Belonging and Growth Mindset

Show students that mistakes are part of the learning process and help them work through challenges in a way that encourages self-compassion and promotes a sense of belonging.

Course Design

• Have activities and assignments that enable students to use their prior knowledge and strengths.
• Focus on mastery and create a class structure that rewards growth. For example:
• Use low-stakes formative assessments (e.g., quizzes, brief papers) where students can get feedback before larger summative assessments (e.g., exams, final paper).
• Create opportunities for students to submit corrections on homework, quizzes, or exams
• Allow students to do an assignment twice and their final grade is the higher of the two attempts..
• Ask students to make revisions based on feedback for assignments and projects.
• Avoid grading exams or other assignments based on a normal distribution (i.e., “curving”).
• Create support for gaining self-regulated learning skills that will help students overcome challenges and persist toward goals. For example:
• Share information about effective goal setting and have activities where students set goals, create specific plans, and monitor their own progress through a weekly action plan in their lab book, a writing plan, etc.
• Use assignments that help students reflect on their learning process to identify what they are doing well, where to improve, and how to use course and university resources.
• Scaffold larger, more complex assignments.

Syllabus

• Explain ways that you encourage growth and mastery through your course design and policies. For example: “This course is designed around the concept that learning is gradual and often involves errors before successful demonstration of knowledge and skills. There will often be low-stakes opportunities to practice before higher-stakes assessments.”
• Include relevant university, disciplinary, and academic skills resources (e.g. Writing Centre, Math Centre, Engineering Student Success Centre, etc.) and highlight how these are helpful for your course.

First Days and Weeks

• Talk to students about how to approach your course and provide resources. For example:
• Talk about resources from your syllabus in a way that will prevent students from feeling that using them means they are less well equipped to succeed than their peers. Send the message that, “successful students seek help, and these are the pathways to help in my course” (Lang, 2020, pg. 185).
• Provide a list of curated advice from previous students. Include advice that emphasizes the challenges in the course and talks about seeking help to overcome those.

Throughout the Semester

• Highlight progress made so far. For example: Discuss improvements across multiple paper drafts or exams.
• Talk to students about overcoming unhealthy social comparisons and about perfectionism versus healthy striving in the context of your course.
• Show students that it is okay to not understand concepts right away and to get things wrong. For example: 1) Check understanding in class with a “muddiest point” prompt; 2) If a student contributes an answer that is incorrect, don’t dismiss it. Help identify where it went wrong and then consider at least one way to get the correct answer.
• Give “Wise” feedback on student work.
• Use exams and other assignments as teaching tools, rather than the end of learning. For example:
  • Go over parts of an exam or assignment and discuss areas of common struggle, what these mistakes mean for thinking and learning, and how they connect to new learning.
• Provide students with feedback on assignments, and discuss how to use feedback to improve.
• Talk about how you have grown your knowledge and skills over time through practice. If comfortable to you, consider sharing about a time when you struggled, failed, or made mistakes in an academic or work context, and how you moved through that challenge. Some resources for more transparent conversations around failure include this University Affairs article on Failure and this article focused on compassionate teaching
• During difficult times, create opportunities for students to practice self-compassion about their schoolwork, such as within a homework assignment or briefly during class. When students show negative thinking connected to cognitive distortions, you can help them reframe by asking them to write realistic statements about what is possible. For example:
  • “I’m just not good at this.” becomes → “Facing difficulties is a normal part of learning, just because this is hard doesn’t mean I can’t do it.”
  • “I know I’m going to fail.” becomes → “I can’t know yet how I will do, I can only try my best to prepare and seek out help.”
  • “I worked hard, and I still failed. I am not meant for this.” becomes → “I did poorly on one exam, but now I know what to expect and will use new strategies next time.”

When a Student is Struggling

What can you do if a student is struggling to understand a concept or if they fail an exam or assignment?

• Consider different approaches for students who do poorly despite exerting great effort and students who are less engaged.
• Listen to the student’s perspective and avoid minimizing their concerns. Avoid saying “This is usually pretty easy” or “This should be straightforward” or “Yes, it’s hard, most people don’t get it, maybe this isn’t for you”. Instead you might say (keep in mind, these are examples, you may want to craft your own), “Different students, with varying perspectives and aptitudes will find some areas challenging or easy”, “Can you tell me where you get stuck on this”, “We all face and grow through challenges, but we also need to decide which challenges are worth it for what we want from life”
• Where appropriate, you might consider referring students to Academic coaching through Student Affairs or a Learning Strategist in Accessibility Services.
• Help normalize struggle as a common part of academics that can be overcome. For example: “Past students who had difficulty with this told me that _____ helped them improve.”
• Work with the student to identify specific areas of struggle and 2-3 strategies for improvement.
• Encourage students to check back in and consider reaching out to follow up.

Especially for Graduate students

• Find a balance between academic support and autonomy. Understand when to give more direction and when to encourage independent thinking by building the student’s confidence in their personal research capabilities.
• Appreciate the student’s point of view and support the pursuit of their research questions.
• Reframe challenges as learning opportunities, and place current performance into a longer-term context.
• Cultivate trust by engaging on common ground and minimizing the usual faculty-student status hierarchy.
• Provide or help students’ access funding, equipment, or facilities to complete their research. Remember that the library has equipment such as laptops, calculators and adaptors that can be checked out. Ensure these issues are covered as part of your standard approach to students you are supervising, and not left to informal discussions which may inadvertently provide advantages to certain students.
• Give constructive feedback on written work submitted for review within a mutually agreed upon timeframe.
• Demonstrate understanding of the student as a whole person by keeping in mind the personal, scholarly, and professional dimensions of being a graduate student.