Leading Conversations with Professors

CwP is 75-minute program the day before classes begin, designed to promote a conversation between a faculty member and a group of students in his or her college about how to get off to a successful start during the first week of classes. It is an opportunity for faculty members to help new students understand their roles as student learners and to express faculty expectations for student engagement.

Goals

• Provide an academic welcome for students brand-new to the college classroom.
• Prepare students for the first week of classes.
• Discuss and model positive faculty student relationships.
• Demonstrate that faculty care about student success, provided that students care about their own success too!
• Answer student questions.

CwP Student Learning Outcomes

• Students will discuss appropriate classroom behaviors and ways of interacting with college faculty.
• Students will explain the difference between fixed and growth mindsets, and how a growth mindset leads to success in college.
• Students will describe the importance of the college syllabus to their academic success and how to use the information contained in the syllabus.
• Students will create a final schedule before the last day of drop/add, and preferably before classes begin.

Conversations with Professors takes place on Sunday before classes begin, from 3:30 until 4:45 p.m. Students are enrolled in a section by their academic college during their summer SOAR session. Faculty who volunteer to assist are assigned to a section composed of students in his or her college. Sections cap at about 30.

Faculty in each Conversation will have a student “Conversations Assistant” (CA). CAs are integral parts of the Conversations experience for several reasons. They will handle the administrative tasks of taking roll, for instance. But more substantively, their presence in the Conversation is meant to model the types of productive relationships faculty and students should develop. Accordingly, faculty members are encouraged to identify a student with whom they have a good relationship and ask if he or she would be willing to assist in the program. However, if you are having difficulty identifying a student who is available to assist or would rather not identify one yourself, the FYE office will be happy to assign one to you.

• Students
  • Assessment administered at conclusion of Fall 2011 CwP
  • Email survey following 2010 CwP
• Faculty
  • 2012
  • 2011
• Student Conversations Assistants
  • 2012
  • 2011

Narrative comments in both the faculty and student assessments are not included because of identifying remarks.