Dr. Nicole Carr (Sociology) led a wonderful roundtable discussion today on Teaching First-Year College Students. Over a dozen USA faculty participated in the discussion, covering a variety of issues from attendance to strategies for identifying at-risk students to determining where to draw the line between nurturing and nannying.
The best indicator (to me) that things were going well was that the time for the session to end came and went, but the discussion never lost steam. About fifteen minutes later, one person got up to leave and another followed, but the conversation still continued for at least another five minutes.
As the organizer of the event, I kept wondering if I should announce that regrettably our time was up, and that we must now end this wonderful discussion. But instead I decided that this useful and valuable conversation should not be thwarted by something so mundane and artificial as a clock. I also decided that after it did come to an end, that I would use this space to try to continue the conversation.
Teaching first-year students is very important to the success of this (or any) university, and it is an important conversation that needs to involve more than the dozen or so faculty members whose schedules allowed them to attend this particular session.
Therefore I invite anyone who reads this post to reply using the comment button below and then return later and view others’ comments and possibly even respond to them. And who knows, we might even be able to start a larger conversation that will help us all improve our success with first-year students.
Posted by Rob on November 19, 2007
Tags: Uncategorized
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