The following practices may be helpful to further support student mental health and well-being: • Acknowledge mental health openly throughout the semester to destigmatize it, e.g., “We are approaching midterms, which can be a stressful time. Please make sure you take care of yourself and know that we have an array of mental health services available on campus.”
• Check in during stressful times, such as midterms and finals, or during national, global, or campus events that may increase students’ stress.
• Design a flexible syllabus, e.g. allowing a certain number of absences (some colleges/programs have required hours (e.g. FAA) that must be adhered to) without an impact on participation grades, granting extensions, or providing the opportunity to drop the lowest exam grade or make corrections. Allowing for mistakes and flexibility can keep students stay motivated even if they fall behind or miss class due to health or personal issues. When you know that the student needs an absence verification, please encourage them to submit the form on the Dean of Students Office ERNIE site. • Acknowledge and celebrate multiple forms of learning by incorporating smaller discussion groups or partner sharing, including a variety of content to accommodate visual and auditory learners, allowing participation points geared toward both introverted and extroverted students, and assigning coursework that incorporates a variety of different learning styles. • Create community guidelines during the first class session, deciding as a class what an inclusive classroom means to them and establishing norms for respectful dialogue, especially around challenging subjects. • Prioritize accessibility for all students, e.g. putting captions on videos shown in class, image descriptions on presentations, setting up the classroom in an accessible way, etc. • Close each class with something positive, for example have students share something they learned or something they are interested in learning more about in the next class. 7
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online