Reslience 101

By Gayle Golden

As we enter midterm time, stresses begin bearing down on students and instructors alike. 

Maybe you've noticed within the past couple of weeks that your students are buckling under a bit. Some may be struggling with mental health issues. Others come into office hours to express anxiety about your course. It may be time to ask yourself if you're doing all you can to address their underlying stress.

Sure that means thinking about whether you are being reasonable about expectations. We can always do more to be sensitive to undue stress. But are you also thinking about ways to help students build resilience?

If not, maybe you should. Colleges across the country have crafted entire projects to help students achieve a key skill they often lack most: the ability to "fail" without falling apart.

Resilience movement  

In 2014, 10 Ivy League universities formed the Resilience Consortium to collaborate on research, education and counseling around understanding and promoting student resilience.

Stanford University has its own Resilience Project that combines personal storytelling, events and academic coaching to remind students that setbacks are a part of academic life. Other colleges are trying to help students who traditionally struggle, such as first-generation students or those from under-represented groups, by tackling the way they view the idea of failure.

As it turns out, HSJMC faculty are right on track with this trend. Just ask a few of our faculty and you'll find "resiliency training" woven into a range of our courses. Here is some of what they have to say:

Focus less on the mistake, more on the lesson
"Everybody makes mistakes," Hubbard Senior Fellow Scott Libin routinely tells his broadcast news students. "That's why everybody needs an editor. The key is learning from mistakes so you don't make the same ones over and over again."

Libin asks student to focus less on the mistakes and more on the response to the mistake: "Will you let it frustrate and fluster you? If so, one error will cause a cascade of others. Or will you recognize what failure has to teach you, of which resilience is the most valuable lesson."

Libin reinforces this by talking about his own mistakes and encouraging guest speakers to share theirs as well. He also encourages students to take the job seriously, yes, but not so much themselves. "The ability to laugh is a survival skill," he says.

Remember the Beatles
Chris Ison, associate professor, also doesn't hesitate to get personal about failure in his professional news reporting classes.  "It's easy to talk about because I've failed so often, and I think if there's one time to talk about yourself in a class, it's if you're talking about your failures. They assume you overcame them, so they can too," he says.

While it may be hard to believe, Ison says his first news stories "really were terrible" and that he was even intimidated while speaking to sources. But, he says, he overcame those fears. He also brings the discussion up the present, saying that his writing can still sometimes be wordy and plodding until he edits himself.

His first rule for his class, he says, is "Remember the Beatles," a reference to the rule of 10,000 hours that Malcolm Gladwell discusses in his book "Outliers." In other words, one has to practice, practice, practice to get good at something.

"The Beatles weren't great until they played eight-hour sets, seven days a week, month after month in Hamburg strip clubs," Ison says. "So students shouldn't worry if they aren't great or make mistakes. Who doesn't? It's temporary, natural, and overcome with practice, which is totally within their control."

And what's Ison's biggest disclosure about himself? He tells students he got a C in the very course he teaches: Jour 3121. Bold stuff to admit, but he contends the candor is helpful to students. "I think they can relate and see hope," he says.

You can't always get what you want

War stories can make good motivators for students learning to cope with failure. Teaching assistant Len Mitsch likes to how his advertising portfolio students a 1975 letter from the Minneapolis Star rejecting him for a cartoonist job. It was blow that freed him from a job chained to a drawing board for decades, he tells them -- a gift, in other words.

Instead, he says, his career in advertising led him to adventures standing atop oil derricks, supervising ad shoots from a helicopter hovering over shark-infested waters and collaborating with Steven Spielberg's cinematographer. 

Mitsch's real kicker, though, is what he tells them about the boxer Floyd Patterson, who apparently had the dubious honor of being knocked down the most times in the ring than anyone in history. As Mitsch tells: "Yes," Patterson once said, "but I also got up more times than anyone in history."

Grit translates into insight
Aside from offering motivational speeches on resilience, instructors can help students learn to grapple with failure by structuring those lessons into their grading system.

In Jour 3004, Susan LoRusso, assistant professor, teaches the concept of "grit," which she calls the "combination of passion and perseverance," early in the semester. The lesson opens up a conversation about failure and growth, she says.


"I use examples of failure from my own life and reflect on how I found opportunity for growth in those moments," she says. "I then have students write down characteristics that they would like to improve upon and ask them not to view these characteristics as fixed but instead commit to measurable goals to grow in these areas." She returns to these themes several times during the semester.

She also designs her course to allow for failure. "No one assignment, project or exam will drastically impact a student's grade," she says. That doesn't mean students don't get upset when they fail a quiz or get a C on a project, but it allows her to discuss the grade in a perspective separate from the students "self-worth."

"I ask students to reflect on what they could have done to be more successful," LoRusso says. "Usually students say they could have spent more time on the assignment or asked more questions. We then work on a plan to do just that in the future. This approach seems to encourage some embrace of failure, and definitely resilience. I almost always see growth in future work."

Are you proud of your work?
Stacey Kanihan, associate professor of strategic communication, doesn't mince words with her students.  "I tell them, 'You didn't come into this class expected to know everything, so let's make it worthwhile.'" 

Making it worthwhile means getting feedback on assignments that is meaningful enough to drive improvement on the next. Kanihan also makes sure that the assignments early in the semester count less than the later ones, which rewards an improvement trajectory. Students will respond to courses that acknowledge a built-in "failure-is-OK" point system. 

The other step is to help students see the improvement they make as they are making it or, certainly, when they have made it. Kanihan will outright ask them if they're proud of what they've done. "The resilience comes from seeing their improvement," she says. "They're proud of their work."

Don't wait until the end of the term
You also don't have to wait until the end of the course to get them to see this process. Sometimes it's pretty fun to point it out to them in the middle of all the stress.

In my own Jour 3101 News Reporting and Writing class, I give students a diagnostic lab the first day that reliably shows me one thing about those newbies: Virtually none knows how to write a news story. Their "stories," so to speak, about a police crime alert are just transcriptions of it, complete with police jargon and no concept of news structure.

But after a month of weekly labs on deadline, and detailed feedback on their many mistakes -- feedback that arguably stresses many of them -- I assign them a breaking news in which they must write three updates of a story over 90 minutes. It's fast-paced and demanding. When they file the last story, I always ask each student to think back to that first lab. They're always struck by the growth.

"See?" I tell them." You've come a long way. Take some time to celebrate. You didn't know how to do that then. All that work. All those mistakes. Now look at you."

If you have a question or a comment for ProActive Teaching, please post one below or email me at ggolden@umn.edu. I'll be back at you soon.

Absences sometimes make instructors ponder

By Gayle Golden

By this time in the semester, rosters have stabilized. You're learning student names. Assignments are building one skill to the next.

If only every student would show up to every class according to plan.

But that's just not how life, or college, goes. Students miss classes. Instructors have to figure out a way to deal with that. Every year, the policy surrounding a student's ability to complete make up work for such absences receives the most queries of any university policy involving teaching and learning.

That makes sense. Students who have to miss class for legitimate reasons, such as illnesses or funerals, worry about the impact on their grade if an instructor won't allow them to make up what they miss. Instructors, meanwhile, sometimes feel confused about how to keep students accountable yet stay sensitive -- all without adding boatloads of extra work to keep track of who has missed what when.

To spread some light, and less heat, I asked a few HSJMC faculty how they handle absences in their classes. The good news is that we all have a few choices, so you can pick whatever suits your style and your course. The important thing is to let students know you are watching.


Build attendance into the coursework
Missing class in Hubbard Senior Fellow Scott Libin's Jour 1001 comes with a price over time: He assigns in-class exercises nearly every session that end up equaling 20 percent of the semester grade. Students with excused absences have one week to make up those exercises. In his smaller broadcast classes, he simply notes when students arrive late, leave early or miss class entirely without offering an excuse -- all of which cost participation points that account for 10 percent of the semester grade.

"I make my attendance practices explicitly clear on the first day of class, as well as in the syllabus and on Moodle," he says. "I try to make private contact with students whose attendance is on the verge of causing serious damage to their grades or whose absences seem out of character or otherwise worrisome. Beyond that, I put the responsibility on individual students to catch up on what they miss."

Signing in for accountability
Lecturer Mark Jenson assumes the students in his ad strategy and account planning classes are ready to step up into the professional world. So he simply has them sign into class as if they were logging into a meeting.

"My philosophy is that they are now adults and they can take responsibility for showing up to class," Jenson says. "Missing class will hurt their grade if they do not do the required work." If a student's grade suffers, he can pull out the class log sheets and show how missing class may have factored. That's a real-world lesson that can pack more a punch than docked points.

Betsy Neibergall Anderson, assistant professor, has also asked students in her Jour 4243 Digital Content for Brand Communications and Jour 3279w Professional Writing for Strategic Communications classes to sign in, which works for her as long as the instructor monitors the sheet, she says.

"One semester I did have students signing in for each other, so I warn them about that, and now try to look over the signed list to make sure it's accurate before the end of class." She has also experimented with phone apps for attendance.

Notably, Canvas has a tool called Rollcall, which can also work attendance into your grade sheet. (Something to look forward to when you transition!)

Two birds with one stone
Assistant Professor Sid Bedingfield uses 17 in-class exercises distributed through the semester, similar to Libin's strategy, in his large Jour 1001 course to build in attendance. "The system is not perfect. But on average, it does penalize those who miss class frequently," he says. It's important that any grading system using such exercises for attendance allow ample points for the other, more meaningful assignments such as exams and short research papers, he says. For example, the 140 points for the in-class exercises are part of 800 total points for the entire course.

But in smaller classes, Bedingfield has experimented with a technique that brings multitasking to the absence patrol. He asks students to propose an exam question based on the day's reading. "This method provides an attendance check each day," he says, "and the quality of the proposed exam question give me some indication of how closely the student engaged with the reading."

Bedingfield uses those exam-question attendance tallies to deliver consequences to students who fail to show up: those who miss class more than three times without a good excuse lose five points from their final point total in the class, which drops them half a letter grade. Meanwhile, the students who show up are turning into earnest contributors to the learning environment.

"So far, I have been pleased with the quality of the proposed exam questions," he says. "I plan to adapt several of them for use on the actual exams." 
 
Be realistic about student motives
Associate Professor Giovanna Dell'Orto uses two forms of attendance in her Jour 3614 History of Media Communication class: quizzes and a sign-in sheet for attendance when students are giving presentations.


Her best advice to those trying to figure out a way to hold students accountable? Make sure something, anything, matters in the long run for student grades. "I know from experience that students are smart at profit-cost calculations, and most will skip classes if they know there are no consequences whatsoever," she says.



Know what's legitimate
While we're on the subject of attendance, it's a good idea to review the FACTS about the absence policy itself.  Formally called the Makeup Work for Legitimate Absences policy, it lists the kinds of absences for which instructors may not penalize students. In other words, instructors must allow students to make up the missed classwork if a students absence is because of:

• illness, physical or mental, of the student or a student’s dependent;
• medical conditions related to pregnancy;
• participation in intercollegiate athletic events;
• subpoenas;
• jury duty;
• military service;
• bereavement, including travel related to bereavement;
• religious observances;
• participation in formal University system governance, including the University Senate, Student Senate, and Board of Regents meetings, by students selected as representatives to those bodies; and
• activities sponsored by the University if identified by the senior academic officer for the campus or the officer’s designee as the basis for excused absences.

Voting is not an unavoidable or legitimate absence, although instructors are expected to accommodate students who want to participate in party caucuses. And for circumstances not listed above, the instructor has the primary responsibility to decide on a case-by-case basis if the absence is legitimate and to grant a request for makeup work.

In other words, it's your choice.

That's important to remember. Instructors are still in the driver's seat when it comes to how to handle many absences, although it's important to know the policy and be sensitive to students who have legitimate concerns. You can usually spot the difference pretty easily. Students who miss class for reasons not listed as legitimate will have to live with the consequences, and usually understand that.

What's up with the single-episode medical absence?
Instructors have a right to request verification for absences, including the ones listed above, to determine if they are indeed legitimate. For example, you have the right to request documentation for to prove that the week-long trip to Miami was indeed for a grandmother's funeral. As difficult as that request may be, most students can easily provide an obituary or some other evidence that the absence was based on a real event.

But one circumstance, students do not need to provide documentation. Last year, the university added a provision to the policy allowing students to request makeup work for a "single-episode medical absence" without providing any documentation. This threw many instructors into a panic: An absence with no verification? Yikes!

The policy change arose because students were flooding Boynton Health clinic for flu or cold symptoms that were often best treated at home. Fear not, though. The policy doesn't leave instructors helplessly watching as scores of students claim seemingly endless single-episode medical absences without notes while demanding makeup work week after week. (What a nightmare!)

If you actually read the policy, you'll see that the instructor does have the right to ask for verification if the student has more than one single-episode medical absence OR if that single-episode medical absence involves missing a lab session, an exam or an important graded assignment. So really, the effect is quite limited. Instructors are still in charge.

And in ALL cases, remember the student needs to inform the instructor of the reason for any absence as soon as possible and to make arrangements to catch up with missed work as soon as the student is able.

Too many absences?
It's possible that a student misses so much coursework that passing the course is, well, not possible.

The policy states that sad reality and backs an instructor's right to determine when that is the case. The best strategy is to let the students know how absences are impacting their status in the course as soon as its becoming an issue. Again, the instructor is in charge. As long as the instructor has communicated clearly with the student every step of the way, it's the student's responsibility to follow through and accept the consequences.

We'd all like students to show up and never face a glitch. But sometimes life doesn't work that way. What we can do is communicate clearly, set the consequences and then show up with compassion and a clear explanation about the cost of missing out.

If you have a question or a comment for ProActive Teaching, please post one below or email me at ggolden@umn.edu. I'll be back at you soon.