Recap: Welcome week workshops

Earlier this week, the CETL team offered a variety of workshops to help instructors prepare for the semester ahead. Below, we offer a few key takeaways from these workshops. 

As always, we invite you to review our schedule of upcoming workshops, peruse our blog for recaps on previous events, and take a look at the ways the CETL team can support your work in teaching at UM. 

Who Are Our Students? 

We offer our session “Who Are Our Students?” at the beginning of the academic year to give instructors a snapshot of the demographics of the UM student body. To do so, we draw from data shared by Institutional Research in their Enrollment Trends dashboard (available to authenticated UM users here). 

Those data from Spring 2025 provide a high-level overview of key patterns in enrollment, including the following characteristics of the UM student body (both undergraduate and graduate/professional students):

• 57.1% female
• 56.2% non-resident (not from Mississippi)
• 96.3% domestic (from the United States)
• 91.6% full-time
• 61.6% are not first-generation college students (though a significant number of students did not report their parents’ college-going history)
• 77.8% are non-STEM majors
• 75.5% are white, 9.5% are Black, 5.6% are Hispanic/Latino, 2.8% identified two or more racial identities, 0.3% are American Indian, 0.1% are Native Hawaiian, and 0.9% are of unknown racial identity. 3.4% identified as US non-residents.

Other key data on students we shared include the prevalence of Greek life participation (48% of UM students participate in a fraternity/sorority) and data from the most recent Healthy Minds survey of UM students. Those data suggest:

• 37% of UM students experience generalized anxiety.
• 39% experience depression; of those 39%, 20% said that these problems made it very or extremely difficult to “do your work, take care of things at home, or get along with other people.”
• Roughly half of students screened showed indications of depression or an anxiety disorder. 
• 12% have engaged in suicidal ideation. 

Nationally, more than 60% of students meet the criteria for one or more mental health issues.

Finally, we shared data on disability prevalence among undergraduates, drawn from the Postsecondary National Policy Institute’s Students with Disabilities in Higher Education 

National Center for Education Statistics. Those tell us that about 21% of undergraduates reported having a disability in the 2019-2020 academic year. 

A typical classroom

Given demographic, mental health, and disability data, in a typical UM classroom of 20 students, instructors could expect roughly:

• At least 2 first-generation students
• 4 students from a historically marginalized racial group
• 3 students who identify as LGBTQ+ (publicly or privately) 
• 4 students with a disability (apparent or non-apparent; formally diagnosed, self-diagnosed, or undiagnosed)
• 4 students who receive federal Pell Grants (need-based financial aid)
• 6 students who will experience basic needs insecurity during their college career
• 12 students who meet the criteria for one or more mental health problems
• 9 students who will not graduate within four years and 6 who will not graduate within six 
• 20 students whose classroom experiences were disrupted by the pandemic

Findings & Applications from the National Academies 2025 Report on STEM Education

On Wednesday, CETL Senior Director Josh Eyler facilitated a conversation about the key findings and recommendations from the 2025 National Academies report, “Transforming Undergraduate STEM Education: Supporting Equitable and Effective Teaching.” The report, the result of a years-long initiative, collects a number of evidence-based steps to enhance student learning. 

The report lays out key definitions of its terms, including (p. 22): 

• Equitable: An education that “provides all students with the support they need to succeed, as measured by achievement of clearly communicated learning objectives. In an equitable learning environment, factors such as race, gender, disability status, and socio-economic status do not impact the rate at which students meet the learning objectives. In addition, an equitable system rewards instructors for effective teaching and provides them with the resources they need to successfully educate all of their students.”
• Effective: “All students demonstrate learning and most, if not all, students have the opportunities and the resources to meet desired learning objectives.”
• Inclusive: “The opportunity to participate in learning experiences that feel welcoming and cultivate a sense of belonging, and to avoid exclusive or exclusionary environments that limit engagement. These limitations may arise from practical barriers or from expectations that are not student centered.”

National Academies Principles for Equitable and Effective Teaching

The report then articulates seven key pedagogical principles to ensure equitable and effective learning experiences (p. 25; discussed in Chapter 4 in detail). They are:

1. Students need opportunities to actively engage in disciplinary learning.
2. Students’ diverse interests, goals, knowledge and experiences can be leveraged to enhance learning.
3. STEM learning involves affective and social dimensions.
4. Identity and sense of belonging shape STEM teaching and learning.
5. Multiple forms of data can provide evidence to inform improvement.
6. Flexibility and responsiveness to situational and contextual factors support student learning.
7. Intentionality and transparency create more equitable opportunities.

National Academies Recommendations

To achieve the vision in the report, the committee offered 15 recommendations, clustered into three areas: Improving Instruction and Courses; Valuing and Supporting Instructors; and Measuring and Advancing System Change. These are discussed in detail in Chapter 10. 

Additional Resources

We also shared two additional resources to registered attendees:

• The Association of American University’s Framework for Systemic Change in Undergraduate STEM Teaching & Learning
• The Equity-Based Teaching Collective’s report, Equity-Based Teaching in Higher Ed: The Levers That Institutions Can Use for Scaling Improvement

Panel: Ideas for Introducing Your Syllabus

Syllabus day? No thanks! For all our concerns about student engagement and motivation, we know that student motivation is typically at its peak in the first week of the semester. In our Wednesday faculty panel about how to introduce the syllabus, we encouraged instructors to take advantage of that motivation by creating a first day (and week) of class that goes beyond a didactic tour through the syllabus, promoting relatively little student engagement.

In our panel discussion, three UM instructors shared their strategies for getting students engaged with the syllabus right from the start of the semester. This guide provides links to articles, advice guides, and other resources you might find useful in thinking about how to craft an engaging syllabus and introduce it to students in ways that build community.

Laura McClellan teaches the BISC 110 course, Human Biology, which combines lecture and lab into a lab science course for non-majors. These courses are taught in the TEAL Labs in the new Duff science building on campus, where students sit at tables of nine and are regularly engaging in small-group, active-learning class activities. To prepare students for the reality that they’ll be working with others regularly, Laura has devised a clever syllabus scavenger hunt that they complete in groups of three. Attendees at the workshop were particularly supportive of having a set of questions that a group could tackle if they finished early, which signals to students that the instructor recognizes student variability. You can see Laura’s scavenger hunt document, including instructor directions, here.

Dr. Kate Kellum in psychology talked about her efforts to get students talking to one another during the first week of the semester, too, but with different goals. For starters, Kate wants students to talk to one another and come up with proposed changes to the syllabus. She wants it to be a living guide to the class, which she describes as helpful for getting buy-in from the class community. After having students get into groups of 2-4 people, she directs them to introduce themselves, explain why they’re taking the class, and then share what excites them most about the semester. Then they read the syllabus as a group and take an in-class survey, with questions about each of the major sections. The questions are always the same:

• What do you really like?
• What suggestions do you have for changes?

By the end of the first week, Kate asks them to submit their suggestions. She then takes those suggestions and annotates/amends the syllabus with them. Importantly, she doesn’t necessarily accept all suggestions; for those she does not accept, she provides a summary during class and explains why she didn’t change it. 

Dr. Kellum also teaches a partially flipped class, where students are responsible for reading or engaging with material outside of class time so that in-class time is spent in discussion. She asks students to read a short piece during the first week to help them see the value of this pedagogical choice. A piece she regularly uses is the Association for Psychological Science’s “Interteaching: Ten Tips for Effective Implementation.” 

We last heard from Dr. Candies Winfun-Cook, who teaches future K12 math educators in the School of Education. As a veteran K12 math educator, Candies is expert at creating clear and scaffolded activities for her students. She shared four different ways she’s used a syllabus scavenger hunt in her classes, including methods that work by:

• Asking students to work in small groups in class to answer open-ended questions
• Having students answer questions that are a mix of multiple choice, true/false, and open-ended, either in groups or alone
• Giving students questions that can be answered individually or in pairs
• Engaging online students in a similar activity that doubles as an attendance verification tool

Dr. Cook kindly shared her activities in this document.

Looking ahead

We hope our welcome week workshops gave our colleagues lots of things to think about as we launch the new academic year. Our CETL team is ready to support your work throughout the semester. Be sure to check out our fall slate of events, review the services we offer, and get in touch.