We began our season with the dense, dark star of the skills of learning to learn. By today’s episode, late in our season, we see that single star has been revealed to be an intricate constellation of disparate points of light and gravity. Our conversation in this episode is about creating constellations of meaning and support through the skills and experience of connection.
Our guests in this episode have come to see their work at the college as hinging on connection.
We talk first with Brad Kauffman, program director at the William Jerry Wood Life Skills Center in the Academic Success Center. Brad works with students on essential skills like time management. As he works with them, he often discovers that other college services could have a direct impact on their academic success, so he regularly connects students to financial aid, counseling and disability services.
Angela Griffin, our second guests, is a professor of Psychology in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences. As her career has progressed, she's come to several revelations about the place of connection in academic success: both slow revelations and sudden. We walk alongside her to understand how she's changed her classes over the years and how much benefit this has brought her students.
Below are resources to strengthen connection in your classes.
Listen here or through Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
Faculty, staff and students can reach out for services related to life skills. Use this form to contact Brad Kaufman at the William Jerry Wood Life Skills Center in our Academic Success Center. He would love to visit your class or consult individually with any students you feel could use more suport and better connection at the college.
Activities to Promote Connection and Community
Here are some of the activities Angela uses in her classes to nurture connection and belonging at MTC, which you can adapt for your classes.
Life in a Box
A cornerstone activity to get to know each other.
Favorite Song and Class Playlist
Building connection through music.
Questions to Build Community
Thirty-six questions to sprinkle through a course.
Connecting and Reconnecting
Connect over planning reconnection.
Background on the 36 Questions Activity
The 36 Questions were originally designed to be used together as a set in order to foster emotional connection and intimacy. Angela divides them up and uses them one at a time to create small moments of connection throughout a course and to teach the psychology behind the questions as part of her discipline. Here are two articles that give more detail and context about the questions.
An article that describes how to use the 36 questions and includes those questions.
This is the Ted Talk that Angela uses in her classes and that brought her to a new appreciation of what classtime could be spent doing. You can share it with your students and watch it yourself to see what it might suggest to you.
The CTE lead the Faculty, Staff, Leadership Common Read program from Augisu 2022-June 2023 and it focused on a book that deeply explores the important of connection and belomging in student success in higher education. If you'd like to explore this topic, you can access the ebook through the MTC LIbrary (login required). You can also listen to the micro-episodes about the chapters in our Sustainable Connections subseries.