Submitted by: Jennifer Brewer, jbrewer1@uca.edu on 10/13/2025
This week’s Faculty for Successful Students focus is: Provide Individualized Support.
Slide:
This theme aligns with the student campaign emphasis: Ask for Help.
Providing individual support to college students is vital for their academic success. Tailoring assistance to each student’s needs helps clarify misunderstandings, strengthen student-teacher relationships, and offer targeted resources. This personalized approach improves performance, builds confidence, and enhances overall academic achievement.
Faculty Tips to Reinforce Success
Here are a few simple ways you can encourage these habits in your classes:
- Complete progress reports.
- Consider scheduling conferences or short check-ins with students; you may want to devote a class period or time during your office hours to meet with students about the course or other topics.
- Keep a file of commonly-used grading comments so that you can quickly customize substantive and meaningful feedback for students on graded assignments.
- Promote Tutoring Services, the Center for Writing and Communication, and Peer Success Coaching in class.
- Remind students that office hours are for them – make yours welcoming.
- Share examples of times you asked for help to normalize the behavior.
- Direct students to support services when you see them struggling.
You are invited to join us for Bear Bites: Supporting Students – Without Losing Your Sanity on Tuesday, October 14, at 12:15 p.m. in the Christian Cafeteria Executive Dining Room. This lunch program will highlight low-lift, high-impact ways to personalize student support and connect them to resources. The focus is on small but powerful strategies you can use to offer individualized support to students—without burning out and protecting your own time, energy, and boundaries. UCA faculty who are doing this well will be on hand to provide details about their experiences. Join us and leave with realistic ideas you can start using right away.
👉 Register for this Bear Bites event!
Resources for You:
When we work together, we make it easier for students to grow, thrive, and succeed here at UCA. Thanks for all you do to support them!
Center for Excellence in Teaching and Academic Leadership & Student Success Services