What’s a learning strategist? What do learning strategists do?
Across all three campuses at the University of Toronto, learning strategists provide a range of critical supports for students. Currently, at the Centre for Learning Strategy Support, we have eighteen strategists on staff, including four team leads. Some of our learning strategists are “on-location,” embedded in smaller communities all across the St. George campus—in the Arts & Science Colleges, in other Student Life departments and increasingly in specific academic departments, where they offer discipline-specific guidance. Others work “centrally,” where they provide generalized support and expert coaching to all students.
While our colleagues value our work providing learning support to students, there remains some misunderstanding about the range of possibilities we foster and the many ways we can invite students to approach their studies with a deft, spirited outlook. It’s useful to think of two dimensions to learning strategy work. First, we help students develop and practice effective, rigorous learning skills and study strategies. Second, we nurture in students an enhanced, healthier, motivated relationship with and disposition toward learning.
What do you mean by “learning skills”? Do you mean studying?
The workshop on reading in graduate school was outstanding and it has totally changed how I approach my reading lists and notetaking. That was really helpful.
Although making meaning from the raw materials of learning involves techniques traditionally linked with studying—reading, taking notes, attending lectures, engaging in dialogue, solving problems—the techniques are not equivalent to learning, as staff and faculty know well. Our team draws from a broad range of disciplines, including but not limited to educational psychology, instructional design, critical pedagogy and the history of education—as well as a body of research sometimes called the science of learning—to help both students and colleagues harness evidence-rich strategies for encoding and retrieving information.
Underlying all of this is the organizational and executive-functioning scaffolding we help students lay to establish sound foundations, manage their time, set achievable goals, plan and reach out. This helps students determine, for themselves, which tactics are most applicable to their context, and it encourages the practice of these skills in low-stakes conditions, something essential for habit formation. Yet, as we all know so well, it’s students’ outlooks that so often get, well, overlooked. Read on for more.
What do you mean by “outlook” or “dispositions” toward learning?
It’s in this realm that learning strategists arguably have greater impact on academic success, as the effective deployment of learning skills requires something more fundamental: the motivation to learn. This domain of learning strategy support is more nuanced and challenging to define, but it involves working with students in all the complexities of their lives to help them develop, understand and find their own relationship with learning.
There’s no playbook to this, but we help students explore how their academic interests enmesh with their distinctive strengths, sense of purpose, identity and sources of confidence—and can yield greater, richer resourcefulness, along with a better understanding of how to contend with stress, with life’s ups and downs, with the challenges of calling upon their networks and to find both intrinsic and extrinsic guideposts as they navigate their degrees and beyond. Learning strategists support all of this.
Other than one-on-one appointments, what options are available for my students?
Learning involves complexities unique to every student, and we call our techniques strategies because they account for each individual’s personal goals and aspirations. For some students, building academic relationships that are savvy to our society’s power structures will require brand-new skills. For others, it’s more a matter of shifting one’s perspective. Some students learn best in quiet, self-paced environments. Others need the raucous energy of conversation.
We customize our approach to the individual student and we offer a variety of programs, services and resources. We’re always eager to build new collaborations with staff and faculty, including bespoke workshops, class presentations, ongoing series or programs to help students recover from academic setbacks.
What’s your approach when you have a student in crisis?
Learning strategists sometimes find themselves in situations where the complexity or urgency of a student’s situation outstrips our capacity to meaningfully intervene, and students may arrive with unrealistic expectations. The interventions we offer can be helpful at all stages of a student’s academic journey, but it’s often most helpful early on, rather than as a quick fix for serious academic precarity.
We know that students’ lives are shaped by many factors: health, accessibility challenges, employment, course selection, language, identity, age and more. Learning strategists, like our colleagues in other departments, knit these dimensions into our work, and we refer students to other services, offices and programs when specialized expertise is warranted. And indeed, many students arrive at our doors having been referred from elsewhere.
The ability to refer more directly has proven an invaluable asset, in particular for a College located less centrally. Our learning strategist has also been invaluable in working with students locally identified as having some level of academic concern, and the local presence of the learning strategist has made for a more unified approach in supporting student success.