by Anika Lautenbach

Motivation has been a common topic of conversation the last year and a half, and understandably so. Many students felt less motivated learning remotely and that their motivation would return once they were back in-person. However, it may not be that simple. A student may feel motivated to complete course work but may find it difficult to study for exams; they may find it easy to motivate themselves to connect with peers but find it challenging to connect with instructors. Given motivation is complex and contextual, I wanted to provide an overview of how we in the Academic Success Center (ASC) talk about motivation with students and share tools you can use to support students.

Encourage Self-Awareness

I hear many students talk about motivation as something that is out of their control. They see it as something they have to wait for, or they see it as a fixed trait; they are either someone who is easily motivated, or they’re not. When talking with students, I encourage them to see motivation as a skill that can be better understood and improved. Understanding themselves and how they respond to the task they need to complete can help them tap into strategies for getting work done. As with many of the skills we chat about at the ASC, developing successful motivation techniques take time and practice.

Everyone is different and what works for one person may not work for another. Given motivation can shift depending on the context and task, it may help to start a conversation with the following questions when helping students develop self-awareness around their motivation:

• What about this task feels challenging? Does it feel too large? Do they need resources? Are they uninterested in the subject? Knowing what feels challenging can help you ask better follow-up questions.
• When you’ve felt unmotivated in the past, what has helped you start working on things? Tapping into previous strategies can help students realize they are capable of getting work done.
• How could you reward yourself for finishing this task? Sometimes having something to look forward to can provide incentive.

You can also support them by introducing ASC worksheets. After your initial conversation, you could introduce Motivation Techniques and ask them what they think could work for them, depending on the situation.

To help with developing self-awareness, you could share the 6 Reasons People Procrastinate. This could be especially helpful for students who aren’t sure why they aren’t feeling motivated and want to read more about the research behind procrastination.

Help Students Identify What They Can Control

One important note is that motivation often depends on our environment. We each face countless distractions in our work spaces – our phones, friends or family, that Netflix show we would rather be binging. One strategy for motivation can be setting up an environment that feels more productive. As you’re working with students, consider asking them some of the following questions:

• Where do you do your best work?
• Is there anything you can do to make your environment more productive?
• How long can you typically focus before you need to take a break?

Besides adjusting their environment, students can also control the way they break down tasks and how they use their time. Students may have a hard time starting a task if it feels overwhelming or if they don’t have much time. One strategy we discuss with students is the “ten-minute rule.” We recommend students tell themselves, “I’m just going to work on this for ten minutes.” Once a task is started, people often keep going – motivation builds as we work on things, rather than striking like lightning. If they only have ten minutes, they’ve still gotten something done which could motivate them to keep chipping away at the task later.

Let Them Know They’re Not Alone

As I mentioned before, we talk to students about motivation a lot. They may feel like everyone else is able to get stuff done while they struggle, but they are definitely not alone in the challenge of motivation.

As you support students, consider sharing your own stories and techniques, while also noting that the strategies that work for you may be different from what works for them, and this is ok. Being able to normalize different approaches and validate their ability to seek support is so important.

In addition, sometimes talking to fellow students about motivation can be a helpful step. Students can drop by the Academic Success Center in Waldo 125 M-F 9 AM to 5 PM to talk with an ASC Strategists. Strategists are also available via live chat on our website and via email, phone, or text message.

I know how challenging it can be to talk about motivation, and I hope these tools and strategies are helpful as you support students.

by Anika Lautenbach and Sarah Norek

This year students have been asked to adapt to myriad changes and uncertainty. Throughout these transitions, students have experienced collective grief and trauma, while also balancing the needs of family, work, school, and other commitments. We know none of this is easy, and we want to share some key ideas about grief and trauma and how they show up in learning contexts.

Grief & Trauma

This summer, Chris and Anika attended a Trauma-Informed Care workshop presented by the Oregon Family Support Network. This workshop emphasized how trauma impacts the brain in many ways—affecting problem-solving, reasoning and learning, and perception of time and the world around us. Trauma can also cause disassociation—feeling separate from self and surroundings—and can trigger fight, flight, and freeze reactions. These are extremely challenging states to learn in, and these are states that our students (and our colleagues and ourselves) are experiencing regularly (Canaga, 2020).

Additionally, Sarah and Clare, partnered with CAPS to design a webinar and Canvas module Learning During Times of Stress. The webinar and module content help students identify and understand feelings of loss, anxiety, fatigue and overwhelm, and provide them with strategies to navigate the experience while taking care of themselves. We learned a lot from our colleagues Emi Brown and Bonnie Hemrick about the symptoms of grief and how these symptoms manifest in our daily lives.

When we experience grief and overwhelm and fatigue, it isn’t uncommon to see changes in our sleeping and eating patterns or to have difficulty with focus or memory. In addition, we may either feel like disengaging or wanting to be even closer to those with whom we find comfort. You may also have heard of anticipatory grief—thinking ahead to loss—in response to something that hadn’t happened yet. Not surprisingly, all of these feelings and experiences can impact a student’s ability to focus and learn.

In a 2020 Healthy Minds Study, 30.5% of students reported that their mental health conditions negatively impacted their academic performance. 31.1% of students reported that anxiety impaired their academics. You can read more about the impact of COVID-19 on college student well-being here.

Even though only 31% of students actively identify the impact of anxiety on academics, many more students may report symptoms associated with anxiety. How students describe their experiences may vary, and students may be experiencing the impact of trauma, grief, or anxiety, even if they use different language when describing their experiences.

Student Experiences

During spring term, students often shared their feelings of frustration, sadness, worry, and fatigue. Students offered that they were feeling overwhelmed by coursework, that things which had previously been easy were now difficult, and that it was difficult to focus and stay motivated. At the same time, they were worried for loved ones, experiencing job losses, and navigating new responsibilities within living spaces. All of these experiences are likely amplified by pandemic’s disparate impacts on marginalized communities, as well as the continued racial injustice and violence.

From the Spring Student Experience Survey and from the Fall Survey conducted in September, we know students continue to experience concerns about mental and physical health and the well-being of their family and friends. In addition, students have expressed concerns about academics, finances, and responsibilities like work and caregiving. If you’d like to learn more about the survey findings, please consider registering for the FYI Friday Session, or contact Clare Creighton for access to the report.

We’ve learned a lot from workshops, collaborations, and  students. While students may find remote and online learning a little more familiar this term, we know that they’re still adapting and facing trauma, grief, and overwhelm that make learning difficult. We’d encourage everyone to keep this in mind while also being active in reaching out to students, checking how they’re doing, and engaging in supportive conversations.

Canaga, S. (2020). OSU Trauma Informed Care [Webinar]. Oregon Family Support Network. https://www.ofsn.org/

The Impact of COVID-19 on College Students’ Well-Being (2020). Healthy Minds Network and American College Health Association. https://healthymindsnetwork.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Healthy_Minds_NCHA_COVID_Survey_Report_FINAL.pdf

by Nicole Hindes

Let’s make a pie.

With that simple sentence, I’ve invited you into a collaboration, but I haven’t actually asked if you want to make a pie with me. Do you also want to make a pie? How will we proceed? What norms and patterns will guide us – and what can intentionality help provide for us? At Indiana University, where I completed my Higher Education and Student Affairs master’s program, we often spoke about how important it is to be intentional in our practice, both in completing the work, and in how we showed up relationally with our students and colleagues. We used intentionality to further goals of student development and dignify relationship norms. “Be intentional” was a repeated refrain inside of my graduate experience. Intentionality is a powerful ingredient we can bring to our pie making effort and how we approach our work together.

So, we’ve chosen to make a pie, together. Both of us are in the place of wanting pie and wanting each other to be involved in the effort.

Is the pie the only thing we care about? How do we want our experience of pie making to be? How will our relationship be impacted by this experience of pie making?

One of the things that helps me find my way to intentionality in my practice at OSU is to look at an experience through a metaphor. We can use our experience of pie-making to deepen understanding about who we are in collaborations with others and build understanding about choices between us in how we will make this pie that illuminates patterns of collaboration and choices that aren’t limited to pie-making. We can also look at roles common inside of academia to consider how these roles, in archetypical form, constrain our access to choices.

If a Professor archetype is collaborating on a pie, we might see the busy professor ask that the pie crust be made ahead of time, expecting (or assuming) a level of base knowledge before deciding what will go in the crust. The professor might use communication norms that assert expertise and authority about the quality of the pie ingredients or the best way to make a pie. The professor may not see that their assertive claims make it too risky for the other to suggest an unusual, but also delicious, gluten-free crust.

Similarly, if a Campus Leader archetype is collaborating on a pie, we might come to the meeting about pie making and see that person set the timeline and predetermine the output expectations (‘traditional cherry’ or ‘key lime’). That person might not see how their suggested ideas or preferences could be heard as expectations that are limiting opportunities to consider the seasonality of fruit, the recipes preferred by the bakers, or understanding that there is a backlog of cakes that have been ordered.

If a New Student archetype is collaborating on a pie, they may be relating from a place of insecurity, unsure that pie in Corvallis is the same as pie in their hometown. They may not know how to bring up the shepherd’s pie they loved eating at their grandfather’s house. They may not know that the blackberry bushes in their backyard can be a valuable contribution to our pie-making goals.

Because archetypes and metaphors are so powerful to the human experience and how we make meaning of the world, we often find ourselves playing out scripts or norms of what dominant culture prescribes as normal. We can do this knowingly to find belonging – or unconsciously because we’re busy and operating as if on autopilot. Because we do our work inside of academia, there are some ways that norms and patterns might prescribe for us how to approach our pie making. These may or may not serve our goals. If we’re not intentional, we might find ourselves communicating or planning in a way that limits the possible pies we could cook up together.

So, remember that I want to make a pie with you? I have some ingredients, some experience and some challenging limitations getting a flaky crust. What ingredients do you have? What experience do you bring? Do you want to work together? What will our conversations be as we make this pie? After we make and consume the pie, how will our relationship have changed? What will that mean for future fruit harvests? Did my choices in relating with you create the context for you to trust me enough to tell me about your grandpa’s shepherd’s pie?

I’ll never forget asking a peer “how do you like to approach collaborations?” and seeing reflected back to me, in her response, how rarely she was asked that question. When I practice intentional collaboration with a group, I might use agendas and meeting design to create the context for collaboration that works for me, the team and our goals. If there’s anyone new to OSU or meeting each other for the first time in the collaboration, I might spend a meaningful chunk of the first meeting (30 minutes!) to build relationships and trust with the group. I like to choose conversation topics and questions that encourage everyone to share about prior roles, strengths and skills that may not be evident based on title or positionality. I’m practicing how to create a brainstorming or idea-generating process that ensures everyone—especially those with less social or positional power—have opportunities to contribute to the vision and approach of the project. Along the way, I try to promote conversation that builds understanding about everyone as whole people with lives outside of roles at OSU.

The pies we make will get eaten and enjoyed. The connections we make when we bake together will be the nourishment that resources us both for years to come. Do you want to make a pie with me?

As we head into the last few weeks of the term, we wanted to share what some of our colleagues from around campus are reading. Perhaps one of these will spark your interest or get added to your To Be Read list over winter break.

We asked colleagues, “What have you read that has informed your work or resonated for you, and why? This can be reading in any form (e.g., books, articles, videos, podcasts, audiobooks, etc.).”

Dan Larson, Vice Provost for Student Affairs

The Sum of Us:  What Racism Costs Everyone and How we can Prosper Together, by Heather McGhee.

While I am not yet finished with the book, I am finding the information and analysis to be helpful in understanding systems and how they perpetuate social and racial disparity.

How College Works by Daniel F. Chambliss and Christopher G. Takacs. This book provides an analysis of what about the college experience produces student success.  It’s a Student Affairs anthem!

Scott Vignos, Interim Vice President and Chief Diversity Office, Office of Institutional Diversity

I am a huge fan of the podcast “Throughline” from National Public Radio. Hosted by Ramtin Arablouei and Rund Abdelfatah, Throughline dives deep to illuminate connections between historical events and contemporary issues. I particularly love the episodes on voting rights in the United States, and James Baldwin’s enduring influence.

Sarah Tinker Perrault, WIC Director & Associate Professor, WIC & School of Writing Literature, & Film

For my research, I’ve been reading about bibliometrics, that is, statistical methods of measuring scholarly output and impact. Two articles offer a good introduction to how bibliometrics affect scholars’ working conditions and work: “The Leiden Manifesto for Research Metrics” and the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment. These and other articles are informing the book I’m writing on rhetorical approaches to teaching science writing. To teach rhetorically, we need to convey the complex contextual factors that affect writers’ decisions; therefore, the book will help writing studies and science faculty understand how factors like bibliometrics shape scientific genre ecologies.

Daniel López-Cevallos, Assistant Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education & Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies, Academic Affairs

This fall, my undergraduate research team (URSA, STEM Leaders) and I are reading the book “Relationship-Rich Education: How Human Connections Drive Success in College” by Peter Felten and Leo Lambert of Elon University. The book argues for the importance of centering human connections/relationships towards a transformative undergraduate educational experience; and propose four principles for advancing relationship-based learning: 1) Every student must experience genuine welcome and deep care; 2) Every student must be inspired to learn; 3) Every student must develop a web of significant relationships; and 4) Every student must explore questions of meaning and purpose.

Fall term has been a lot for students to navigate. While the return to in-person learning for some students has been exciting and joyful, it’s also come with stress, overwhelm, and burnout as the term gets busier, and motivation become challenging. The last few weeks of the term are often a whirlwind of holidays; assignments; work; and moving between different spaces for travel, studying, and finals.

Instructors have likely already planned out class time for the next few weeks, and supervisors and team leads may not have a lot of space left in staff meetings either. However, these three strategies take relatively little time, and can have a big impact on students’ experience of the final weeks of the term.

Help Students Plan Post-Holiday Academics

OSU’s fall term is unique with a holiday before Week 10. The final weeks of the term go by fast, and the Week 9 break can sometimes make students feel they have more time than they do, or that they may be able to accomplish more after the break than is feasible. If students don’t look ahead, they may find themselves surprised when facing Week 10 and Finals.

If you’re an instructor, it can help to take a few minutes in class during Week 8 or 9 to look ahead with students. If you have an assignment due early Week 10, you could post a few prompts during class or on Canvas to help students consider

• How long will this assignment take?
• What day(s) do they hope to complete it on?
• If these days are over the holiday/weekend…
  • What time do they want to hold for themselves?
  • What times are best for work that will make Week 10 manageable?

For those supporting students in non-class contexts, these questions work well too! Giving students space to plan intentionally can make Week 10 easier to navigate.

Prompt Backward Planning

Particularly when things get busy or feel overwhelming, students often benefit from being prompted to plan around finals.

For instructors, highlighting final due dates in class—whether that’s a final exam, project, or paper—and giving students 10 minutes to plan backwards from that date can be a big help. A calendar and a few prompts can be useful for planning:

• What are smaller steps to accomplishing the larger task?
  • E.g., if writing a paper, when will you draft? When will you get feedback, and from whom? When will you revise?
• If studying in advance of a final, how might you distribute your practice over time?
• What support and resources do you have? When will you reach out to them?

In non-class contexts supervising student staff or advising, giving students space to do that same kind of planning can also be helpful. Beyond finals-related questions, you might also prompt students to consider

• How do work hours intersect with studying or finals? Would any adjustments to schedule be needed or helpful?
• What other routine or non-routine events are important to include on your calendar these next three weeks?

The Academic Success Center’s Final Survival Guide has a variety of tools and strategies for planning the end of the term and maintaining well-being. It also includes a small and large calendar you could share with students.

Encourage Self-Care

As the term gets hectic, reminding students of the importance of self-care helps students attend to their well-being in addition to the variety of commitments they’re balancing within and outside of academics.  Here are a few ways you can encourage self-care:

• Share the DAM Good Self-Care Packet, and create space for students to identify strategies or fill out page 4’s Plan for Self-Care. A few minutes in class, in a staff meeting, or during a conversation can remind students how important their well-being is.
• Encourage breaks. Nearing finals, students often have longer study sessions and may benefit from considering
  • How long can you maintain focus before losing attention or energy?
  • How long will your breaks be? And with what frequency?
  • What will you do during breaks?
  • How will you get back on track after a longer break?
• Make space for students to share self-care strategies. Sometimes hearing from other students and from you about approaches to self-care and managing stress can give students a range of strategies and normalize self-care as a part of overall well-being and academic success.

I hope some of these ideas are helpful as you think about supporting students at the end of fall term. If you have additional ideas or strategies you use, please share them in the comments!