Background
College students tend to experience particularly high levels of stress (Duffy, 2019). Therefore, it is important to investigate how to support their psychological well-being (PWB). Professors are well-poised to support students because they interact with them regularly across relatively long periods of time. Although there is ample research on college teaching practices that promote students’ learning (e.g., Svinicki & McKeachie, 2014) and teaching practices that support students' PWB within K-12 settings (e.g., Van Ryzin et al., 2009), there is little research on how college professors can support students’ PWB (Eisenberg et al., 2013).
Aims
The purpose of this study was to investigate teaching practices that college professors could use to support students’ psychological well-being.
Method
To explore this, a series of college student focus groups (N = 26) were conducted to identify teaching practices that students perceive as supportive them in experiencing pleasant feelings, feelings of connectedness, a sense of autonomy, a sense of meaning/purpose, and feelings of accomplishment and growth/development. These topics correspond to major dimensions of well-being defined in the literature on human flourishing (e.g., Colby & Morton, 2017; Deci & Ryan, 1985; Keys, 1998; Ryff, 1989; Seligman, 2012).
Results
Analyses of the responses uncovered several themes. For example, students reported that they feel a greater sense of connection with professors who recognize (out loud) that students face challenges outside of class; students experience greater personal growth when professors encourage students to share their perspectives, even if they are not fully-formed or polished; and, students find classes to be more meaningful when content was connected to “real world” events, especially when they had opportunities to learn about the perspectives of people different from themselves.
Conclusion
Based on these findings, we provide a list of recommended teaching practices that professors can use to support students’ well-being. We also discuss directions for future research on this topic.