Running head: STUDENT SERVICES PROGRAM PROPOSAL

Student Services Program Proposal

Matthew Robinson

Wright State University

Running head: STUDENT SERVICES PROGRAM PROPOSAL

Abstract
This paper serves as a proposal to address the growing concern of declining student
resilience. This issue has gained attention in recent years, notably from Dr. Peter Gray, a
psychology researcher at Boston College, and Dr. Carol S. Dweck, a psychology professor at
Stanford University. This proposal aims to create programs that provides support to students who
have difficulty coping and to guide development of resilience in those students. The solutions
given will also be based in theory, in particular Astin's Involvement theory as well as Sanford's
theory on Challenge and Support.

Running head: STUDENT SERVICES PROGRAM PROPOSAL

Challenge
Student affairs is a continually evolving field. Every day we as educators are faced with
challenges new and old. One of these new problems is declining student resilience. In an article
for Psychology Today in 2015, Dr. Peter Gray of Boston College identifies this issue and gives it
the aforementioned name of declining student resilience. In the article, Gray talks about a
meeting with the head of a Counseling Services and other faculty and staff. Gray tells us that in
these meetings he is told that calls to the counseling center have more than doubled in the last
five years and that some faculty members are afraid to give low grades because of the possible
emotional consequences (Gray, 2015). Not only is this effecting our students, but it is also
causing our faculty to be fearful of grading assignments and one of our divisions in student
affairs to become overwhelmed by the volume of cases.
When we think of the word resilience, we usually think of something that can bounce
back from a set back. For example, the way a tennis ball can be hit repeatedly and not explode on
impact. In terms of student development, Drs. Carol Dweck and David Yaeger define resilience
as, "any behavioral, attributional, or emotional response to an academic or social challenge that
is positive and beneficial for development ." Yaeger and Dweck also give a definition of what is
not resilience: "we refer to any response to a challenge that is negative or not beneficial for
development (such as helplessness, giving up, cheating, or aggressive retaliation) as not resilient
(Dweck and Yaeger, 2014, p. 303)."

Running head: STUDENT SERVICES PROGRAM PROPOSAL

When examining the situation presented to Dr. Gray, we can see that the students in his
story were exhibiting behavior that was not resilient as defined by Dweck and Yaeger. My fear
for our institution is that students will become increasingly less resilient and will eventually
begin to exhibit behaviors that are detrimental to their growth. I believe that by being proactive
in our approach, we can help reinforce behavior that is seen as resilient and begin equipping
students who demonstrate traits that are not resilient with the tools necessary to develop
resilience.

Scholarly Review
Much of the literature about declining student resilience is young and steeped in
psychology. Dr. Dweck in particular has examined this issue multiple times. In 2007, Dweck
published an article titled The Perils of Praise in which she examined the types of praise we give
our students and how that may be a detriment. Dweck describes a fixed mindset and a growth
mindset (Dweck, 2007). The fixed mindset is the idea that we only praise students on their
intelligence, not their effort, which causes them to be in a state in which they are afraid to be
judged as not smart (Dweck, 2007). Dweck found that students in the growth mindset are more
resilient and have more motivation because they are being praised for the work they put into their
studies.

Running head: STUDENT SERVICES PROGRAM PROPOSAL

To test this theory, Dweck facilitated workshops at a New York junior high school in
which students in the experimental group were also taught how their brain worked. The control
group only received training on study skills. It was found that after a few months, students who
had been exposed to the idea of growth mindset had better grades than those in the control group
(Dweck, 2007). Dweck's conclusion was that we should not be praising our students for their
intelligence, but rather the process of achievement (Dweck, 2007). Dweck closed by sating that,
"Maybe we have produced a generation of students who are more dependent, fragile, and entitled
than previous generations. If so, it's time for us to adopt a growth mind-set and learn from our
mistakes. It's time to deliver interventions that will truly boost students' motivation, resilience,
and learning (Dweck, 2007)."
Dweck went on to further expound on resilient mindsets in her research study with Dr.
Yaeger from 2012 titled Mindsets That Promote Resilience: When Students Believe That
Personal Characteristics Can Be Developed. One of the main items examined in this study was
the idea of implicit theories, or as Dweck and Yaeger describe them, "nave or lay theories
because, unlike scientific theories, they refer to a persons commonsense explanations for
everyday events (Dweck and Yaeger, 2014, p. 303)."
Yaeger and Dweck found that students' implicit theories had a direct impact on resilience
when it comes to academic and social tests (Dweck and Yaeger, 2014, p. 312). Their conclusion
echoes Dweck's earlier work in that students do not need to be praised for being smart but rather

Running head: STUDENT SERVICES PROGRAM PROPOSAL

need to be presented mindsets that see challenges as mere obstacles for them to overcome
(Dweck and Yaeger, 2014, p. 312). The last sentence in the article summarizes this point
perfectly, "When we emphasize peoples potential to change, we prepare our students to face
lifes challenges resiliently."
I want our interventions to primarily follow the work of Dweck as I feel her idea that
creating a growth mindset would be the best for us to help our students develop resiliency. That
being said, more specified research has been done in terms of resilience in specific student
populations. For example, Emine Erdogan, Oznur Ozdogan, and Mehmet Erdogan published a
study looking at Turkish students and how the factors of gender and faculty can impact
resilience. It also interesting to note their perspectives being from Turkey, a country that is male
dominated in terms of gender (Erdogan, Ozdogan, and Erdogan, 2014, p. 1266). Another study
done on resilience in nursing students done by Lisa Jean Thomas of the University of Dartmouth
also provides us with a unique example.
As more research is done we will have a greater understanding of what exactly resilience
is and how our students can begin to intentionally develop it, but we must begin taking steps now
if we are to ensure that our students are able to respond to the challenges that will arise in the
university setting as well as in life.

Running head: STUDENT SERVICES PROGRAM PROPOSAL

Analysis
When looking at how this issue is impacting our students and us as professionals, we can
look at some of the ethical standards of ACPA to guide our analysis. First, in terms of being
dedicated to enhancing the worth, dignity, potential and uniqueness of our students (ACPA p. 1),
we have an obligation to make sure that our students are in an environment that allows them to
discover themselves and grow into the person they envision themselves to be. We also have an
obligation to make sure that our students are able to face challenges when they are introduced in
their experiences. If we allow students to quit every time they are faced with adversity, are we
really fulfilling those obligations? Are we really focused on developing our students, or are we
only concerned with having glowing enrollment numbers?
Our obligations do not stop with our students. We have a responsibility to our university
and society as a whole (ACPA p. 4-5). Students who are not resilient may face challenges in
their professional careers which they may not be able to cope with and thus could cause them to
quit their jobs, lose focus in their lives, and in the worst cases, consider life to be no longer worth
living. We can not be ethical practitioners of student affairs if we allow our students to leave our
institution without all the tools required to help them reach their goals personally and
professionally.
The students on our campus are our legacy as professionals. They are the people who
portray our university's mission in their interactions with society both during and after their time

Running head: STUDENT SERVICES PROGRAM PROPOSAL

with us. There is a clear need for some of students to develop resilience in the face of challenge.
We can not be idle in our response to this challenge, and I know that if our division of student
affairs is committed to serving students, a major piece of that going forward is the decline that
our students are experiencing. It will take a certain degree of buy in from everyone, especially
those that believe that the current generation of students are simply to spoon fed, but I know that
we can begin teaching our students about resiliency and the different mindsets presented by
Dweck in order to begin enhancing their educations in new ways.

Solutions
Now that I have thoroughly introduced this issue, I would like to propose some solutions
that I think will aid our students in their development of resilience. These solutions will also
have basis in two student development theories: Astin's Involvement theory and Sanford's
Challenge and Support theory. Personally I have found these theories to be the most beneficial in
my development, and I feel that they best compliment the solutions I will be proposing to our
division.
My first proposal is to create a new series of programs on campus that will introduce
students to the idea of resilience and Dweck's growth mindset. One possible reason that we are
seeing a decline in student resilience is that our students simply do not know what it means to be

Running head: STUDENT SERVICES PROGRAM PROPOSAL

resilient. It is entirely possible that our students are in the fixed mindset that Dweck described in
2007. These programs would allow our students to see where their mindset might be and how
that effects how they respond to different types of challenge.
Our programs would also serve as a safe space for challenge to be introduced. For
example, one session can be devoted to facing loss and the emotions that come with the grieving
process. In this session, students will be presented a scenario in which one of their loved ones
passes away suddenly. We would rate their responses based on how much resiliency they exhibit,
after which we would interpret how resilient or not our participants are. Once this scenario is
complete, the facilitator would open a dialogue on how their mindsets may have influenced their
response. Our hope is that our students would recognize that if they responded in a way that was
deemed not resilient, they could then begin to work towards developing strategies to better cope
with loss.
Each of these sessions would involve a facilitator who would also provide information on
the various services around campus that are designed to serve our students. These sessions will
be completely optional for our students, but we will be intentional in our marketing of the
programs to make sure students will understand the benefit of attending just one of our sessions
offered. Challenge and support is a very large part of this program series because we are
introducing new challenges to our students while also introducing them to way that they can
begin to support themselves. Obviously we will always be here for our students, but by allowing

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them to face these challenges and learn how they deal with obstacles, we are equipping them to
be more prepared for stress in the future. Overall, I think these programs would be a great way
for us to address declining student resilience head on and would act as a great learning piece
outside of the classroom for our students.
My next proposal is to introduce a training for our faculty to understand the importance
of this issue. We may run into an issue of our faculty simply dismissing this issue as our students
being babies or simply being lazy. We need to combat this dangerous mindset as it could lead to
us losing more students due to lack of empathy by their professors. For this training to be
successful we will need to make sure just how serious this problem is for not only our students,
but also our university as a whole. As Dr. Gray described, other institutions are already facing
situations in which one bad grade could cause a student to go into a downward spiral which
could involve blaming the instructor instead of taking personal responsibility for their grade
(Gray, 2015).
This training would have to be mandatory as it is vital for all of our faculty to know why
we are pushing so hard for this issue to be recognized. The training will be led by a group
comprised of those in our division and faculty members who have already had experiences with
these types of situations. The reason for this panel is to give many voices to the problem, not just
perspectives that may be deemed to be biased towards seeing an issue when there is not one.

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This training will not only introduce declining student resilience however, we will also
introduce our faculty to their own mindsets and how they handle not only their challenges, but
also their students' responses. This will allow them to better understand how they perceive
challenge and can then adapt in order to best serve a student who may not perceive a similar
challenge in the same regard. For example, a professor from a privileged socioeconomic
background may view rising dining hall prices as simply part of running the university, where as
a student who is not from the same type of background could view those rising costs as a death
sentence on their time at our institution. The intention of this training is to make sure that in
those situations, our faculty can understand the different type of mindsets that are involved on
our campus and how they may affect responses by our students.
I think the outcome of this training will be positive. We will have equipped our faculty
with a better understanding of a major issue that is facing their students. With a well trained
faculty and staff, we will be able to better adapt to our students growing resilience problems and
provide proper support when needed.

Approval, Implementation and Evaluation

Approval to implement these programs would have to come from our division of student
affairs, as well from the academic affairs side of our university. I will open a dialogue with the

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Vice President of Student Affairs as well as our Provost so that I can share this proposal with
them as well. One other group I think we would need approval from is our students. I will poll
students to see if they think these interventions would be beneficial to them.
Next, evaluation of these programs will come in two stages. First, surveys will be given
out at both the student sessions as well as the faculty training. This will allow us get immediate
feedback so that we can determine if our intent of presenting declining student resilience as a
major issue is being met. We will also be able to make minor adjustments to each session on the
program side from these surveys. Secondly, we will do an end of the year analysis in which we
will get feedback from all involved on both programs. Facilitators, student affairs staff, faculty,
and students will all be encouraged to share what we did well and what we could improve upon.
From there we will complete a SWOT analysis and begin using that data to plan for the next
round of student sessions as well as the next faculty training.
I would also like to address some of the possible concerns about funding, approval,
implementation, and evaluation. I can already see some of the questions that will arise about my
suggested programs. How are you going to pay for this? How do you expect to get faculty to
attend a mandatory training? Is this even an issue? Is it not just that these millennials are lazy?
First, funding for the student centered programs would come from both our student
activity fee, which provides for programs like these, as well as part of the student affairs budget.
I understand that budgets are a scary thing, especially in today's climate, but to not fund these

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programs would leave our students in a place where they would have no support outside of what
is already provided, which we have seen is starting to become an issue. Overcrowding of the
counseling center, students leaving higher education, etc. I believe that these programs would
begin to help address these issues.
In response to getting faculty to attend a mandatory training, their program would be
considered a part of their professional development, which is already required by many
institutions for faculty to remain in good standing. I also believe that our faculty will take a
genuine interest in learning more about declining student resilience as it pertains to performance
in the classroom. This training will provide with not only another type of professional
development, but it will also help them connect with their students further.
Finally, I think I have already addressed why this is an important issue that is growing
each day, but to reiterate: declining student resilience effects all of us. Faculty, staff, local
community, and the like. If we do not begin addressing this issue with intention, we will be
failing in our roles as educators. Instead of teaching our students to adapt and critically think
through their challenges, we would be allowing them to think that one failure could spell disaster
in their lives. Most of all, we must remember that at the heart of this issue is our students. They
are the reason we all have jobs. We owe it to them to help them through this newest challenge.
So do I think that this is an issue? Absolutely, and if we do not do anything about it we will be
failing our students.

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References
ACPA Ethical Principal Standards. Retrieved November 29, 2016, from MyACPA,
http://www.myacpa.org/sites/default/files/Ethical_Principles_Standards.pdf
Balk, D. E., Walker, A. C., & Baker, A. (2010). Prevalence and severity of
college student bereavement examined in a randomly selected sample. Death Studies,
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Dweck, C. S. (2007). The perils and promises of praise. Kaleidoscope, Contemporary
and Classic Readings in Education, 12.
Yeager, D. S., & Dweck, C. S. (2012). Mindsets that promote resilience: When students believe
that personal characteristics can be developed. Educational Psychologist, 47(4), 302-314.
Erdogan, E., Ozdogan, O., & Erdogan, M. (2015). University Students Resilience Level: The
Effect of Gender and Faculty. Procedia-Social and Behavioral Sciences, 186, 1262-1267.
Gray, P. (2015). Declining student resilience: A serious problem for colleges. Psychology

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Today, 22.
Minulescu, M. (2015). Is university Capable to Build Resilience in Students?. Procedia-Social
and Behavioral Sciences, 180, 1628-1631.
Morrison, G. M., & Allen, M. R. (2007). Promoting student resilience in school contexts. Theory
into Practice, 46(2), 162-169.
Thomas, L. J., & Revell, S. H. (2016). Resilience in nursing students: An integrative
review. Nurse education today, 36, 457-462.