Supporting Our Students' Well-being

Particularly in difficult times, it’s important to keep an eye on how students are doing—Georgetown’s Student Outreach and Support has compiled a guide to recognizing and supporting students in distress—and you should be ready to share campus safety net resources, such as Counseling and Psychiatric Services (CAPS), Health Education Services (HES), the Center for Multicultural Equity & Access (CMEA), the LGBTQ Resource Center, and Campus Ministry.

You might also consider bringing well-being more explicitly into the classroom as a topic worthy of discussion, and perhaps relevant to the course material at hand. Could well-being be one of your goals for student development? Resilience—the ability to weather or bounce back from stresses and challenges—could be a particular area of attention. As this paper from the University of Michigan suggests, there are many opportunities to foster resilience across the semester, well before problems arise: in sharing lists of campus resources on the syllabus, along with a statement about struggles being normative; in-class conversations about strategies (students can generate them) for dealing with periods of academic or personal difficulty; regular mention of the core elements of self-care, from sleep to nutrition to social engagement.

For more on all this, see our page on Teaching Well-Being, or explore our Engelhard Project, which supports faculty efforts to bring well-being into the classroom (learn more about becoming a Fellow). The University of California-Berkeley has also compiled a tip sheet for helping students deal with painful events in the news.