These stories describe promising approaches professors have found for getting students to buy into the project of learning.
How to Show Students a Gen-Ed Course Matters
By Beckie Supiano October 17, 2025
For one science professor, it’s about connecting to what motivates students.
… Professors teaching gen-ed courses don’t always take a step back to ask why their institution offers such courses, Duncan says. He’s come to see that the courses are not really about the content, or in his case that “black holes are really important for everyone to know about.” Rather, colleges “want students who are not science majors to see how science works. To perhaps even learn to think scientifically. And to distinguish between things that have facts to support them and things that are just opinion.”
… In his course, Duncan would give his students examples that extended beyond astronomy. For example, even before the pandemic put vaccines front and center, Duncan talked about their importance, showing a picture of a polio ward and mentioning that Roald Dahl lost a young child to measles. Stories, he says, stay with them longer than statistics.
… These efforts meant he had less time to get into as much content about astronomy. But Duncan saw as more important the broader goal of helping students understand how science works.
To gauge whether his approach was successful, Duncan included a bonus question on his final exam asking students whether the course had affected their view of science, and if so, how? Students only rarely said “no,” Duncan says.
Duncan analyzed the responses students wrote in the fall of 2019 and found that about a third of students said they were less likely to be fooled by bad science or pseudoscience. Nearly as many said they had improved their critical thinking or scientific thinking skills.
One student wrote, “This class has given me a cosmic perspective of our size in the universe, but also practice [in the] skills of thinking critically of claims and assertions needed to make good decisions.”
It’s important for students to recognize that they’re learning more than just content in their courses, says Mary-Ann Winkelmes, the founder and director of the Transparency in Learning and Teaching in Higher Education project (TILT Higher Ed). “Part of what Doug Duncan did so well, and part of what TILT helps to do is to call students’ attention — their megacognitive awareness — to how they’re learning something, and what skills, specifically, they’re learning, and how these skills are useful, right now, in this context, and how those skills could be useful later on.”
This, indeed, is part of the case for having general-education requirements. When students take a mix of courses, they are exposed to thinking and learning through different disciplinary lenses. “We want them to leave with the awareness,” she says, that “they have many ways to learn, they have many ways to think. And all of those ways that they’ve experienced in college are going to make them more effective thinkers and learners.”
Teaching students to think and learn, she adds, is the best way that professors can prepare them for a future in which they’ll have to think and learn about things none of us can predict.
Why One Professor Fosters Friendships in Her Courses
By Beckie Supiano October 3, 2025
When students feel connected to one another, they’re more likely to come to class, do the work, and even take risks.
… Learning, after all, is social. When students get to know each other, they’re more likely to come to class and do the work. And when they feel comfortable around each other, more engaging forms of work are also possible.
… “Life makes us all anxious,” Mullally says, “and we have to develop the tools and skills to figure out how to deal with that.” A classroom can be a place to practice skills, and Mullally uses hers to work on forming the kinds of collegial relationships that help students feel supported enough to take risks.
It starts with getting students to interact.
… To Komguep, the biotechnology class felt like a community, one where students recognized one another’s personalities and could anticipate their peers’ reactions and responses. That dynamic, she says, helped quieter students like her come out of their shells. “I’m honestly not very comfortable with public speaking, but being in that class made me more confident, especially doing presentations.”
And that confidence wasn’t all that Komguep gained in the course. She had been a bit nervous to take biotechnology, because while she is interested in the biology part, she was less familiar with the business aspects other students knew a lot about. Because the course was so interactive, she was able to learn things from her classmates she wouldn’t otherwise have known, in a way that stretched her without being too intimidating.
… There are many good reasons for professors to encourage students to interact, says Peter Felten, co-author of Relationship-Rich Education: How Human Connections Drive Success in College. “They’re going to learn more. They’ll be more motivated, more likely to come to class, if they have friends in class,” says Felten, executive director of the Center for Engaged Learning, assistant provost for teaching and learning, and a professor of history at Elon University.
But students don’t always know that.
… “Sometimes we forget, as we’re preparing our classes and teaching our classes, we’re not just teaching students content,” Felten says. “We’re teaching them how to be in our disciplines.”
Take Felten’s discipline, history. “If my class is entirely lecture and all of their assessments are individual writing, I’m teaching them a lot of history, and I’m also teaching them that historians work alone and that all historical work is produced individually.”
“The same is true in a science course,” he says. “And so, as Martha is saying, if science is inherently collaborative and high-end research science is based on these collaborations, working together, then shouldn’t we teach students both how to understand science and how to do science how science actually works?”
Connecting with classmates, then, doesn’t just give students a reason to come to class or support in learning the material in the present. It’s also part of their preparation for what they’ll do in the future.
Other ways to help students connect:
Francisco Gallegos, an associate professor of philosophy at Wake Forest University, has put students into small discussion groups and asked them to meet outside of class, using a format adapted from a consulting company where he once worked.
Connections Are Everything: A College Student’s Guide to Relationship-Rich Education, by Felten and several co-authors,gives students practical advice on how to build relationships with professors, staff members, and peers. It can be read for free online.
Aimee Deconinck, a lecturer in biological sciences at Clemson University, puts students into small learning groups using a cooperative-learning model that she learned from Mara Evans, a STEM teaching associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In these groups, students have discussions, solve practice problems, and, sometimes, study together outside of class.
Some professors ask students to learn the names of at least some of their classmates and encourage them to exchange contact information so they can ask one another questions or meet up to study.
Professors can use icebreakers to help students meet, and give them more guidance on how to have productive discussions in class.