A Faculty and Staff Toolkit for Co-creating Healthier Academic Environments
A Faculty and Staff Toolkit for Co-creating Healthier Academic Environments
Althea L. Woodruff, The University of Texas at Austin
Christina Berg, Colorado State University
The Well-Being in Academic Environments Toolkit provides strategies and implementation tips for faculty and staff to support student mental health and cultivate well-being in academic environments and/or in their spheres of influence. It addresses how to create a more accessible learning space specifically for those struggling with mental health. It also provides guidance for assisting a student in distress and referral pathways.
Why is such a toolkit needed?
- Dramatic increases in self-reported mental health struggles by college students (Duffy et al., 2019; Flaherty, 2023; Krendl, 2023)
- Strong relationship between academic performance and mental health (Eisenberg et al., 2009; El Ansari & Stock, 2010; Keyes et al., 2012; Lipson et al., 2019; Renshaw et al., 2016)
- Mental health struggles as top reasons for either not enrolling in or dropping out of college (Gallup, 2023a; Gallup, 2023b)
- Increased demand at college counseling centers for low-risk concerns, such as general anxiety and stress, loneliness, and isolation (EAB, 2018)
- Okanagan Charter’s (2015) call to embed well-being into all aspects of campus culture, including classrooms and other learning environments
To make the toolkit as user-friendly as possible, we suggest simple, practical techniques that faculty and staff can incorporate into courses or other academic settings. Examples include:
- Seeing the whole student:
- Remember your students are human, and so are you.
- Talk about mental health openly to destigmatize it.
- Allow students to see your authentic self, including your mistakes and vulnerabilities.
- Share ways that you practice self-care, and have students share how they practice it, as well.
- Social connection and belonging:
- On the first day of class, use a survey to get to know students.
- Learn your students’ names.
- Share personal anecdotes.
- Get out from behind the podium or desk and move among the students.
- Use various forms of cooperative or collaborative learning.
- Mindfulness and stress reduction:
- Engage in short “brain breaks” that allow students to take their minds off the learning content.
- Incorporate mindfulness activities at highly stressful times.
- Teach students how to use effective self-talk and stress-reduction approaches to manage their emotions.
- Gratitude and optimism:
- In class, share student actions that have inspired gratitude.
- Send emails to individual students listing things they’ve done that you appreciate.
- Have students keep a gratitude journal and write in it once a week.
- When going over an exam or assignment, focus on what students did correctly before addressing their mistakes.
- Self-compassion and empathy:
- When you make a mistake or struggle with something, share it with students and talk about strategies you use to be compassionate with yourself.
- Be flexible and take into consideration students’ lives outside of class.
- Give students the benefit of the doubt. Don’t assume they’re lazy or trying to get out of work.
- When students struggle or fail, talk about a time when you had a similar experience.
- Growth mindset:
- Let students see you make mistakes. Then show them how you use those mistakes to learn.
- Discuss and model self-regulation strategies for learning and applying content.
- Focus less on competition and performance and more on learning and growth.
- Build in different ways for students to demonstrate learning and growth.
- Resilience and coping with failure:
- Allow students to correct mistakes and redo assignments to demonstrate continued growth and learning.
- Explicitly teach strategies you use to cope with and overcome failure.
- Teach students how to self-assess accurately by modeling your own self-assessing behavior.
- Physical health and sleep:
- Share resources, such as a campus or local food pantry and movement opportunities.
- Bring a snack bag or tub to class to share healthy snacks with students.
- Set assignment deadlines earlier in the day (e.g., 7pm instead of midnight).
- At the end of class, offer a sleep tip or debunk a sleep myth.
- Effective instruction:
- Review previously learned content before introducing new information.
- Connect course content to the real world.
- Incorporate “think, pair, share” or other quick activities to allow students time to process content.
- Use quick activities and informal assessments to check for understanding (e.g., thumbs-up, thumbs-sideways, or thumbs-down.)
- Supporting students in distress:
- Know and watch for signs of distress.
- When you see these signs, initiate a conversation to check in with the student. Start with what you’ve noticed followed by a question.
- Be prepared to share resources with the student as needed.
Although the focus of the toolkit is academic environments, such as classrooms, many advisors, student leaders, graduate students, and others have used these ideas to build well-being into their own work. For example, academic advisors will discuss the importance of sleep when helping students plan their class schedules, or student leaders will distribute gratitude journals or have members participate in an art activity at their organization meetings to practice gratitude and/or mindfulness.
When compared with students in non-Texas Well-being classes, students in Texas Well-being classes report:
- Faculty as more supportive of their mental health,
- A greater sense of autonomy in the class,
- More comfort with the instructor and in the class,
- Greater faculty empathy, and
- Stronger growth mindset and mastery goal orientation.
For more information visit UT Austin’s Texas Well-being or CSU’s Well-being in Academic Environments program. Each of these websites provides the practical suggestions listed above in addition to many more ideas and resources to support student well-being. For other ideas related to the specific domains, check out these resources: