Teaching College Freshmen

Bette Erickson and Diane Strommer offer practical guidance to new and veteran faculty on how to most effectively teach and create academic support systems for college students in their first, most critical year. Drawing on freshman learning research, the authors examine today's first year college students to reveal the factors that can make teaching freshman so difficult and challenging - including the great diversity of their educational backgrounds and learning development, their expectations about learning, and their educational goals and values. The authors identify common freshman anxieties, assumptions and habits that can impede learning progress, and they illustrate what faculty can do to overcome and dispel these obstacles - from designing a useful syllabus and developing productive out-of-class assignments to implementing innovative techniques that can enhance class participation.