The Students We have

There's an old educational adage: teach the students we have, not the ones we wish we had.

Too often, we view shortcomings in student success as the fault of the student: they didn't show up to class... they didn't respond to my emails... they just didn't want to get engaged! We have built a set of expectations for students - expectations that are often critical to whether or not they succeed in college - and express frustration, disappointment, or a host of other feelings when these expectations are not met. When a real student doesn't do those things, the instinct is to locate the problem in them.

I want to be careful here, because there's a version of this that lets students off the hook entirely, and that isn't what I mean. Students carry real responsibility for their own success, and things would be easier if every one of them arrived with the habits we hope for.

But there's a practical problem with the “if they'd only” list: not one item on it is a lever we can actually pull. We can wish students were different, or we can work with the students in front of us. Only one of those leads to action, and only action leads to improvement.

Working with the students we have means borrowing another well-worn phrase — meeting them where they are. Not as a slogan, but as a method: figure out where a student actually is, identify the best path forward for them, and guide them along it.

That's where the part of this work I find most useful, and most overlooked, comes in: the noncognitive factors. The hard-to-see things like motivation, study skills, sense of belonging, or a student's belief that they can do the work in front of them - they aren't listed on a transcript. On one hand, these things are easy to miss... but that would require us paying attention to them in the first place. Far too often, we only notice these challenges retrospectively.

Yet when I sit down and talk with educators - faculty, staff, administrators... it doesn't matter - all of them agree that these things very much matter. The capable student who is quietly drifting usually isn't lazy; more often they don't yet feel like they belong here, or they don't believe the work is theirs to do. Name that correctly and you can help. Misname it as a motivation problem and you'll spend the whole semester frustrated with each other.

That's the purpose of this newsletter. The aim is to build your understanding of these factors well enough to do three things with them: describe a student's strengths and challenges more precisely, act on that understanding at both the student and the institutional level, and — the only thing that finally matters — improve actual student success.

Every other week, The Students We Have will land in your inbox with a few short things toward that end: a research review, a news story worth your time, a development in the field — kept brief, kept plain, and always pointed at what you can do with it in your own work.

Teach the students we have. That's the whole idea. I'm glad you're here.

— Ross

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