Keystone Concepts in Teaching: A Higher Education Podcast from the Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning

S3 E22: The Learning Services Office is Supporting Student Success

• Stearns Center • Season 3 • Episode 22

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Vicki Dominick from Learning Services joins your host, Dr. Rachel Yoho, to discuss the resources and opportunities available through the efforts of the Learning Services office. 

Resources: Learning Services at George Mason University:  https://learningservices.gmu.edu Learning Services workshop announcements:  https://learningservices.gmu.edu/workshops/ Tutoring resources:  https://learningservices.gmu.edu/tutoring-resources2/  

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Rachel:

Hello and welcome to the Keystone Concepts in Teaching podcast. I'm your host Rachel Yoho, and I'm very excited in this episode to be joined by Vicki Dominic, who is the Associate Director for Learning Services here at George Mason University. So in this episode we're going to be talking about all of the interesting resources, the cool topics, and all the things that the Office of Learning Services does. So basically to get us started, could you tell us a little bit about learning services and some of your work, Vicki?

Vicki:

Yes, hi. Thank you so much for having me, Rachel. I really appreciate the invitation. So Learning Services is here to help students achieve whatever their academic goals are and we provide some support to students around their metacognition and self-regulation, which is just a fancy way of saying we help students with their study strategies and their time management.

Rachel:

Yeah, that's great. I mean, that's, that's obviously very timely always, but especially now, especially as we're coming out of, you know, changes to education post pandemic if you will. So when faculty are thinking about this, so whether our listeners are Mason faculty or if they are elsewhere, for Mason faculty, what might you tell them about what they could know, what they should know about learning services, or for those who might be looking for something similar on their own campus, what might they want to know or that they might not already?

Vicki:

So we provide several services to students. We provide individual academic coaching where we help students develop study plans and teach them study strategies. We offer academic success workshops on a variety of topics related to study strategies and self-regulation. We also maintain a list of tutoring resources for students. Since we don't have a central tutoring center, we have taken on that responsibility to put everything in one place on our website. We offer KNACK tutoring out of our office. And we have several partnerships and collaborations that we do with different colleges and academic departments across the university.

Rachel:

Great. And can you tell us about what KNACK is for those who might not be familiar with that?

Vicki:

So KNACK is a tutor matching platform and we have contracted with them. So they recruit, hire, and train mason students to provide tutoring just to other Mason students. And so student wants to have to tutoring, and it's a class that we cover. They submit a request through the KNACK platform. Then any tutors who are available will respond through the platform and they make all the arrangements on KNACK, so they don't have to exchange any personal information, email or phone number. If they wanna have a tutoring session that's virtual, they have a virtual classroom. If they wanna have a session on campus or in person, it would have to happen on campus. So all that's arranged through the KNACK platform. It was launched in August of 2024 and has been very successful. This is the end of our first year.

Rachel:

Yeah, that's great. And so if we're thinking about faculty, especially about some of the resources that you were just talking about, maybe to follow up on that, you know, if I'm a faculty member who's teaching, one of the things that I certainly recommend to faculty is linking some of the, you know, short videos, the resources into their course. But what if they have a student who might be in additional need of assistance? Could they maybe suggest that they visit learning services? Or how might you go about telling a faculty member what they might consider there?

Vicki:

So faculty are encouraged to refer students to our office, and that can be done formally through Patriot Connect. There is a referral refer option. More informally by simply sending an email to me or to the learning services to email. Either way, it works for us. We'll try to reach out to the student and get them connected and help them make an appointment so they can come in for academic coaching.

Rachel:

Yeah. That's great. Yeah. Great ways to connect students with resources. So can you tell us a little bit about some of the challenges that we have at Mason that, you know, obviously many other institutions share and some of the ways that you and others, you know, other colleagues that you're working with on some of these challenges?

Vicki:

So, one of the things that we've noticed is, you know, we don't have a central advising model. Every college or department does their advising a little bit differently. So that's been a bit of a challenge. It's also a challenge, it's a huge challenge that we don't have a centralized tutoring center. And our tutors go by different names. So we have some that are called peer mentors and some that are called coaches and some that are called consultants. So that is why we started the webpage with all the tutoring resources. But more recently I've been involved in the learning supports task force that was implemented last spring. So spring 2024, where we were looking at what are all of the learning supports that are available on campus for students, and what can we do to be more efficient and effective in supporting our students. And this spring, we're now working on the implementation committee. So this learning supports task force was sponsored by Keith Renshaw and Sally Laurenson. And so we've been looking at ways we can coordinate between our centers a little bit better. How can we have some consistent training to support our students, and just make things more efficient, make it easier for them to find the support that they need, help reduce the stigma of looking for help and assistance? And making things more efficient and more cost effective for the university overall.

Rachel:

Yeah, absolutely. And, and centralizing things certainly helps our students quite a bit as well. Or even like you said earlier, you know, having all the resources listed in one place, but, you know, with so many different names, especially. That's great. So let's talk a little bit more about what you mentioned earlier. You know, we were talking about skills, whether we're calling them metacognition or if we're gonna call them study skills, whatever you prefer whatever our listeners are most comfortable with, what are some of the broad skills that your office is helping with and more specifically, how are you helping them with that? What can faculty know and learn and be able to connect with from these resources also?

Vicki:

So some of the things that we help with in terms of study strategies or study skills are things like reading and note taking, memory strategies, exam strategies. That is all offered through one-on-one academic coaching which is then customized to the student's needs. And we'll work very closely with the student on like, all right, let's see your course materials. Let's get your syllabus, show me your textbook, show me your notes. I do a lot of think aloud where I'll demonstrate to students how to approach reading with their textbook or ways that they can more effectively take notes. Or we'll spend time during the session creating flashcards to get them ready for a test. So those are things that we do in coaching. We have full academic success workshops on each of those topics that I just mentioned. Most of them are virtual. We do have either in person and we spend some time in the workshop and we try to have some hands on time. The other half of that is the self-regulation piece. So that's things like time management. Managing your focus and concentration, overcoming procrastination, which is by far our most popular workshop in the center in in Learning Services.

Rachel:

Yeah, that makes sense..

Vicki:

Um,

Rachel:

Totally fair.

Vicki:

motivation, goal setting. So again, we can cover all of those things in one-on-one coaching, but we also have workshops on all of those. And I forgot to mention. Professors can invite us to come to their class and present a custom workshop to their students, whether it's a study strategy that I've mentioned or when some of these self-regulation things we're happy to come and visit their class if they would like to invite us.

Rachel:

Yeah, that's great. So if I'm a faculty member, you know. Listening and perhaps I don't have a whole class session that I have, you know, time in my schedule for that. Certainly there are some videos on your website. I've recommended those in one of the workshops that I do with faculty. But what else might I consider? You know, are there other ways that I can think about, you know, obviously, certainly individual students I could refer, but maybe would I be looking at integrating some of the videos in different modules? Or how might you recommend that? I actually think about strategically connecting students with some of the existing resources.

Vicki:

Yeah. And in addition to the videos that we have on our website, we also have our own YouTube channel. And some, they range in length, but some of them are very short. Literally they're YouTube shorts. And then there's there's like a, a longer like 20 minute video on concentration. So faculty are welcome to utilize any of our videos and integrate it into their course. It might be a short module that they have students participate in. I'm happy to consult if there's something custom somebody wanted to have, as long as it's not elaborate and fancy. I would be happy to consult and put something together for faculty. But yeah, we just wanna support faculty in supporting the students in any way that we're able to within our abilities.

Rachel:

Absolutely. And certainly your office does really cool things. And so one of the other things that I do kind of think of when we're talking about, for instance, reading or, you know, not everything's the same across every discipline. So one of the things that I hear in the back of my head is, you know, certain disciplines that are like, well that might work for everyone, but not for me, not for my area. And so I was wondering, you know, what does that look like? Certainly when you have one-on-one consultations that would be discipline specific or course specific, you know, student specific if you will. But when we're thinking about, you know, some of the videos, some of the other resources, you know, obviously your office isn't making individual things for every single discipline or something, but can you tell me what your response might be to that? But, well, but that's not what reading's like in my area, type of comment?

Vicki:

So ideally one-on-one coaching is best to address some of those differences because even within a same course, you can have vastly different, you know, reading secondary sources or primary sources, translated sources, research, you know, reading and research. So one-on-one coaching make really helps us to address specific kind of reading or the specific issue the student is having. But generally when we're trying to do these things, we give a variety. So we have a strategy that's about reading textbooks. We have a different strategy that we talk about when you're reading poetry or literature or philosophy. We do directly talk about how to read, you know, research articles. That's all in that college reading strategies session. And we have a series of workshops that are for grad students as well. And there's one on graduate reading strategies where we talk about. How do you deal with the pace of reading? How do you skim effectively? We always tell students to skim, but nobody ever explains how to do that. We, we actually can do that in our train, in our workshops to explain how, here's how you skim.

Rachel:

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so that's great. So we're not just talking about undergraduate students here either, and how reading even varies across, you know, different types of graduate courses, different disciplines.'Cause that often happens in graduate courses of, you know. How do I actually read a research paper? You know, when students encounter a research paper for the first time and, you know, reading from the very first word to the very last word may not be their best strategy. That's great. So I think this is a great way when we're looking at different resources available for faculty. So some of the things that we'll include in the show notes, certainly, we'll link to the learning services website and all that, but also the links to some of the videos that we were mentioning, and some of the contact points as well. But as we maybe start to wrap up our conversation a little bit, I think where I wanna take this is really looking at our keystone concept being that connection with resources. Because here often we have a lot of concerns for faculty. You know, not all of our students are coming in with the same skills, the same background, the same academic experiences. And I think learning services can be a great resource to help different students who might be needing some assistance in some of these different areas, and especially when we're thinking about faculty, they may be disciplinary experts we may be disciplinary experts but we're not always skilled in or have the time to equip to whatever you wanna call it, to help with the learning strategy side. And I think, you know, really looking at this, the excellent resources that your office provides, Vicki is really helping to, to bridge that gap a little bit. But to do that, I think we're looking at making sure people are aware of the office and the services that can be provided to students. So I really appreciate that.

Vicki:

Yes, I agree with you and often I'm working with students in other disciplines and it's always surprising how it's like, well, how can you help me with finance? Or how can you help me with history? Or How can you help me with engineering? And I've worked with students in all of those backgrounds because I'm teaching them how to learn and that cuts across the content areas. And sometimes not being a content expert is an advantage'cause I can ask questions and guide the student on good problem solving, like what do I do when I don't know how to do something? And I can role model that. And I say I, but I have a whole staff of learning specialists and, and peer academic coaches. But for all of us to be able to model help seeking and, you know, problem solving, I think is really impactful for students to see. It's okay to ask for help. It's okay not to know how to do something. I think that's important for all of our students at Mason to know.

Rachel:

Absolutely. And that's really one of the hardest barriers that, you know, we've talked about, I think in other episodes of like, I don't know, being really powerful, but help seeking, like, can you help me with this? Is such a hurdle, but can be a really valuable, really beneficial thing. And that goes for both students and faculty. You know, Hey, can you help me connect this student with resources? Hey, can I, you know, link some resources into my course to help the students with this specific topic? All of those help seeking and support giving things are so important. I think that really well reflects our keystone concept today. So with that, Vicki, anything else you'd like to share? Anything else that you think listeners might benefit from?

Vicki:

I did wanna share that something that people may not think of is that if you've got a student with an incomplete, we are able to provide them academic coaching even if they are not enrolled in classes. We're happy to see students for that. We also have an academic recovery program that we run, and folks wanna learn more about that, they are welcome to reach out to me and I'm happy to share that information.

Rachel:

All right. Well, that sounds great. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for telling us about the powerhouse office that is learning services and all of your impactful work with students. So thank you.

Vicki:

Thank you. It's been a pleasure to talk about our office.

Rachel:

All right, well, please catch our next episode. We post every two weeks and we look forward to bringing more information about teaching and the keystone concepts in teaching to you soon.