Engaging Faculty in Supporting Student Well-Being

Engaging Faculty in Supporting Student Well-Being
-Jennifer Jacobsen

Faculty members are critical partners in creating an environment that supports student well-being – their influence on our students cannot be overestimated. They create and sustain the climate in which our students learn and this climate plays a profound role in how our students experience their lives at our institutions of higher education.

While many faculty members are on board with considering student well-being, for those who haven’t thought much about it or why it might be part of their work, it’s important to make the case clear on the relationship between students’ well-being, particularly mental health and substance use, and their academic engagement. You’d be hard pressed to find a faculty member who doesn’t value students’ academic engagement. This can be done through sharing peer-reviewed research, or, closer to home, sharing relationships within your own student health data, whether through surveys or qualitative strategies.

For example, in the American College Health Association’s National College Health Assessment, undergraduates in the national sample regularly report anxiety, depression, stress, and sleep difficulties as negatively affecting their academic performance. Not only are these well-being issues in and of themselves, but also further analysis reveals that students’ self-reported alcohol and cannabis use is statistically significantly correlated with reporting these issues as interfering with academics.

Since the height of the COVID pandemic, many faculty feel they are asked to be increasingly responsible for students’ mental health with little guidance on what that means. Additionally, we want to avoid asking faculty to support students’ well-being at the expense of their own. So, in terms of collaborating with faculty members to encourage them in their support of students’ well-being, be sure to keep it lower-effort and in their wheelhouse.

A starting place could be as simple as syllabus deadlines that are at 5:00 p.m. instead of midnight (or, worse yet, assignments due at class time at 8:00 a.m.!) Or having office hours in an approachable and accessible space such as the student union or coffeeshop. Incorporating the basics of universal design in learning can benefit all students, not just those registered with the disability services office. Students have even shared that having a mental health statement and list of related resources on their syllabus shows that their professors care about them. Additional information can be found online.

As prevention practitioners, we can find ways to partner with faculty that benefit everyone. Maybe your statistics and data science faculty are looking for local datasets that interest their students, and what’s more interesting to students than campus health surveys that include themselves and their peers? Students often approach those datasets with fresh eyes and explore relationships that we may never have thought about. It’s possible your psychology department teaches health psychology or pharmapsychology, both of which provide interesting opportunities for shared projects or speakers. Marketing and communications courses are often looking for projects that can positively affect the campus community. It likely goes without saying that pre-health professions students are often also keenly interested in learning more from practitioners.

Considering faculty members’ regular contact with students and positions of authority, it’s also critical your faculty know your campus data so they can be partners in promoting accurate norms, questioning misperceived norms, and setting pro-social expectancies. No matter how much you do at orientation, all it takes is for one trusted faculty member to note, “I know it’s homecoming and all of you are going to be drinking this weekend, so I am assigning a lighter amount of reading” to undo your good work. In addition to traditional presentations, there are fun ways to offer bites and snacks of your campus norms (e.g., wheel of norms, pub quiz) with a little extra education in the debrief that can increase the likelihood that your faculty colleagues can be effective partners in challenging the assumptions of what makes a “typical” college experience.

The work of supporting student well-being is critical to student success and prevention practitioners do not have to do this work alone. Thoughtfully engaging faculty members creates opportunities that benefit everyone, especially our students. A little strategy and a little creativity can go a long way in forming lasting and effective partnerships with faculty.

Jennifer Jacobsen, MA, MPH is the Executive Director of Health & Wellness at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, with more than 25 years of experience in higher education. She serves on the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism’s College Workgroup and has served on multiple alcohol and other drug-related committees for both NASPA—Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education and the National Collegiate Athletic Association. Jen strives to bring a public health lens to college health and prevention work and is currently pursuing a DrPH with a concentration in implementation science at Johns Hopkins University.