Fostering Student Success

Althea Counts, TRIO Programs Director, University of South Carolina

This is the third newsletter in a series that will serve as a report and thematic summary of content shared in the National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience and Students in Transition’s multi-pronged engagement of TRIO Student Support Services (SSS) programs. This report will also highlight the National Resource Center’s work with the Advising Success Network (ASN).

A primary goal of the National Resource Center is to highlight potentially overlooked voices of people doing advising work that fosters student success and equity. With this in mind, the National Resource Center established an SSS Professional Learning Community (PLC) as an exchange site for framing, learning, and sharing best practices to maximize advising effectiveness within TRIO programs. The goals of the PLC included:

Amplifying the voices of key contributors to equity in the higher education landscape
Sharing successes, as well as supportive solutions to challenges
Contributing to the scholarly-practice knowledge base on advising and student success
Network expansion of TRIO SSS programs
Engaging partners in thought leadership

The PLC employed a series of online and virtual engagements that stimulated discussion, encouraged sharing of expertise, facilitated a book club engagement, and provided online community networking. Participants from diverse institutions shared examples of successful programming and services provided by their programs and worked collaboratively to find solutions to challenges they were experiencing in student engagement and improving the campus culture to be more supportive of first-generation students from low socioeconomic backgrounds.

Virtual engagements were recorded, and TRIO SSS participants could access these recordings via the SSS PLC Blackboard learning management site. Discussions from the virtual engagements included services and programming that addressed meeting SSS federally mandated and standardized objectives regarding retention, achieving satisfactory academic performance, and graduation of participants. The overarching theme from all sessions was fostering student success and proven ways to achieve student success.

Book Club Engagement

The November 2022 virtual event centered on a common text distributed to all participants. The benefits of reading a common text as a book club activity can be obvious. Participants are exposed to new knowledge that informs practice, creating an environment that encourages sharing. Rouech et al. (2022) describe a book club as a setting for social and intellectual discussion of best practices and how to implement them.

The selected book was Promoting Belonging, Growth Mindset, and Resilience to Foster Student Success (Baldwin et al., 2020). SSS PLC participants received the book at the one-day symposium for SSS PLC participants, sponsored by the National Resource Center. The symposium preceded the Conference on Students in Transition, and both events were held in Atlanta, Georgia.

During the virtual book club engagement, authors Dr. Amy Baldwin, Director of Students in Transition and a faculty member at the University of Central Arkansas, and Dr. Bryce Bunting, Assistant Clinical Professor at Brigham Young University’s Counseling and Career Center, led an online discussion of select chapters. The authors encouraged PLC participants to think about the students on their respective campuses, the SSS program services they provide, and their campus environments as they highlighted areas of the text.

Baldwin et al. (2020) provide practical strategies, grounded in theory, for promoting student success inside and outside the classroom. The authors define the approach to student success as developing the whole student, which is in alignment with the TRIO SSS approach to student service provision. Holistic development can include the student’s intellectual, emotional, social, physical, and spiritual growth (Baldwin et al., 2020). SSS programs have long realized that assisting students in addressing the non-academic areas of their lives often leads to better or improved academic outcomes for the student.

Baldwin et al. focused on three actions that encourage student success: helping students develop a growth mindset (Dweck, 2006), ensuring students feel they belong on their campus, and helping students develop resiliency in the face of adversity, inside and outside the classroom. These actions are integral to the structure and services of TRIO SSS programs and are reflected in the programs’ design and services.

Growth and Learning Mindsets

During their virtual discussion, authors Baldwin and Bunting emphasized fostering a learning mindset in students, and this topic became the focus of the book club engagement. Students with learning mindsets think and act in a way that demonstrates learning can be improved with effort. The focus should be on what is learned from an experience, not on performance. For institutions, fostering a learning mindset means getting students to see failure as an opportunity for feedback instead of the end (Baldwin et al., 2020). The authors guided participants through questions that stressed the key transition points students encounter during their college careers and illustrated where and how fixed mindsets often appear.

In addition, participants provided anecdotal examples of students who demonstrated learning mindsets. For instance, some students are used to being independent and handling life concerns independently instead of applying help-seeking behaviors. PLC participants discussed examples of interventions or services used to promote learning mindsets that could be adapted for various campuses. A key takeaway from the session emphasized learning mindsets effectively helping students address feelings of imposter syndrome as vital to their future success.

Learning Mindsets in the Classroom

Helping students develop learning mindsets in the classroom is an essential duty of TRIO SSS staff. Often, they serve as academic advisors for students and are tasked with helping students navigate challenges in their academic curriculum. As students develop learning mindsets within the classroom, that skill can also be applied to learning outside of the classroom.

Baldwin and Bunting had the SSS PLC participants share instances of their students expressing a “crisis of confidence” in the classroom. Several participants expressed that although the students had completed the high school diploma requirements, they still lacked confidence in their math abilities. Those students appeared to have a fixed mindset toward their aptitude to master math concepts. They believed their mathematical intelligence could not evolve. However, once the students learned their competency levels could be improved, their confidence was enhanced, becoming a catalyst for positive change in other areas of their lives.

PLC participants discussed using powerful stories from more experienced students who have demonstrated a learning mindset as a way to encourage others. Those students found effective study strategies and adopted help-seeking behaviors such as participating in tutoring to improve their academic performance. Often, SSS participants, some of whom are non-traditional college students, have learned to be independent and solve their own problems. So, they are hesitant to seek help with academic or non-academic concerns. Several SSS PLC participants cited that adopting the learning mindset has increased their student’s academic confidence and encouraged them to pursue a graduate degree.

Promoting Belonging

Rethinking the campus culture was a focal point in the creation of TRIO SSS Programs. College campuses were not designed to meet the needs of SSS-eligible students. However, TRIO SSS programs have worked to create an environment that nurtures a sense of belonging for first generation students from low-income families. TRIO SSS programs establish relationships with students and get to know them individually. Assessment of student needs, at the initial point of enrollment in the SSS program, helps to determine the student’s academic, social, and financial needs and directs planning of program services. In addition, the staff in these programs develop relationships with department chairs, faculty, and advisors to provide a seamless connection between the academic departments and support services offices on college campuses. These collaborative efforts work effectively to meet students’ needs in a holistic manner.

Conclusion

The book club engagement was an effective forum, as it gave PLC participants a scholarly book to read and time to discuss it. Promoting Belonging, Growth Mindset, and Resilience to Foster Student Success is a convincing read that challenged SSS PLC participants to evaluate their program’s services. It provided concrete examples illustrating theory to practice and provided solid recommendations on adapting situations for TRIO SSS programs and their host institutions, Participants in the PLC’s virtual event were able to connect with the book authors and commit to examining ways to initiate change at their respective institutions.

References

Baldwin, A., Bunting, B. D., Daugherty, D., Lewis, L., & Steenbergh, T. A. (2020). Promoting belonging, growth mindset, and resilience to foster student success. National Resource Center for The First-Year Experience and Students in Transition, University of South Carolina.

Dweck, C. (2016). Mindset: The new psychology of success. Random House.

Rouech, K E., VanDeusen, B. A., Angera, J. J., Arnekrans, A. K., Majorana, J. C., & Brown, J. L. (2022). Read all about it: Faculty book clubs in action to support student engagement, The Clearing House: A Journal of Educational Strategies, Issues and Ideas, 95(6), 242–249, https:// doi.org/10.1080/00098655.2022.2122919