The First-Year Experience working group’s focus is the Design of a Flexible Self-Discovering First-Year Experience - creating a foundation for self-actualization and establishing cultural norms associated with well-being, innovation, and lifelong learning.
Why enhance the first-year experience?
- Empower students to explore their interests and experiment using a design thinking (or other appropriate) approach
- Cultivate and support a campus culture focused on well-being & innovation
- Develop self-determination and lifelong learning
- Integrate orientation programming and the recently initiated residential curriculum
- Engage instructors of first-year courses in meaningful collaboration that includes interdisciplinary & problem-based team teaching around global themes
- Coordinate a collaborative first-year advising model
Moving Forward
To support development of a comprehensive first-year experience, initial areas to
prototype and test have been
identified and include:
- Engaging all first year faculty in the development of deeper learning communities
(cohorts) around common annual themes and or challenges (such as NAE and UN Grand
Challenges). This will be prototyped fall 2020 with an interdisciplinary team-taught
Eng Fund, Global Issues, Composition, and Calculus course with a cohort of first-year
engineering students - Build an interdisciplinary team of faculty coordinators of first-year courses to identify
ways of reducing educational
noise experienced by the students and develop deeper connected cohort classes - Centralized advising and learning support Developing student coaches to support generalized
advising questions
(ie minors, how to transfer credit, how to register for classes, etc) - Integrating Orientation programming (such as summer reading) to provide earlier outreach and longer engagement into the semester. A first-year college or academy that enables coordination of first-year teaching and advising
- A modified grading system that allows students the freedom to explore and to gain competencies in a safe, yet brave, space
- Support for staff and faculty dedicated to the success of students in their first year
