Spotlight on Creative Instruction: Supporting Wellbeing

In this Spotlight on Creative Instruction, faculty colleagues share their own approaches to centering students’–and their own–wellbeing.

Sarah Adams-Schoen
Assistant Professor, Law

Things I do to support my students’ wellbeing include:

• I encourage students to give feedback to me, directly or anonymously, about anything about the course structure, materials or my teaching that makes it difficult for them to engage or learn. I put this encouragement in the syllabus and also make the point in class a couple times throughout the semester and provide names, phone numbers and email addresses of administrators who will share anonymous student feedback with me.
• I take attendance at the start of each class using a poll with 3 options: (1) present and prepared, (2) present and prepared but wishing not to participate, and (3) present and unprepared. Students who want to keep their cameras off, not be called on, or not participate in breakout sessions, but who have otherwise prepared for class, can choose option (2). I ask students who choose (2) or (3) to check in with me via private chat or email. Students are aware that I don’t collect the data for punitive purposes. The vast majority of students select option (1) most of the time.
• My classes cover legal regimes that were created and have been used to advantage White communities and burden Black, Indigenous and other Communities of Color. To prepare students for critical examination of these legal regimes, I post an introductory video to my course Canvas pages that introduces the material, discusses my relationship to it, and previews Dr. Alex-Assensoh’s LACE framework. I introduce the framework in class in more detail. I provide opportunities for students to reflect on the LACE framework using their own lived experience expertise through a pair-and-share exercise using 2-person breakout rooms. Students also had the opportunity to opt out of the breakout room exercise.  

One thing I do (or don’t do, or reflect on) to support my own wellbeing is:

• When I can, I attend a weekly CoDaC writing circle dedicated to carers. The circles have been supportive in terms of my well-being and research. One thing I’ve struggled with during the pandemic is isolation from my colleagues, and the writing circles help alleviate some of that sense of loneliness and loss. The tradeoff though is about 30 minutes a week more Zoom time, but, for me, it has certainly been worth it.
• I use the function on Zoom that allows me to hide my video from myself.

Shifting our teaching culture around wellbeing:

• Teaching in the online environment is challenging under the best circumstances. To support a student- and wellness-centered teaching culture that includes, for example, active learning in the Zoom classroom, I’d like to see more logistical and technical support for all teachers. For example, it would be incredibly helpful to have a student worker who could help manage the technical aspects of the online classroom such as troubleshooting student connectivity issues; managing the waiting room and chat; helping manage tools like breakout rooms, polls, shared docs, jam board, etc.
• I purchased the Calendly app, which integrates with my Outlook calendar and allows students and others to schedule meetings with me without the need for back-and-forth emails. I’ve really appreciated this time-saving tool and I’d like to see this or a similar tool offered for free to faculty and staff.

Maile Hutterer
Associate Professor, History of Art and Architecture

Things I do to support my students’ wellbeing are:

• I design my course for maximum deadline flexibility. My syllabus includes a statement about accepting work through the last date of the class and articulates a standard make-up assignment for missed classes
• I regularly provide students opportunities to connect with classmates and peers for check-ins at the start of class. These can take the form of small group (4 students) with a prompt like: “I invite you to share one success, challenge, or question that you have experienced in the past week.” During these times, students have the option of returning to the main room if they do not feel comfortable in the breakout room. I also invite students to verbally greet each other at the start of class and thank each other at the end of every class.
• I integrate collaborative learning in all of my classes to help foster community and deep peer-to-peer interaction.
• At times of predicable high stress (e.g. midterm, 2020 election), I post announcements and send emails to my classes about wellbeing support on campus (e.g. the counseling center)
• I open my class meeting early and stay late to provide students an opportunity to ask questions or connect without the burden of coming to a separate meeting (e.g. office hours)
  

José Meléndez
Assistant Professor, Planning, Public Policy and Management 

Things I do to support my students’ wellbeing are:

• Encourage students to hang out before class starts to catch up with classmates. (I rarely do this after class since my classes are quite exhausting. But I know others also allow for students to hang out after class.)
• Create a separate hangout time for Friday afternoons; students focus these conversations.
  

Things I do to support my wellbeing are:

• Force myself to take a midday 5-minute walk, just for fresh air and stretch.
• Schedule physical/mental health time in the evening hours after a long day.
• Avoid unnecessary zoom time. So, no happy hours, or other things that just add to screen time.
• Don’t schedule zoom events on weekends

Lori Shontz
Professor of Practice, School of Journalism and Communication

Things I do to support my students’ wellbeing:

• I’ve eliminated penalties for late work. The vast majority of students have been respectful of this and have made deadline anyway. Almost everyone who has missed deadline has eventually turned in strong work, even if it’s a couple of days or a week late. So they ARE learning.
• We begin every Zoom class with a “check-in” that students answer in the chat, and most of these are geared toward mental and physical wellbeing. Examples: What did you do to take care of yourself this week? (That was this week, and answers ranged from “laundry” to “Lord of the Rings marathon with cheesecake from Costco.”) Tell me something nice that someone did for you unexpectedly. What’s something you are grateful for this week? All of my class surveys have indicated that students like this start to class, and it’s helped build community among the students, as well, when they connect over their answers. Note: I participate in this, too, and answer all of my own prompts.
• I’ve owned my own mistakes. Sometimes I don’t know what day it is, either, and it is definitely taking me longer to do a lot of tasks.
• As part of my weekly modules, I’ve shared resources on a gratitude practice, on how this pandemic may affect your productivity, and how to recuperate during chaos.

Things I do to support my wellbeing:

• I have done yoga every day in 2021, and I’ve been doing it five or six days a week, without fail, since the pandemic started. (Up from three to five days.)
• I’ve also found myself reading more (feminist!) romance novels than usual — Happily Ever After endings are a good thing these days 🙂 
• And I’m going to be honest about this: I’ve been seeing a therapist every other week, and while it’s slow progress, it’s helpful.
• Also, I want to shout out the CoDaC writing circles, particularly Lara Bovilsky, who does a fantastic job coordinating them. Doing professional and creative work has been slow going, but Lara has created a supportive atmosphere that both acknowledges the difficulty of the pandemic and our jobs AND provides support to accomplish and celebrate successes, even if they are small.

Shifting our teaching culture around wellbeing:

• I don’t think giving extra care for students is acknowledged as part of the job, and it is — and always has been. I keep thinking about a line in Ed Yong’s piece from The Atlantic titled How the Pandemic Defeated America: “Water running along a pavement will readily seep into every crack; so, too, did the unchecked coronavirus seep into every fault line in the modern world.” I think this pandemic has showed how much our students have always been struggling. 
• Shifting this requires two things, I think: (1) Recognizing and tangibly rewarding the extra work that some faculty are putting in and (2) Equipping others who aren’t comfortable with this work or who don’t think this is part of the job to be able to better respond to their students and to their colleagues’ needs.