Helping Your Students to Send an "SOS"

[smccormack]

As the government shutdown continues, more college students will face economic hardships. Educating our students on how to advocate for themselves is a critical life skill. Sometimes the help they need is academic and other times it’s socio-economic. Helping the students to see their professors as a resource is critical to their overall success in college and can link them to valuable resources during difficult economic times. Here are some ways that you can be helpful to your students without a lot of heavy lifting.

Know where to go at your institution for assistance. My college, for example, has a Benefits Hub – a web page with resources for everything from employment assistance, to housing and food insecurity, to health insurance guidance. I keep the page bookmarked so that I can quickly send the link to students should they ask for guidance. Sharing the link in a general email to students can also be useful at midsemester as many learn about the resources when they first enroll but forget about their availability when they are in crisis. 

Invite the students to ask for help. Every few weeks I remind the students about my office hours by listing the many topics they might wish to discuss with me – academic work and career planning, but also any issues that might be impacting their school work. I point out to them that the college has resources that I can help them connect with and that they are not alone in the process of navigating college or daily life. My invitations generally result in students asking for academic support but a handful of times each semester I will have a student come to office hours to ask me for help with another class. Creating that safe space for dialogue with students can be enormously beneficial. I once had a student who lost her scientific calculator midway through the semester. Without the resources to purchase a replacement she had missed the previous two assignments in her math class. What she didn’t know until she visited my office hours was that our college library lends such technology to students: problem solved.

Use the Achieve Goal Setting and Reflection Surveys to check in. An easy way to get students to reflect on how their semester is progressing is to activate an Achieve survey. I use the surveys as extra credit, which generally makes the students happy and ensures that I get lots of responses. I curate them to include questions specific to each class. Next week, for example, I will deploy a Reflection Survey to assess students’ experience completing library-based research for our class project. Including a question about their overall sense of wellness enables students to express concerns that they might not bring up at class but that are impacting their school work (transportation or food issues, for example) and provides an opportunity for faculty to connect students with relevant resources in a non-intimidating way. 

Additional ideas? Please share!