First Year Innovations 

Traditional first-year and student success wisdom suggests that what students need most to be successful in college is academic skill and a bouquet of essentially non-academic skills like strong time management, emotional intelligence, and effective goal setting. FYE faculty and staff have never disagreed, but also think that publishing houses’  and many university’s overwhelming focus on this purely practical approach to student success is, simply put, incomplete.

Perhaps what sets FYE apart from most other programs is our innovative perspective on student success.  We believe, and our programming and courses are built around, the notion that what drives student success is a strong sense of student meaning; that a clear sense from the student as to why they are pursuing an education and how that pursuit reflects an expression of the Self is the foundation for students success.  And from a meaning centered educational experience, an intrinsic motivation to persist develops that drives a student towards their desired, highly individualized ends.

This programmatic approach is greatly influenced by Self-Determination Theory (SDT), a theory of human motivation developed by psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan.  In a nutshell, SDT assumes that human beings are naturally inclined to develop and seek out positive challenges for growth throughout their life as long as three psychological needs are met: the need for competence, autonomy, and relatedness.  If these three needs are not met, according to SDT, a person’s development can be thwarted. In settings where these needs are met, people develop intrinsic (autonomous) motivation towards their personal goals.

Behind much of our coursework and individual developmental conversations is a commitment to supporting students in exploring the things that make them feel successful (their competencies), in discovering the interpersonal spaces where students feel that they matter to others and others matter to them (relatedness), and to seize control of their life as principle decision makers (autonomy).  This commitment is reflected in FYE’s deceptively simple essential intent: to support educational persistence and facilitate the design of a meaningful life. The energy needed to achieve one’s highest developmental aspirations is rooted in the satisfaction of those needs that mold our authentic selves. What awaits on the other side is the potential for a life of meaning and relevance. And when topics like time management, study skills, emotional intelligence, and goal setting are mapped onto an education of meaning and motivation, they are far more likely to be internalized by the student and seen as means to an end, not more of the sort of the meaningless busy work the present-day student has become so painfully accustomed to enduring.

It is a commonly held assumption that building rapport with faculty, supporting community building, and finding a sense of belonging are critical to a student’s persistence in higher education.  Nearly all student success programs, including FYE, hold these aspirations as central to their mission.

However, in FYE we’ve also asked ourselves a big question about our strong  relationships with students. What’s the untapped potential underneath this strong rapport with our students?  The answer, we believe, is deceptively simple: With focused intent and training, we can extend our trusting relationships to supporting student discovery of an intrinsic, autonomous motivation
that can propel an individual towards personal and academic success. More importantly still, we hope to support students in finding meaning in, and fulfillment from, the developmental discoveries in the first year.

Beginning in the Spring of 2019, FYE faculty and staff will complete an extensive training on Motivational Interviewing (MI) within a student success context.  MI’s origin is in public health, commonly used in settings where clients are seeking healthier lifestyles or addiction treatment. In educational settings, MI is a student-centered method for making positive changes and increasing helpful behaviors.  It is a non-confrontational approach to creating goals that are practical and relevant. The benefits extend to the practitioners of MI as well. MI trained professionals often report gains in their listening and problem solving skills, not to mention improvement in their overall communication.  This training will also include the development of “learning communities” wherein FYE personnel will practice and hone their MI skills as a collaborative unit throughout the year.

This commitment to MI training exemplifies FYE’s unique commitment to working with our students at the elemental level of individualism.  The MI profile of FYE also reflects our belief that learning and development often happen outside of the classroom, with the student in the driver’s seat, and the professional taking the role of facilitator rather than expert.  

Beginning in the Fall of 2019, FYE will be collaborating with two NAU faculty, Dr. Jonathan Lee of the College of Education and Dr. Dawn Clifford of Health Sciences, on a research project assessing the impacts of MI support on students in FYE programming and courses.  We look forward to sharing those results with our colleagues in the student success community.

FYE is a student success laboratory as well as a source of valuable research for the NAU community.  

It is customary that FYE faculty solicit feedback through questionnaires and surveys throughout the course of each semester.  Sometimes these responses lead to change at the classroom level, other times research is gathered on a much broader scale to make deeper programmatic change.  

Beginning in the Spring of 2017, FYE began three full semester of a programmatic Science of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) study into the impact of our course connected Peer Coach program.  Faculty supported the creation and stewardship of research proposals through the Institutional Review Board process, not to mention held regular meetings discussing the data as it trickled in.  Data collected in the Peer Coach SoTL has come to shape the current Peer Coach model and article drafts on the research are circulating through the department.

FYE also enjoys collaborative efforts with partners on our campus.  Beginning in the Spring of 2017, FYE partnered with Dr. Ji Eun Lee of the Department of Educational Psychology on a study of future oriented motivation with FYE students.  Additionally, Dr. Lee’s work has extended to a deeper scholarly relationship with FYE faculty member, Buck Blankenship. Some of their work will be presented at the upcoming 2018 American Psychological Association national conference.

Beginning in the Fall of 2019, FYE will be collaborating with two NAU faculty, Dr. Jonathan Lee of the College of Education and Dr. Dawn Clifford of Health Sciences, on a research project assessing the impacts of MI support on students in FYE programming and courses.  We look forward to sharing those results with our colleagues in the student success community.

In FYE, we see that classroom success begins with supporting the whole student, not just supporting academic skills.  When a first-year student arrives on campus, they are entering an entirely new world of university acronyms, institutional offices, and a vast bureaucracy that can seem as daunting as it is incomprehensible- all the while acting independently for the first time in their life.  In response to this challenging transition, FYE faculty and staff consider it a critical function of their job to support the whole student across the whole university.   

FYE faculty meet with each student regularly throughout the semester to answer questions, act as advocates, and unearth institutional and personal success barriers.  A faculty member is as likely to talk about their class with a student as they are to discuss financial aid disbursement, account holds, health and wellness resources, or roommate agreements.  Students seeking deeper, more robust support can access FYE professional staff to receive consistent coaching for personal development and investigative assistance in navigating complex institutional challenges.  

Most importantly, students have a collaborator in developing as self-advocates for their own needs and potential.  Becoming a strong self-advocate takes mentorship, practice, and time. This developmental process can take many forms. FYE faculty and staff will sometimes sit side-by-side with a student while they speak to Financial Aid on speakerphone.  Faculty and staff may assist a student in drafting a list of pertinent questions before walking into a billing conversation. Faculty and staff may even role play the asking of those questions. Sometimes, students just need someone to sit with them in the waiting room before a counseling appointment.