Episode 113: Thinking Critically in College with Louis Newman, Author of Thinking Critically in College: The Essential Handbook for Students Success
Louis E. Newman is the former Dean of Academic Advising and Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. At Stanford his responsibilities included overseeing an extensive residential advising program, the pre-law and pre-med advising programs, transfer and co-term student advising, new student orientation programs, a summer bridge program, and the university's academic progress review system. At Stanford, he grew the advising program, promoted a holistic approach to academic advising, and advocated for liberal education.
He is also the John M. and Elizabeth W. Musser Professor of Religious Studies, Emeritus, at Carleton College, where he taught for thirty-three years. During his tenure at Carleton, he also served as an Associate Dean of the College, which included expanding the advisor training program and launching new programs to support advisors. He also served for a term as Director of the Perlman Center for Learning and Teaching, which sponsored weekly programs for faculty and staff on all aspects of pedagogy, academic policy, and trends in higher education. In this role he also functioned as the informal mentor to the faculty at Carleton, which is consistently rated by US News & World Report as #1 for undergraduate teaching.
Why Do Students Need Advising?
Students need advising for a number of reasons. First and foremost, students come in with a limited appreciation of what they can do in college because no matter how rigorous your high school education was, any college offers so many more opportunities for studying so many more subjects and having so many more educational experiences that students are a little overwhelmed. A part of what happens when students get overwhelmed, they tend to start shutting off options. They focus on the things they either already know and feel comfortable with or they tend to simply eliminate things they feel might be new or challenging or that might take them in the direction where they don’t feel like they’re necessarily gonna be at the top of their game. The students tend to be somewhat risk averse. One of the roles of advisor of good advising is to help students realize that when you move outside your comfort zone you often learn a lot and discover a new interest that they may never even have known they had. If you want a broad education, the students need someone to help guide them in this new educational landscape. The other reason is that students often find themselves in circumstances where they need a little bit of guidance that help routinely. For example, say a student wants to drop a class after the add and drop deadline or they want to change the grading option, there could also be some major crisis going on in their lives and they might have to figure out if they should drop a class or power through. They need someone to give them a little bit of guidance about what their options are, and how to manage that. Every student at one point or another needs that kind of routine guidance to help them through their education.
How Students Can Be Prepared for College?
First of all, it is almost inevitable that students when they make the transition from high school to college, from mostly living t home to living at home to living away from home, and if that’s in fact what they’re doing in college that’s a complicated transition. It often takes weeks or sometimes months before a student really settles in and feels like the college campus is their new home. That is a huge transition all by itself. There is a lot of development, personal and emotional development that happens. Among most college students during that first year, advising can be very important in supporting students through that period, especially as they are dealing with a whole new environment and it helps them navigate that new environment and feels comfortable there. In terms of academics, for the most part, students will find that there is a range of college courses and high school experiences, and sometimes students come to college, having taken a lot of AP courses or even some college-level courses during their high school years and that really has prepared them fairly well for what a college classroom is going to be like. They step into that classroom, really feeling pretty well prepared and pretty solid. In other cases they may find themselves feeling as though they’re in over their heads, or at the very least, they got thrown in the deep end and they have to swim really hard and really fast which is also a new experience.
How Can The Faculty Help The Students Succeed?
There are a number of things that the faculty could be doing to help students think critically. For example, when you provide students with a written assignment, it would be great if the faculty could incorporate into that assignment, explicitly name the specific, critical thinking skills that a student is gonna have to employ to successfully complete that assignment. The assignment could say, analyze this or compare that but they do not exactly explain to the students what that looks like, or what it means to analyze something in general. It means you have to ask a series of questions about it and you need to have some guidance as to what sorts of questions might be appropriate. Especially for first-year students who are getting their feet on the ground academically, it would be incredibly helpful if the faculty were much more explicit about the kinds of critical thinking that they’re asking students to do. Another way to help the students succeed is through feedback the faculty gives on student work. They could point out more clearly what kinds of critical thinking the students did well at and where precisely they fell short. Similarly, in lecture classes when a student raises their hand and asks a question, the faculty member might very well say, you know that's a great question. and then proceed to answer it or address it in some way instead of saying that’s a really great question and it is a great question because what you’ve just done is you compared the thing that we were just talking about with a different theory we looked at weeks ago. This helps students recognize that that is the kind of intellectual move that the faculty really appreciate. One last thing the faculty can do is talk more explicitly with students about their own intellectual work. When students recognize the faculty also struggle to do their own research, and to come up with new ideas and to test them. The students recognize that this is a continuum. They are at one end of it just starting their college careers. They're studying with people who mostly have PHDs that have been studying their subject for many years but even they are in the process of learning and refining their ideas and refining the methods that they use. When the faculty lets the students see what they do as professional academics, it helps students recognize.
Contact Louis Newman
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/louis-newman-a1b4669/
Get your copy of Thinking Critically in College: The Essential Handbook for Students Success: https://thinkingcritically.us
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