91ֿ Professor Mary Russell, Ph.D., recalls the very day she realized that her participation in the Belonging Champions program was transforming her and her classroom.
Russell, who teaches biological sciences at 91ֿ at Trumbull, had merely revamped her course syllabus to include on the first page: “You belong in this room. You belong at 91ֿ. You belong here.”
“I had a student email me and say, ‘I have never felt like I belong at any classroom at 91ֿ, ever, until you said that.’ Wow, goosebumps,” Russell told 91ֿ Today.
And all she had done was revamp her course syllabus.
“Even just doing that affected my students,” she said.
Those immediate results were enough for Russell to want to participate in the Belonging Champions program. After three semesters, she is now serving as a facilitator for a new cohort of faculty members.
“It has been transformative,” Russell said.
Belonging Champions is a program that brings together groups of faculty to learn about practices that have been found to improve the student experience in courses, which, in turn, improves student success, retention and persistence rates.
Denise Bartell, Ph.D., senior associate vice president for regional faculty and student success, said the program is reinvigorating faculty and transforming student experiences.
“We know that when students feel as if they belong, when they feel as if we believe in their capacity to be successful, when they see the relevance of what they are doing toward their personal goals, they are more likely to persist in the face of challenge, they are more likely to reach out when they need help, and they tend to learn more,” Bartell said.
Enrollment at the Regional Campuses has increased, suggesting that the program is having a positive effect on student success. In the three semesters since the program has been active, the Regional Campuses have seen the following:
- Regional Campus overall enrollment for the Spring 2025 Semester is up 5.7%
- Enrollment for first-year students is up 5.4% and for sophomores up 10% across the regional system compared to Spring 2024 Semester.
- The persistence rate of first-year students – those who persist in their studies after the fall semester to the spring – is up 4.9% from 2024.
Bartell said when administrators dove deeper into the data, they discovered that some of the strongest gains were among historically underserved student populations.
The persistence rate increased for part-time students by 11.6%, for adult first-year students by 6.7%, for first-generation students by 6.7%, and for underrepresented students by 9.9%.
Belonging Champions began on the Regional Campuses and to date, 140 faculty members have participated. The group began with instructors who teach first-year courses and students, knowing that students who have a better sense of belonging and connection to their courses and instructors are more likely to persist in their coursework.
Students are surveyed, the results are given to their instructors, and the faculty teams are offered resources for dealing with various issues.
“What I’ve learned is our students have needs, and if we don’t meet these needs, no matter how good you are at delivering content, there is a definite segment of the population that you can’t reach, no matter how intelligent they are, you can’t reach them,” Russell said. “And it is incumbent upon us to learn how to reach them, we are educators.”
Belonging Champions teaches teachers that all students need to have certain needs met before they can learn, no matter how adept an instructor is at teaching.
Among the most important are a sense of belonging, identity safety, and having their basic needs and security met, including food security.
“Basic needs and security, that broke my heart,” said Russell, who has been teaching at 91ֿ for 21 years.
“I had built up this wall over 21 years,” Russell said. “I felt that I didn’t need to know the details of my students’ lives. If they’re not coming to class, if they’re not accomplishing what they are supposed to, that’s on them. We’re all grownups. Because of Belonging Champions, I have taken down that wall. We all interact more. I learn about them, and I found out there are so many reasons why they are not necessarily able to meet these arbitrary walls that I put up.”
One such arbitrary wall, for example, was over granting students time extensions to complete work. If a student asked for an extension, Russell typically would grant it. Yet many students didn’t even realize they could ask – and those are the types of barriers Russell has begun to remove to level the playing field and set everyone up equally for success.
And Russell has learned that being flexible doesn’t mean a course becomes less rigorous academically.
Associate Professor James Seelye, Ph.D., had a similar experience.
Seelye, who is in his 15th year teaching American history at 91ֿ Stark, said he was intrigued when he first read about the Belonging Champions program.
“It probably ended up being the single most transformative thing I have ever done related to my entire teaching career,” he said. “It put me in a place to be much more mindful of who my students are and what they need to succeed.”
“Our students are people with lives that are very intense and really busy, and they have things going on that we might not think about, and I don’t think that’s just Regional Campus students,” Seelye continued.
Like Russell, Seelye also revamped his syllabus to reflect better who he is as a person and instructor – someone who was there to help.
“I just made a lot of subtle changes that I think really help my students realize that I’m here for them,” he said. “I want them to feel secure and safe. I want students to realize that they do belong here and that this university is a welcoming place where everybody belongs, so no matter who they are, what their background is, no matter what they have going on in their lives, they are in the right place.”
Russell said the cost of a college education today is too great for students to start and not finish their degrees. “Those stakes are too high,” she said.
This semester, the program is expanding to faculty on the Kent Campus, and Russell is serving as a facilitator for a Kent Campus group.
Instructors attend a virtual one-hour meeting each week with other faculty, to chat about student success issues and get introduced to resources that may help.
For many faculty, the sessions quickly became their favorite hour of the week.
“It was such a rewarding hour every week that went by so quickly and it was just really great to see how many of our colleagues were really interested in this kind of work and how we can improve our students’ experiences here,” Seelye said.
Russell agreed.
“That is my safe place. It is where I get my strength, my recharge,” she said. “We support each other and the senior leadership models grace, they show us grace, which has reminded me how to show grace to my students. I really, really enjoy teaching again. It has reinvigorated me.”