The Spartans' Table initiative is BACK! by Dave Marlow When you sit down together at the Spartans' Table, you belong. Belonging is a primary factor in student retention (Costello, et al., 2022). Students who feel connected to their university are more likely to persist in their educational goals. Interacting informally at the Spartan Cafe in … Continue reading Relationship Matters: Casual Conversation as Pedagogy
Soft Skills and First Year Students
By Kristen Stevenson The Back to School Buzz is in the air! School supplies, backpacks, and nervous students abound while faculty wrap their minds around a new year, finish syllabi, and create content in Blackboard. For those of us who teach first-year students, we are also planning how to guide students to be successful in … Continue reading Soft Skills and First Year Students
Building a Safe Classroom Enviroment
By Kristen Stevenson The Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework promotes synergies among teaching presence, cognitive presence, and social presence to achieve learning in courses. Your teaching presence sets the tone of the classroom (both face-to-face and virtual) for students to safely and successfully interact with both the content and one another. While college classrooms often … Continue reading Building a Safe Classroom Enviroment
Using Social-Emotional Learning to Improve Student Career Readiness
By Kristen Stevenson The USC Upstate Moving UP QEP focuses on preparing career-ready students who can “identify and articulate their knowledge, skills, abilities, experiences, and other characteristics as relevant to desired career goals; and explore identify, and address areas necessary for professional growth and success.” It is important for us as instructors to reflect on … Continue reading Using Social-Emotional Learning to Improve Student Career Readiness
Are We There Yet? Keeping our Sanity in an Ongoing Pandemic
By Kristen Stevenson It is Blursday of the 21st month of the Covid-19 pandemic and...We. Are. Over. It. We are deep in the midst of burnout, the “exhaustion of physical or emotional strength or motivation usually as a result of prolonged stress or frustration” (Merriam-Webster, 2021). We keep thinking that the pandemic is almost over … Continue reading Are We There Yet? Keeping our Sanity in an Ongoing Pandemic
Strategies for Improving Faculty Well-Being
By Kristen Stevenson Let’s face it: teaching is hard. It is emotional, it is exhausting, and it can make you burn the candle on both ends. It is also rewarding, exhilarating, and worth the effort. Teaching requires emotional labor, “the management of feeling to create a publicly observable facial and bodily display” as we see … Continue reading Strategies for Improving Faculty Well-Being