Teaching First Year Students

How can we support our first-year students?

University students face a multitude of challenges in their first year: adapting to new environments, making new friends, taking greater personal responsibility.... and, oh yes, studying and completing coursework at a whole new level of rigor and complexity. Faculty at Southern Oregon University have identified a series of teaching strategies to increase students' success in their first year.

This site has been designed to provide information about the strategies suggested by SOU faculty and staff and to describe technologies that would support these strategies.

Strategies to support first-year students fall into four key areas:

— Understanding who our first-year students are,

— Growth mindset strategies for the first-year student,

— Teaching practices that promote first-year student success, and

— Course design principles that support student success.

Background

In June 2016, faculty focus groups met in association with Curriculum Design Academy and Re-Imagining the First Year projects to explore the challenges, opportunities, and possible approaches to teaching first-year students. A similar session was held during the Instructional Institute in September that year. Faculty were invited to participate if they taught a relatively high number or a significant percentage of first-year students. Student Affairs staff who work with first-year students also participated in these focus groups, in addition to the more than 30 faculty members from 15 different programs who took part.

Notes from all three sessions are included in the Summary of June/September 2016 Faculty Focus Groups on Teaching First-Year Students (see also Rough Notes for December 2, 2016 workshop). Other faculty took part in a series of workshops on teaching the first-year student offered by the Center for Instructional Support and contributed their approaches to teaching these students.