Supporting Student Success Through the Wellbeing Enhances Learning Model

Wellbeing has emerged as a top priority as individuals, organizations, and communities continue to navigate through these seismic shifts and experience increased levels of burnout, stress, and isolation.

March 10, 2023
Asa Olson & Kely MacPhail

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MUCH HAS CHANGED in our world over the past few years. We’ve been living through a global pandemic as well as intense reckoning with racial injustice, human rights, and planetary health. Wellbeing has emerged as a top priority as individuals, organizations, and communities continue to navigate through these seismic shifts and experience increased levels of burnout, stress, and isolation.

In many ways, the University of Minnesota’s Earl E. Bakken Center for Spirituality & Healing was prescient in its focus on student wellbeing. Our faculty and staff have always recognized that student wellbeing is important and that it affects every aspect of their lives, including their learning. Dating back to 2013, our instructors collaborated to identify key instructional practices that could contribute to student wellbeing, aligning them with the six dimensions of the Center’s Wellbeing Model (health, relationships, security, purpose, community, and environment). Principles of transformative learning, contemplative pedagogy, and social/ emotional and collaborative learning were all given consideration in this process. This effort resulted in the creation of a model called the Bakken Center’s Unifying Framework for Teaching and Learning.

While we have been operationalizing this framework for nearly a decade, there are few projects like it, and the research has really only started to take off. Research on the workplace indicates that wellbeing can enhance engagement as well as productivity and less turnover (Gallup). Although the workplace is a different environment with different goals than an educational setting, the analog has always begged a valid question: how does wellbeing relate to student engagement, performance, learning, and retention?

Research is beginning to seek answers to this question in areas such as mindfulness-based interventions and positive education. The body of literature about the positive relationship between student wellbeing and academic performance is growing. One study identifies a reciprocal relationship between student wellbeing (i.e., a student’s health awareness and health behavior) and a student’s academic performance (El Ansari, Stock 2010), and a review on positive psychology interventions in higher ed highlights promising results, not only in terms of student wellbeing but also in terms of academic outcomes and teacher wellbeing (Shankland, Rosset 2017). There is also a substantial body of literature on specific teaching practices’ contribution to wellbeing.

In Fall 2020, the Center’s Learning Resources Group (LRG) recognized the urgency to build on the existing Unifying Framework for Teaching and Learning and to incorporate the growing body of literature about wellbeing, engagement, and performance, along with new practices drawing from Universal Design guidelines and anti-racist pedagogy. We presented the revised framework to various University partners for feedback, and also conducted surveys and focus groups with our instructors to learn more about the ways they cultivate student wellbeing through their teaching and what additional practices would be useful for them to incorporate. Our conversations and our outreach were met with excitement, and helped the CSH Unifying Framework for Teaching and Learning blossom into its newest form, the Wellbeing Enhances Learning (WEL) Model.

The WEL Model theorizes that student wellbeing improves engagement and learning. It identifies key goals toward enhancing student wellbeing and supplies a list of practices that contribute to each goal. These practices are descriptive rather than prescriptive, and instructors can adapt them based on the needs, aims, and contexts of their courses. To help instructors implement these practices, the WEL Model suggests several strategies for each practice, and each strategy also has an example. Some of the strategies include mindfulness or movement-based interventions, but most of them connect existing teaching strategies to specific dimensions of wellbeing, such as the role of inquiry-based learning activities in discovering personal relevance and purpose. Instructors can browse the Model for new practices, use it as a reflective tool, or follow the five steps that we suggest in the toolkit. Based on the Center’s strategic plan to promote academic excellence and rigor through courses that promote accessibility and student success, the WEL Model has become one of the top initiatives for the LRG. We have presented it at local and international conferences, shared it with University partners, and hosted several trainings and workshops around it. We recognize that the Model’s positive reception is due in part to state of the world and the challenging times in which we live, and we are hopeful the WEL Model can have a positive impact in this context and beyond, in a world where the burdens of the pandemic, we hope, have lightened.

References

El Ansari, W. & Stock, C. (2010). Is the health and wellbeing of university students associated with their academic performance? Cross sectional findings from the United Kingdom. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 7(2), 509- 527.

Gallup. (n.d.). Employee wellbeing is key for workplace productivity. https://www.gallup.com/ workplace/215924/well-being.aspx

Shankland, R. & Rosset, E. (2017). Review of brief schoolbased positive psychological interventions: A taster for teachers and educators. Educational Psychology Review 29(2), 363–392.

 

The Wellbeing Enhances Learning (WEL) Model Overview and Goals

ENVIRONMENT

Maintain a setting and culture that cultivates empathy, inclusion, and equity to reduce stress and enhance cognition

  • Connect with nature and care for the planet
  • Share perspectives and experiences that are diverse or novel
  • Appreciate and create beauty, art, and literature
  • Create a culture of compassion that allows for mistakes and fosters growth

COMMUNITY

Facilitate connection, connectedness, and a sense of belonging.

  • Co-create class guidelines and share responsibility for reinforcing those guidelines
  • Hold space for multiple truths and multiple voices (normalize multiculturalism)
  • Model and teach empathic listening Reinforce curiosity as contrasted with judgment
  • Stay open to new ideas and to the creativity of others Introduce and welcome challenging conversations and exchanges
  • Encourage students to ask peers and teachers for support

PURPOSE

Create meaning through values, spirit, and intention.

  • Welcome and invite moments of silence
  • Create reflective opportunities that inspire self-knowledge and growth
  • Set goals that are relevant and useful for students and encourage personal goal-setting
  • Notice and embrace “spirit-filled” moments Introduce and welcome deep and provocative thoughts and questions
  • Foster the integration and synthesis of new wisdom
  • Teach flexible and diverse content that students can find culturally or socially relevant

HEALTH

Address factors that contribute to whole person health.

  • Start with centering or grounding
  • Model and support skills for self-care and coping
  • Normalize emotional experience
  • Invite students to explore how their identity and values contribute to the class

RELATIONSHIPS

Build relationships by fostering respect, empathy, authenticity, and trust.

  • Explore personal experiences and potential bias
  • Accept where others are in their life journey Include activities that promote equity, trust, and connection
  • Assess and attend to the personal development needs of each student
  • Speak and act from a place of fairness, respect, and openness
  • Seek and accept feedback from students

SECURITY

Create a safe place to teach, learn, reflect, and delve into the unknown.

  • Establish clear expectations of learners and clear guidelines for assessment and grading processes
  • Expect and reinforce behaviors such as fairness, respect, and compassion throughout the learning experience Model appropriate levels of vulnerability and risk-taking
  • Provide feedback that reduces mistrust and focuses on student improvement
  • Maintain privacy and confidentiality as needed
  • Share a diversity of perspectives so that students can feel safe to be themselves and speak to all of their identities

Categories: Academics

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