How to Be a Superhero

What We Must Do

In some ways, this is an easy question. When a student takes the initiative to self-disclose a LD to our institution, our disabilities services colleagues share possible and effective accommodations and engage us in collaborative conversation about what needs to be done. While the accommodation does not have to be the student’s ideal choice, there must be a choice nonetheless, and it needs to be enacted with sensitivity to any stigma a student may feel.

What We Might Do

While identified LDs usually engender “stock” solutions—like extra time on an exam or a distraction-free testing space (Gulli, 2016)—there may be many other options to consider. For example, what about offering an oral exam option for a dyslexic student? Some educators have used that option with great success when the LD makes the written word a battlefield for the student. Instructors could consider video or captioned versions of course material, or peer tutoring instead of institutional tutors, all in the service of making coursework more accessible to LD students. When we consider choices for deviating from course requirements and norms to accommodate for a learning need, we should also consider the probability of success that such a deviation or compromise or flexibility would engender.

Accommodation gets even more complicated when we engage with students’ needs outside the “verified” disabilities services letters. Cortiella and Horowitz (2014) found that while 94% of high school students with LDs received disability services and support, only 17% of students who received those services in high school requested continuation of such support in college. Certainly these students’ learning abilities did not miraculously improve—but stigma and a determination to be independent deter some individuals from seeking continuation of services. The nature of a student’s learning struggle is not always easy to identify; yet it is our choice as to whether and how we approach that student to discuss options to help them. Do we accommodate students without “formally” recognized disabilities but who identify particular learning strategies and techniques that would help them? Do we insist that they go through the formal process to meet their needs? What is fair, creative, and workable?

What We Probably Will Not Do

Increasingly, we have encountered students with learning preferences that are not necessarily linked to LDs. The advent of Individualized Learning Plans in primary and secondary education has foundationally reformed the concept of a course plan that includes the same activities, requirements, and delivery for every student. Each semester, we might have to reconsider how thinly our class sessions can be sliced to accommodate the most learners; the possibilities and limits of personalization challenge already stretched instructor time commitments. Individuality of needs starting prior to higher education represents a level of individualization that one student disabilities services professional called, “neither wise nor sustainable” (M. Druschel, personal interview with Kathy Lund Dean, September 7, 2016).

Equity, too, is an issue to be explored. If we go the extra mile for one student, what prevents another from coming forward with an additional, different, personalized learning plan (or other similar) request? Perhaps we could discuss the issue of learning needs with all students in our classrooms, since all are affected by the time and effort choices we make. Are we willing to open up that conversation?

What We Definitely Should not Do

At the risk of including proverbial “no-brainers” in this discussion, M. Druschel (personal interview with Kathy Lund Dean, September 7, 2016) indicated that not every instructor has engaged with student LD needs and with the possibility of being a learning superhero. Instructors should not make accommodations for some students and not others, or treat LD students differentially in a negative or shaming way. Not considering the individual student’s input into their own learning needs when managing a LD is also something we should avoid. Instructors should not disclose the disability to other students. And perhaps the most basic “should not”: We should not simply ignore the letter about the student’s LD and leave the student to manage on her or his own.

Other Considerations

All superheroes, and particularly the ones who appear to be everyday people, try to do the right thing when faced with what appear to be insurmountable challenges. We all can learn, and all our students benefit, from the increased attention to LD students that have come as the result of disability law and increased sensitivity to learning issues in education. When we consider elements in our learning environments that were initially accommodations but are now considered principles of Universal Design for Learning (National Center on Universal Design for Learning, n.d.) and beneficial for everyone, such as providing course content via multiple representations and means, our learning communities take on the “rising tide lifts all boats” analogy.

Costs also must be part of our thinking. For example, what about the LD student who requires a single room for an international study tour when the norm is double or triple housing? Can we learn to examine our norms for student practice so that we recognize when practices are simply historical or when they are based on real evidence of effective learning strategies? Who bears the costs, not just financial costs, but time, attention, and responsibility/oversight for such changes?

In This Issue

Caring for individual students and, in particular, those students for whom learning itself can be fraught with frustration and difficulty is an ongoing and rich conversation. In this issue, we share other aspects of caring for and engaging with students that are just beginning to be part of a discussion in higher education—how we understand mentoring students, and how we navigate the “relation” aspect of relational learning. The lead essay by Chory and Offstein, “‘Your Professor Will Know You as a Person’: Evaluating and Rethinking the Relational Boundaries Between Faculty and Students” is the result of those authors’ years of considering how the faculty–student relationship has evolved without, in their experience, the attendant conversations about the implications of that evolution. We are delighted to engage the management education community in this crucial and complex conversation with the inclusion of several rejoinders to Chory and Offstein’s provocative article.

First, Bill Starbuck chronicles many examples of the fundamental changes that higher education is experiencing due to external forces like demographic change, challenges to the higher education business model, and breathtaking technological advancements. He notes that the time is right to engage with Chory and Offstein’s topic, because college-age students and their developmental trajectories demand more individualized care than ever. Starbuck warns us to be mindful of how we respond to the challenges that increasingly diverse students bring to the faculty–student relationship, lest we address them in ways that are “klutzy and programmatic” and serve no one well. Deborah Butler shares her long experience as a management professor of very large classes, where “relationship” by necessity must take a different form than the one-on-one dyadic model common in mentoring. Butler has had to reflect on what “relationship” means for her and her many students, and the ways in which she may serve their development in that mainstay of higher education, the large lecture course. Writing from a candidly self-evaluative space, Butler shows creativity in the way we might interact with our students to help them be their best selves. In our final rejoinder comments, John Stark writes from the perspective of a faculty member turned administrator for his college of business, and the often dual nature of his lived experience. Certainly, he writes, faculty should be modeling for students what professional, developmental relationships look like, but how faculty gain those skills remains curiously uninstitutionalized.

Also in this issue we share ways authors have developed to help students gain experience with and appreciation for the often hidden norms that run organizational life, or what Moberg (2006) called “tacit” organizational information. Barkacs and Barkacs created a role-play simulation that challenges students’ perceptions of the “objective” process by which resources are allocated in organizational settings. Through their many years of running the simulation “Budget Time,” they hope to shorten students’ learning curves about potential gender-based bias, and their article comes with detailed roles and handouts with which readers may also run this activity. Another instructional innovation in this issue helps students manage their anxiety about career planning, helping them be more strategic about understanding their options and skills. Using the Department of Labor’s “My Next Move” tool, Koys shares how he significantly increased students’ ownership of their career planning activities.

This issue includes two research articles. In one, Swaim and Henley tackle persistent and potentially difficult aspects of student team functioning and ultimate goal attainment—whether students think the outcome of a team project is valuable, and how to increase student commitment to such projects. By showing that specific instructor behaviors relating to collaboration increase both of those desired outcomes, Swaim and Henley recommend a particular set of caring and nurturing behaviors related to student team effectiveness. With our second research article, Bear and Jones help readers return to the central theme of faculty–student relationships and, based on their study, recommend specific aspects of a mentoring relationship that contribute to positive learning. In particular, Bear and Jones help readers understand the central role of trust in such relationships, and how trust can be the glue of mentoring.