Pens held by faculty members raced over paper Friday as they took notes on how to bridge the gap between student generational issues with communication, technology and entitlement.

Four panelists spoke to about 35 faculty members at the first brown-bag discussion titled “Let’s Talk Teaching: Who are our First-Year Students?” to analyze what the incoming generation’s problem areas are and what faculty members can do to compensate for them for a more successful learning experience.

The event was sponsored by the Faculty Development Office, and the four panelists were: Stephen Lucas, the department chair and graduate coordinator of secondary education and foundations; Melissa Ames, an assistant professor of English; Dianne Timm of the counseling and student development department; and Moe Samad, the associate residence director of Carman Hall.

Lucas said one of the main goals needed to address the generational issues is to discover how to take the admitted freshman students and transform them into the graduates that faculty members envision.

Samad said he encounters generational issues every day because about 95 percent of the freshman students on campus live in Carman Hall.

He said two common communication issues he witnessed are lack of face-to-face conversations and lack of courage to speak to faculty members.

“We need to find a way to break that barrier and say ‘I’m not just your instructor, but I am also here to mentor and help you to get you educated enough to move on after college,'” Samad said. “I think there is an approachability factor and a comfortness that they are lacking that they aren’t really pushing themselves to.”

Samad also tied these issues to technology, especially with students incorporating text lingo and using poor email etiquette.

“I think they get to a point where they think it is OK because they are doing it constantly with their friends,” Samad said. “They engage in that lingo and dialect in a daily, hourly and minute basis so they don’t know any better.”

Ames addressed methods with how to keep students motivated and interactive, and she said the typical college freshman’s attention is lost after about 14 or 15 minutes.

“We have to almost trick them into our subject matter and seduce them into being interested and engaged,” Ames said.

Faculty members should abandon the teaching practice of lecturing, and students are more apt to learn and be motivated when working with others, Ames said.

Sace Elder, an associate professor of history, said she teaches using a combination of lecture and discussion, and she found these ideas troublesome.

“As a historian, there is no way around teaching students content because they have to know stuff in order to do the kind of critical thinking and analysis that we all want and expect our students to have,” Elder said.

She also said she does not usually organize her class into groups because she did not think they were useful when she was a student.

“Dr. Ames gave me a lot to think about in terms of how to structure classroom time and giving students opportunities for choice and group interaction,” Elder said.

Timm spoke about how what students learn outside of the classroom affects how they act inside of the classroom.

One example of this is that GPS has always been available to students during the course of their lives, Timm said.

“Students have always had something to give them direction, and they expect that in the classroom so teachers need to reach out to students when they are struggling and direct them,” she said.

Dagni Bredesen, the interim director of Faculty Development and an English professor, said catering to everything the students want will not help them grow so faculty members need to discover how to bridge the gap between when students need a lot of support to then becoming more independent, life-long learners.

“I think what emerged from the discussion is that it is important to know who the students are and what they are coming in with in terms of expectations and skill sets,” Bredesen said. “I think it is important to know how to reach those students, but I also think that we have to create the conditions so that they will really be prepared for the world.”

The next “Let’s Talk Teaching: Who are our First-Year Students?” discussion is scheduled for March 30.

Those interested can register at the Faculty Development website.

Rachel Rodgers can be reached at 581-2812 or [email protected].