and agency in the world,” said Ann Phelps, a trained jazz musician with a degree in theology and the arts from Yale, who runs the undergraduate program with Lamb and oversees the Scholars. “We want them to understand that their choices will impact the lives of others and, at the very least, not to ignore the hard questions.”
Leaders in Training
While making a case for why an individual’s character growth benefits others, Phelps is witness to how this work can transform a person’s own life. Her involvement with the Scholars includes everything from recruiting and onboarding students, to running programs and discussion groups, to supporting them personally when the growth gets hard. She is perhaps best positioned to refute the notion that character is hardwired or only for those with proper upbringings. “Anyone has the capacity to develop strong character,” she said. “These students arrive at college with limitations and opportunities for growth (like we all have), often covered by talent, work ethic, intelligence, or pure luck. They could easily thrive in life without trying to become kinder, more courageous, or more just, but in this space, they work on developing virtues anyway.” On a Zoom call in late spring, she asked two of her students to discuss their experiences in the Leadership and Character Scholars program.
Sofia Ramirez Pedroza is in her junior year and is excited she still has a quarter of the program left. She said it has had a profound influence on her, both in terms of how she sees herself and what she would like to do with her life. “Whether it’s a big goal or a small goal, I just see the world differently now,” she said.
Sofia had a full ride to Wake Forest and didn’t think too much about the impact of what she had just been granted, but the intentionality of the program soon became evident. “This was not a loose kind of thing,” she said. “I came to understand that this was a place where they really cared about the cultivation of good people. Ann and Dr. Lamb and the rest of the people involved were very much invested in who we were becoming.”
At first, she didn’t know what that would look like for her. Sofia is Hispanic and credits her loving family with a confidence that clearly shows in her outgoing personality. But despite her easy nature, she says she developed a tough exterior to shield her from a lifetime of feeling undeserving—the “quota girl,” she said, who wouldn’t have made it otherwise. “I was very much a pessimistic person so I didn’t even know I had the capacity of understanding that I really could grow into the person I want to become.”
Sofia said the virtues she most wanted to cultivate with the seven strategies were gratitude and hope, which she wrote about in her end-of-semester commencement speech and said she owes to the people in the program. A subtle but important clue to her character growth is revealed when she discusses her career, which she now views as not just about herself.
“I’ve always wanted to do something in sports, but as a Hispanic female I didn’t really think there was a space for me,” she said. “Then I thought, why not? I decided to go for it, not just for me, but for the sea of people that come behind me that didn’t get granted these opportunities.”
Rachel Edwards just graduated and was among the program’s first cohort in 2019. When she first received the scholarship into the program, she said she was intrigued by the concept but didn’t really know what to expect. “Maybe I’d become a leader of a club or something, but I had no idea the extent to which I, Rachel Edwards, would change as a person.”
When Rachel came to Wake Forest, she was a pre-med major determined to fulfill her and her family’s dream of becoming a doctor. Shortly after she arrived, she intervened in a sexual assault on behalf of her friend and was left “wrecked by it.” Her mental health suffered, and she went to Phelps for advice, thinking she might transfer.
“At the same time, we were reading Aristotle’s book, Nicomachean Ethics, and I was really curious about what this old white man had to say about justice,” she said. “It ended up being something I could hold onto and do something with instead of just going away, so I began to form a conception of justice as a virtue.”
Photo provided by Wake Forest University
Rachel also began working at the school’s Title IX office where the staff was scrambling to adapt to then Education Secretary Betsy Devos’ new regulations on sexual assault. She dove into the work and remained involved throughout her four years at Wake Forest. “This is what justice for my friend looked like for me,” she said. She eventually found the courage to tell her parents she wasn’t going to become a doctor. In the fall of 2023, she is headed to law school.
When asked about her wellbeing, Rachel said, “I think when you develop your character, you’re simultaneously developing your wellbeing – you’re developing skills to approach the world. In every situation that took me to the lowest of lows, it was the program, and the people in it, that brought me back. And it wasn’t a superficial thing like, ‘I get to hold Ann’s hand.’ It was what Ann was teaching me. It was the content.”
The Case for Character
While Rachel and Sofia’s stories anecdotally demonstrate what the program is capable of, Lamb and Townsend have more tangible evidence to show the academic community. Numerous papers convey the results of the assessments they have done that show that students in Lamb’s course grew in seven targeted virtues compared to control groups; strengthened a sense of purpose including a “beyond the self” purpose that focused on flourishing within a community; and developed a growth mindset—a belief that self-improvement is possible if they try. The faculty training workshops have proven to increase professors’ understanding of character education as well as their confidence in incorporating these ideas into their classes.
When asked if all students should receive character and leadership training, Sofia said, “Of course. I mean, why wouldn’t you want to be a better person?”
Accompanying these materials are infographics showing that between all three pillars, and a fourth involving external-facing conferences and seminars, the program can count over 25,000 individual engagements in the last three years alone, including hundreds with faculty and staff at other colleges and universities. This is an important metric as the program uses the new Lilly Endowment, Inc. grant money to make character education contagious throughout the country.
Though not stated, these documents also serve to fend off the critics of this work, the “eye rollers” Townsend refers to who believe it’s “soft stuff,” or others who see it as preachy or patronizing. Lamb says the urgency for character-based education may be the strongest defense in a world where leadership is confused with celebrity and young people are hungry for something to believe in.
When asked if all students should receive character and leadership training, Sofia said, “Of course. I mean, why wouldn’t you want to be a better person?”
Can today’s students, having grown up in this fast-paced, digital world, inundated by content capped at 60 seconds, learn to slow down? At The Noble and Greenough School in Dedham, Massachusetts, Jen Hamilton arranged for her high schoolers to try with the help of “savoring stations,” including sweet treats, rich smelling oils, a bucket of water beads and a lava lamp with green and blue floating goo. As the kids drifted between stops, Hamilton asked them to consider the last time they’d savored a meal. “You ever notice that when you’re on your phone, all of a sudden the food is gone?”
Hamilton is the director of counseling at The Noble and Greenough School, or Nobles, a private high school in suburban Boston, and the students are in a course called “Psychology and the Good Life,” which she co-teaches with Dr. LaTasha Sarpy. The class may sound familiar, given it’s a junior version of one by the same name made famous by professor Laurie Santos—the most popular class in the history of Yale University. The savoring stations were Hamilton and Sarpy’s idea but the rest of their curriculum tracks closely to the lectures Santos designed to teach her Ivy League undergraduates “a set of scientifically-validated strategies for living a more satisfying life.” More recently, teachers like Hamilton and Sarpy have set out to find whether this approach can work for high schoolers, many of whom are a mirror image of the Yale students’ younger selves.
Laurie Santos, Professor of Psychology, Head of Silliman College, Yale University
Santos is strongly behind the idea. “When we first developed a course at Yale, it went viral on campus, and when we started getting press attention, I kept hearing from parents and educators who said, ‘This is so great that you have a class for college students, but I wish we could get something for students who [are] younger.’ So even when I first taught the class back in 2018, I was already thinking of ways that we could develop this content for younger learners.”
Nearly 1,200 students gravitated to Santos’ class at Yale during its first semester in 2018 for the opportunity to learn what really makes humans happy, as opposed to what they think will make them happy, and how to apply that knowledge to better themselves and their communities. Its popularity is encouraging while also reflecting the unrelenting desire for today’s college students to “feel better.” In 2020-2021, the Healthy Minds Study found more than 60% of college students met criteria for one or more mental health problems—a 50% increase since 2013. Wary of increasing demand for psychological services, experts have emphasized the importance of preventing mental health problems before they come up, rather than only confronting them after the fact. Perhaps, pioneer professors like Santos considered, teaching students how to build healthy habits that stave off larger emotional problems could do just that.
As for the high school setting, Hamilton, too, is on the cutting edge. The seasoned counselor, going on 22 years at Nobles, was one of the first to work with Santos to bring her lessons to high schoolers, who, like their college peers, need significant mental health support. According to the 2021 Youth Risk Behavior Report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than four in ten high school students (42%) reported feeling persistently sad or hopeless, while more than one in five (22%) reported considering suicide, and one in ten (10%) attempted suicide. Sixty percent of women and 70% of LGBTQ+ students also reported feeling persistently sad or hopeless. A quarter of women reported making a suicide plan and a quarter of the LGBTQ+ sample reported attempting suicide.
Still, the fate of wellness curricula in high school remains to be sealed. Teaching the material to teens touts the appeal of starting mental health detection and prevention sooner. Plus, the structured nature of high school means these classes stand to have a more comprehensive reach, as opposed to the opt-in basis of many college interventions. Could Santos and Hamilton’s work be a model for secondary schools interested in cultivating wellbeing for students before their next stage of life, whether in college or elsewhere? The question of scalability seems to hinge on not only the outcome of classes like Hamilton’s but the logistical feasibility of finding the resources they require—outside the gates of the nation’s most elite institutions.
Nearly 1,200 students gravitated to Santos’ class in its first semester for the opportunity to learn what really makes humans happy, as opposed to what they think will make them happy.
In January, 2018, Hamilton learned about “Psychology and the Good Life” with much of the rest of the world—from a feature in The New York Times. The article described the course’s unprecedented influence, surprising even Santos, who began to wonder whether the entire campus wasn’t on the brink of a wellness reformation. “With one in four students at Yale taking it, if we see good habits–things like students showing more gratitude, procrastinating less, increasing social connections–we’re actually seeding change in the school’s culture,” she told The Times about three weeks after the class made its astounding debut. Then, a promising teaser: Santos revealed she would be releasing a pre-recorded, seminar-style version of the content, called “The Science of Well-Being,” through the online course provider Coursera.
Hamilton was hooked. “I was really intrigued reading the article that a course like this is even being taught,” she said. “So I just kind of kept watching Coursera, watching Coursera, and when it was available, I immediately took it.” After she completed the online offering, released in March, 2018, the Nobles counselor couldn’t stop thinking about the content and, in applying it to her own life, experienced first-hand the “huge difference” she said it can make for personal happiness. When she reached out to Santos to inquire about a version of the material tailored to high schoolers, she never expected to hear back. Santos responded right away, explaining she planned to develop a course for younger learners but hadn’t yet had the chance.
“We actually received a grant to do that at the end of 2019 and we were planning to film that new class in the summer of 2020,” Santos said. “We all know what happened then, unfortunately.” Santos would eventually be able to release “The Science of Well-Being for Teens,” a high school version of her adult course, on Coursera in early 2023.
Hamilton felt the content was too valuable to shelve for future use. With the support of Santos and her team, she set out to preserve the key tenets of their original class, while adding her own flair. An elective for seniors and the occasional juniors, the Nobles class started meeting three times per week in the fall of 2019. Students watch and discuss the Yale lectures in class or watch them for homework and come into class to discuss and engage in practical activities. They focus on a number of scientifically-backed techniques, which Santos calls “rewirements,” to “rewire” their brains and help them feel happier. They receive a dynamic “toolkit” for not only dealing with life’s lows but appreciating its highs, Hamilton said. “It’s Psychology and the Good Life—how to enjoy the good life when it’s good, instead of just kind of being a zombie and marching through your life without paying attention.”
The structured nature of high school means these classes stand to have a more comprehensive reach, as opposed to the opt-in basis of many college interventions.
Despite being designed for a college audience, the bulk of the original material didn’t need to change. High school students, like college students, tend to stress about factors like academics, social life, and the future, Santos said, so their wellness needs end up being aligned. One of the ways the content may be particularly helpful for younger learners, however, is by addressing their tendencies toward self-criticism. “Their thought patterns are filled with rumination and worry,” Santos said. “And so what we’ve seen is that a lot of the high schoolers who’ve taken the class that we’ve talked with say that the part of the class that’s really on changing your thought patterns was most beneficial to them. I think this is a set of skills that all high schoolers really need and that they’ve really appreciated.”
“We focus on this in the college class, but we really wanted to give even more strategies to high school students that they could use in the trenches to really regulate their emotions and change their thought patterns from being more self-critical to more self-compassionate or more sort of scattered and taken up with technology to being a little more present,” she added.
Its ability to target self-critical thinking is also one of the main reasons Hamilton saw a future for the course at Nobles. At the prestigious prep school, where tuition exceeds $60,000 and almost a third of seniors matriculate at the Ivy League, perfectionism abounds. “I think about Nobles kids as being very similar in profile to kids that end up going to Yale,” Hamilton said. “They’re very, very high achieving. At times, they don’t know how to take their foot off the gas.” Hamilton said she often witnesses her students in a perpetual cycle of working intensely towards a goal, convinced they’ll be happy when they reach it. When the satisfaction ends up being fleeting, they start work toward the next promising thing. “What they’ve been doing is practicing being miserable.” She tells her students that taking care of their wellbeing doesn’t make them weak but can actually help them perform at their highest level.
It didn’t take long for Hamilton’s course to become popular, much like at Yale. After the first semester, a waitlist to enroll formed for the next one. Many of the students in her current class said they wanted to participate after hearing positive reviews from former students. “When we’re in a pressured situation and we have so much going on, we don’t really get to reflect and think about our mental health,” said Brian, who took the class in the spring of 2023. As a senior, he found the lessons particularly helpful for tackling some of the stressors that come with reaching the end of high school. “In this class, we learn that certain things don’t give you long term happiness, like the car you get or getting into the college of your dreams. I feel like that’s super helpful to learn, especially at this time where kids are getting accepted or not accepted into where they want to go.”
Photo by Mollie Ames
Beyond the content, the class meetings themselves can provide welcome relief to students typically stressed by school activities. “We’re still learning science-y things but in a different way,” another student in the Class of 2023 said of the “break” the class offered her during a demanding senior spring. On the day of the savoring stations, almost no one brought their backpacks into the classroom. They started the session as usual, with meditation, this time set to a cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car.” After some self-conscious giggles, they settled into the song and eventually the rest of the class, chatting and relaxed. Hamilton traveled the room, surveying, but also engaging. She’s the kind of teacher that doesn’t need to try to form connections with students—she just does, one of her former students said. She asked students about the sports they were playing that season and whether they had attended their future colleges’ admitted students day. At times, she opened up about her own life and answered questions about her family.
“Jen Hamilton has been such an ally in this quest to make sure we can help high school students get the right strategies that they can use to get more resilient and feel better,” Santos said. “The program she’s been able to develop at Nobles is so comprehensive. It really allows students to not only learn the scientific content that we teach in the class, but to really put it into practice in an excellent way.”
Young people get out of the class what they put in, Hamilton believes. “I say to kids, ‘If you’re taking this class because you think it’s going to be easy, it could be,’ but it also could be the hardest class you’re ever going to take because we’re really asking you to change your behavior,’” she said. For their final assignment, called the “Hack Yourself Project,” students choose a different wellness “hack” or habit and apply it to their own life. After tracking the hack’s impact on their happiness through weekly evaluations, they write a final paper on their findings and present it to the class. In Brian’s class, he said almost everyone recorded positive results.
Hamilton will be teaching the material as a required course for all 11th graders at the start of the 2023-2024 school year. In contrast to the senior elective she’s offered thus far, the junior class will meet once per week without homework. She called the opportunity to extend the reach of this content within her own campus “a dream.” Her hope for the future is that other educators investigate the Coursera offering and take it for themselves. “Even if you’re not going to teach it at your school, if you take it, you’ll probably incorporate a lot of these different techniques into your own life, which will make you a better teacher, first of all, but then you’ll also probably want to use a lot of them in the classroom.”
“I think in schools often we think, ‘Oh, this stuff is too soft. We really have to just focus on being rigorous with our academics and help our kids get to the next highest thing that they want to achieve,’” Hamilton said. “But I really think that if a school cares about their students and their students’ achievement, then they have to care about their wellbeing.”
“And if they care about their wellbeing, then they have to be willing to devote some time to it.”
In a classroom in New York city, three community college students discuss their futures. Andrew, who tried and left the Navy, will pursue a degree in technology. Nick, who had trouble keeping up during COVID, has just been accepted to university where he will study psychology. Mary Alice does not know what she wants to study or do for work, but she believes the school will help her figure it out.
“There are times when I get very down on myself and don’t think I have the energy to keep going,” she said. “But when I come to Guttman, I’m excited because I’m surrounded by people who care about me, and it makes me look forward to my day.”
Helping students like Nick, Andrew, and Mary Alice find their way, and their careers, is part of a revolutionary approach to higher education at the Stella and Charles Guttman Community College. With high-impact practices, experiential learning, and a career preparedness program grounded in sociology and anthropology, there is no school like it in the country for connecting students from vulnerable neighborhoods to the world of work. Since opening its doors in 2012, Guttman’s graduation rates have hovered at 40%, more than twice the national average – up until COVID-19. Now, like all community colleges in the country, Guttman’s enrollment and graduation rates are significantly down, but it is eager to meet that challenge. The school’s story at the precipice of post-COVID America feels a lot like that of its host city—it is proud, resilient, and betting on its assets.
Guttman Community College is located in Midtown, Manhattan, with buildings on either side of the New York Public Library. Bryant Park serves as a sort of non-traditional quad, with students sharing spaces with New Yorkers of every stripe and visitors from around the world. Like everything at Guttman, its location is intentional. Guttman tells its students, “You have a place at the center of everything.” Most of the students are of color, many are immigrants, and nearly all are first generation college students.
“When I come to Guttman, I’m excited because I’m surrounded by people who care about me and it makes me look forward to my day.”
Founded in 2012 as “New Community College” within the City University of New York (CUNY), the school was renamed the Stella and Charles Guttman Community College after the foundation of the same name donated $15 million to see what it would take to increase New York City’s community college graduation rate which, in 2012, was about six percent.
Guttman was designed for traditional-aged college students, those just leaving high school, with first-year students attending full-time. Its evidence-based model and small classes support students, often arriving from lower-performing public schools, from admission through graduation and beyond. Even before they start their first year, students enroll in a mandatory bridge program that helps them adjust to college life. There are no remedial courses, just developmental support built into the curriculum. From the beginning, Guttman students are challenged to think about work as a career, not just a job.
“Guttman’s success can be summed up as an intentional focus on achieving success for our most vulnerable communities. Its first-year experience integrates the best pedagogical practices that have resulted in high completion rates amongst first-generation college students. This is due to dedicated faculty and staff who engage in methodologies that positively impact this student population,” said Guttman President Dr. Larry D. Johnson, Jr.
Hailed as an early example of “inclusive excellence,” in 2020, Guttman was ranked the best community college in the nation by Niche.com, just before COVID-19 hit and New York became the country’s epicenter. For a school that rests its success on its high touch, pivoting to online learning during the pandemic was particularly debilitating.
“We built a high-impact college where there are whiteboards everywhere and furniture that moves around and experiential learning and then ‘boom,’ we moved online and suddenly we had a whole set of students that weren’t getting our secret sauce,” said Dr. Nicola Blake, Guttman’s Interim Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs.
Interim Provost & VP Nicola Blake & Clinician Nicole Brown
Blake acknowledges the recent stop-outs and enrollment decline but does not seem discouraged by it. The Jamaican-born professor turned provost has been with Guttman from the beginning and embodies the grit of its students. She has seen what can be overcome.
Guttman is now back to in-person classes and Blake is one of the point people on Johnson’s strategic planning effort, called “Guttman Forward 2028.” In 2028, new milestones will be realized including accelerated enrollment growth, increased faculty, and the opening of a new building. In the fall of 2023, they hope to have 1100 students, slightly higher than their pre-COVID peak. To get there, they are adjusting the model and doubling down on their secret sauce.
Key Ingredients
In his literature class, Professor Valdon “Tau” Battice is using Jamaica Kincaid’s Girl to interrogate the ways in which a society might impose on the individual through the framework of a mother-daughter relationship within a colonial society. He engages each student in the small class one by one, calling them by name and asking them to consider concepts such as femininity, social comportment, indigeneity, and culture. If they do not want to offer a comment, he waits and then returns another time with another opportunity. Soon, every member of the class has added something to the discussion.
Lecturer Valdon (Tau) Battice
Battice is among a faculty body dedicated to student-centered, experiential learning; People who “can work anywhere but choose to work here,” Blake said. Guttman’s faculty has more published papers than any other community college in the system but is recruited first and foremost for its teaching. This, too, is by design. Guttman’s Reappointment, Promotion and Tenure (RPT) document puts teaching first before service and scholarship, with teaching far outweighing the other two categories.
“We built a high impact college where there are whiteboards everywhere and furniture that moves around and experiential learning and then ‘boom,’ we moved online and suddenly we had a whole set of students that weren’t getting our secret sauce.”
Guttman’s faculty members are carefully recruited and predominantly young. They are not averse to disrupting the system by doing things differently. They have spent numerous hours learning culturally responsive pedagogy and are all trained in Universal Design for Learning (UDL), establishing steps within assignments so that all students can succeed. They administer very few tests, choosing instead to conduct project-based learning and problem solving. Until recently, there were no academic departments and no offices, just faculty working across disciplines in open workspaces.
The student affairs team gathered in Guttman’s 8th floor conference room are young, passionate, and collaborative. Their interlocking networks of counselors, peer mentors, Student Success Advocates (SSAs) and career strategists are there to move students towards their goals, whether it is degree attainment, career, or transferring to senior schools. With backgrounds not unlike their students, the team of accomplished professionals emphasizes that the determinants of those outcomes include things like confidence, safety, social and professional capital, and mental health.
Interim Dean Courtney Stevenson
Courtney Stevenson is Interim Assistant Dean for Student Affairs. She worked in elementary education before getting a master’s in clinical psychology and coming to Guttman to head up mental health and wellbeing. Her experience teaching 5th grade in a low-socioeconomic urban neighborhood impressed on her the importance of understanding her students as people first.
“Before I could actually teach the content, I needed to peel back all of the personal stuff that the student was walking into the classroom with,” she said. Being able to focus on the wellbeing of young people in an academic setting is what drew her to Guttman.
Stevenson’s student affairs team is clearly in step. In describing their respective areas, they tend to finish one another’s sentences or pick up directly from where a colleague left off. As the Director of Advising and Transfer Support, Victoria Romero oversees the academic scaffolding that keeps Guttman students on track. Born and raised in New York City, she went to public schools before attending a private boarding school upstate through a government funded program.
Director Victoria Romero
“My parents always wanted more for me than they had for themselves,” she said. “Education was huge.” After finishing college and getting her master’s in human service administration, Romero, who is currently completing her doctorate in education, returned home hoping to work on behalf of people who she said, “look like me, share my struggles, but may not have been as fortunate.”
Romero describes the proactive advising Guttman students receive. First-year students take a number of mandatory courses as a cohort. They enter learning communities, called “houses,” where they are assigned their SSAs. Instructional teams involving faculty meet regularly to discuss a person’s performance in a number of ways. “While we’re talking with students and celebrating all of their accomplishments, we are also taking a close look at how they are doing, if there’s a point of disengagement, or if we need to bring in other services like wellness,” said Romero.
“The theme song here is ‘You can’t hide,’” said Blake, referring to students, faculty, and staff. Transparency includes knowing when to make changes. “Do we get it perfect? No, but we’re naming it and looking at the data and when we need to make a shift, we shift.”
The flexibility and high touch have paid off: in 2019-2020, Guttman’s transfer rate to CUNY or non-CUNY bachelor degree programs within two years of earning an associate’s degree was 75%.
“My SSA was so effective at helping me find my path and that meant going on to get my degree in English at Hunter College,” said Nichole, a Guttman alumna who is now working at the school. “She walked me through the transfer process and found a backup major for me if it didn’t work out. Even after I was at Hunter, she helped me work through some issues I had with my credits.”
Here, the extra support can make all the difference in a process that is far from seamless.
One of Guttman’s ongoing challenges is fitting its unconventional model into a conventional system with institutional bias about the rigor and preparedness of the junior colleges. This can mean there are disconnects when transferring within CUNY. Chancellor Felix Rodriguez, who previously headed up another of CUNY’s community colleges, is taking this on, and said it has been an unaddressed issue within the system (see Q&A with Matos Rodriguez).
Guttman has a significant percentage of neurodivergent students, most of whom come to the school with an IEP (Independent Education Plan) from their high schools. Luiz Gutierrez is the Assistant Director of AccessABILITY, the office that helps these students become independent self-advocates. Like his colleagues, Gutierrez’ team is part of the network, working with faculty, SSAs, and career strategists on behalf of these students and those with physical disabilities. He points out a major difference between what his team does at Guttman and what happens in most college disabilities offices. “We don’t wait for students to come to us, we go to them,” he said, noting that young people, in particular, have trouble asking for help.
Gutierrez, who is pursuing his second master’s degree, also sees himself in his students. “I was drawn to Guttman because of its model but I’m also an individual,” he said. “I was a student with a disability myself and I saw the benefits that came from a supportive disabilities office.” Gutierrez said being involved in programs like CUNY’s Coalition for Students with Disabilities gave him an invaluable sense of community and he encourages his students to pursue these kinds of activities. “It is an amazing feeling when you know you are not alone and that there are other people going through what you are,” he said.
Rethinking Work
Everything about Guttman says to its students, “We got you,” but what may be most effective about Guttman’s model is the agency it engenders in students long after it lets go. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the way Guttman prepares students for careers. “We tell our students as soon as they come in the door, ‘We are going to start talking about your future now. What are your career goals? You need to start mapping that out,’” said Shaina Davis, Internship Manager at the Center for Career Preparation and Partnerships (CCPP).
Blake said the instruction can include everything from understanding concepts like “org charts” and “the glass ceiling,” to learning to speak up in rooms where you are the only person with an accent.
At Guttman, career development services go far beyond resume writing and mock interviews. Career mapping means directing students to courses they will need to take, helping them find the right internships and/or professional mentors and pivoting to a new plan if students change their minds. None of this is done in a vacuum. Guttman invites leaders from a variety of industries in to hear what jobs they need and what new jobs might be emerging so that they can match their students’ interests with the demands of the market.
The centerpiece of all this is Guttman’s mandatory, first-year, social science course called Ethnographies of Work (EOW). The course uses methods rooted in sociology and anthropology to teach students how work is actually experienced and how to navigate as a student of color in a predominately white professional world. Blake said the instruction can include everything from understanding concepts like “org charts” and “the glass ceiling,” to learning to speak up in rooms where you are the only person with an accent.
“A LinkedIn profile will not tell you your survivability in a workplace, or if passion meets purpose, or if you really get to do the thing you want to do,” she said.
Students in EOW do field work, analyze data, and study workplace doctrines to understand more broadly about work and their place in it. Professor Karen Williams, who directs the program at Guttman, instructs students to enter workplaces as researchers, observing dynamics that are often overlooked. An auto-ethnographic component allows students to explore their own and their family’s relationship to work. “We ask students to think about the jobs their parents do and their grandparents had and to see themselves as branches of these roots,” she said.
This can be difficult work. More often than not, Guttman families are not in jobs they love, and have historically viewed work as a way to survive. Blake writes about how students unpack this legacy in Learning from “Dirty Jobs:” Reflection on Work in the Classroom. The article presents the context and pedagogy of utilizing notions of “dirty jobs” in the classroom and highlights the discoveries made about theories of work in the process. Students document these discoveries using writing assignments that lead to a better understanding of the concept, “What is Work?”
While Guttman students have community, family and other networks, they often lack access to the networks that so many graduates rely on to ascend in their careers. “Because of systemic inequities that often serve as gatekeepers to networks within professional workplaces, they are at a disadvantage when it comes to finding or succeeding in jobs they have worked so hard to prepare for,” said Mary Gatta, a former faculty member who taught EOW at Guttman and is now the director of research at the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE). Gatta, who has written papers on the program, said programs like these help students seek and create their own networks, along with disrupting existing networks.
Thanks to champions like Blake and Gatta, the EOW model is now being implemented in community colleges throughout the country where similar methods can lead to positive outcomes for other students.
Expanding the circle
If there is one promise that the Guttman visionaries have not yet fulfilled, it is to offer these experiences to a significantly larger number of students, right in New York City. There is no doubt that the pandemic threw this goal off track. Guttman students were disproportionately impacted by COVID and its mitigation in every way, from illness and death in their families to limited workspaces and internet access during quarantine. For many students of varying abilities who had been promised individual attention, online learning just didn’t work.
The pandemic added another barrier for students who had not yet enrolled: Students who had been isolated in high school are in many ways less mature and less eager to join in on the community-based, high impact practices. Others, who may have considered Guttman, have been refocused on hourly work, some of which can yield $25 an hour. Blake acknowledges that as much as COVID impacted Guttman’s enrollment, it was not the only reason the numbers could not be sustained. Even before the pandemic, surveys showed that students were looking for greater flexibility in their schedules. People who had started somewhere else and hoped to try again at Guttman were not allowed to transfer in.
“We realized the model had too many intersecting high-impact practices, which created a barrier for different kinds of students,” said Blake. “We were hyper-focused on students who could be available five days a week, full time, and as a vehicle for social justice, we have to think about who we are excluding.”
This year, Guttman is making another shift. It will soon allow students who have been at other community colleges to transfer in and is appealing to students who work by splitting school hours into intervals that can accommodate jobs. Asked what happens to the high-impact model when the numbers begin to change, Blake said they are all over it. The enrollment growth, plus Guttman’s endowment and federal grant money, will help maintain the ratios of students to coaches and counselors.
Here Is where the story continues. President Johnson explained that “Guttman Forward 2028” has five pillars, each containing six-year key performance indicators in several areas, such as elevating diversity and inclusion; retention strategies; student, staff, and faculty satisfaction; and increasing the enrollment pipeline.
“While I am most excited about each of the five pillars, the one that resonates the most with me is Pillar Number One: Elevate diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging,” he said. “It is important to me that Guttman is a student-ready and employee-ready institution that welcomes diverse perspectives and encourages academic research and is an institution where all can feel respected and belong.”
Johnson said the true success of Guttman is its students: “They are what make us #GuttmanProud.”
