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Thriving in the Classroom

According to Dr. Laurie Schreiner, student thriving has five dimensions:

Thriving in the Classroom eLearning modules

The Centre for Teaching and Learning has created six eLearning modules in OWL to help you foster the learning conditions that help your students thrive at Western. Each module will take about 1.5 hours to complete, and will include readings and videos, reflection questions, activities, and additional resources to support your learning. The modules can be accessed by joining the Thriving in the Classroom OWL site.

Click here to join the Thriving in the Classroom OWL site 

Thriving Through Teamwork

This module encourages instructors to evaluate, revise and strengthen their existing team projects. The principal goal is to provide you with pedagogically-informed best practices and hands-on activities that you can quickly and readily apply in practical ways. We'll also draw your attention to thriving principles of engaged learning, social connectedness, positive perspective and diverse citizenship strengthen and support best practices in teamwork design and practice. 

Thriving and Metacognition

This module explore how faculty and instructors can build courses to support student metacognition in deep ways. The literature shows that when we demonstrate and encourage metacognition throughout a course, students are more engaged and are much more likely to thrive during their university years -- and beyond. We will explore a process for building a course on a foundation of metacognition for increased student success and thriving.

Removing Barriers to Student Thriving: Trauma-informed Pedagogical Practices

This module on teaching for student thriving centers on raising awareness of trauma-informed pedagogical practices. Being aware of what trauma is and is not can help us introduce small, but powerful, curricular changes. These changes benefit everyone on campus, but those who bear trauma will benefit especially well. Working, teaching, and responding to trauma-informed practices contributes to everyone's thriving at Western.

Difficult Dialogues and Sensitive Subjects in our Curricula

There are times when we want to or need to have difficult dialogues in the classroom. Having students tackle a sensitive subject that is pertinent to their learning requires significant preparation. Helping students wrestle with controversial topics can provide them with a better understanding of they we are and their relationships with other people.

Developing an Inclusive Teaching Practice

Inclusive teaching is about fostering a sense of belonging in your classroom, in your institution, and in your discipline. This belonging is related not only to social connectedness, but also through learning environments where students feel that they are active participants in constructing knowledge and feel that their needs as a learner are being satisfied (Rovai, 2002; Schreiner, 2010). This module touches upon inclusive pedagogical strategies, both small and large, that anyone can implement in their own classroom as part of contributing to a thriving culture at Western.

Promoting a Positive Perspective

This module allows you to help students cultivate a positive perspective, even when it doesn't come naturally for them...or for you! The lessons in this module equip you to teach students how to respond to stressful moments in the classroom to promote thriving, reframe failure as an essential component of learning, defeat imposter syndrome, apply student strengths through partnerships that allow them to achieve their goals, and develop a growth mindset as a strategy for academic success.

Limitations of the Thriving model

There is much to recommend about Dr Schreiner's work as we have outlined above. Her anti-deficit approach is particularly noteworthy, and much of the work she draws upon is well-founded research on positive psychology. As one would expect with any paradigmatic framework, there are limitations. While the thriving quotient does address BIPOC students in predominantly white institutions (PWI), there are some who point to an underestimation of the institutionalized forms of racism and marginalization in the thriving research. (e.g. Okello & Perez, 2018). Moreover, the Thriving Quotient research has not put significant effort into the experiences of international, indigenous, LGBTQ+, commuter, or returning adult students. The extent to which the experiences of these latter populations would have on the Thriving Quotient research has yet to be determined. At the same time, one can see many ways in which Schreiner's Thriving Quotient research could well apply to remote and hybrid learning. Still, little has been published on correlating factors of thriving with online education.

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Questions?

If you need help incorporating something you have learned in one of our Thriving in the Classroom eLearning modules into your course, please contact one of our educational developers.