Top of mind for the chancellor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Donde Plowman, and Amber Williams, the university’s vice president of student success, is ensuring their teams—and students—are aware of and confident about their strengths as they navigate their work.
Williams, who joined the institution in 2020, soon before it fell a bit short on its retention increase goal, has found it helpful to remind colleagues that data is about individuals and showing what can be done to meet their needs. “One of my framings for leadership is that you lead through people, priorities and then projects,” she says. “People is the first thing. If you don’t get the people part right, the rest of it doesn’t work.”
So rather than thinking about falling short by a percentage point, Williams will talk about the need to reach, say, 50 additional struggling students in their efforts.
On Oct. 28, 29 and 30, student success professionals from across the country will visit UT’s campus to share their challenges and successes in supporting students at their own institution. Learn more about the Student Success US event here, and look out for ideas and advice shared at the conference in the coming weeks on Inside Higher Ed.
An edited version of the podcast, with Melissa Ezarik, Student Success editor at Inside Higher Ed, speaking with Plowman and Williams, appears below.
Inside Higher Ed: So nice to be talking with both of you. In recent years, we’ve seen student success become the main focus—or at least a larger focus—at so many colleges and universities. Can you give us a bit of perspective on how you have seen student success within higher ed progressing and evolving? Donde, can we start with you?
Donde Plowman: Thank you so much for that question. You know, we’re excited about what we’re doing here, and I think it’s unique from other schools, but everywhere I go, presidents and chancellors tell me student success is their No. 1 priority. And as a land-grant institution, it’s our responsibility not just to attract and educate students but to do it in an efficient way. And so those outcomes are important in delivering on our mission.
Inside Higher Ed: Amber, what student success work do you think makes your institution stand out in this area? Just one thing that stands out to me is your robust student success department page. You’ve got inspirational words there. You’ve got the list of helpful resources that are easy to find. And I know that your programs are robust as well. Can you share what makes you excited?
Amber Williams: I think what makes us excited about our work is that it’s led by the students. So everything we do is because it’s what our students have said they need, and we believe that anything that they need, it’s our responsibility to deliver.
Why you’re seeing such energy across our campus, across our faculty, across our staff is because we’re all working towards the same goal, which is to ensure that every student that enrolls on this campus [is] thriving. And the last thing I would say that’s a little unique about our campus is we are a strengths-based campus, meaning that we’re focused in on what students do well. And we’re focused in on helping build their confidence. We are also committed to providing the resources that they need to thrive. And it’s not just a division that is a part of that conversation, it is the entire campus. Literally, every faculty and staff member [is] committed to the success of our students.
Plowman: You know what I’m most proud of? You did not use a single metric in answering that question. And seriously, while we have great metrics and I’m thrilled with them and we can talk about them, I’m really excited that what we’re doing here is based on a philosophy. A philosophy of student well-being and actually all human beings’ well-being, but we’re focusing on students. So it’s a philosophy and the strengths [are] one part of it.
And guess what’s happened? The metrics all are flowing exactly like we want them to do. But I love the fact that we’re focusing on the students, their potential for success, their strengths, their well-being. And that’s what I’m really proud of.
Williams: It’s funny you bring that up, because when I arrived in 2020, everyone was, you know, there was that goal that we were going to hit 90 percent retention by 2020, actually.
And we had been at 86 percent. And so the campus was really, I would say, disheartened because a lot of people had put in lots of work to try to move the needle on that retention rate and it just hadn’t moved.
What I started telling the team is, let’s focus less on the number and let’s focus more on the people. And so what I started to say to them is, at the time our first-year class was like 5,200 students. So I said, look, y’all, we can find 52 students, because 1 percent was 52 students. I was like, we can find and support 52 more students. And so we kind of shifted it from those outcomes and those metrics to the people. Every single percentage point is a group of humans that have dreams and desires, and we can figure out how to get them there. It really has been one of the guiding forces behind what we have been doing.
Plowman: I love the way you reduce it to a chunk. That’s so smart, motivationally.
Inside Higher Ed: In talking with others within higher ed, is framing it that way not something that is done as often?
Plowman: I think it’s very unique to us. I don’t hear anyone talking about it. Now, we’re going to be having this big national conference, and people are going to learn more about what we do. And helping everyone with this. Because honestly, our students, when Amber arrived and began standing up this division, her observation was, our students have the skills, and they’ve been taught really well in the classroom. It doesn’t make sense that the retention rates are what they are. Absolutely. And so that was motivation to get something moving in a new direction. And boy, I couldn’t be happier with the outcomes.
Williams: I speak all over the country about student success and how to build thriving units. And no, people aren’t talking about it like breaking it down into chunks. People really are working towards this bigger goal of whatever has been set by the administration. It’s always great to have aspirational goals. But one of my framings for leadership is that you lead through people, priorities and then projects. People is the first thing. If you don’t get the people part right, the rest of it doesn’t work.
By focusing on the people first to get to that goal, I feel like is how we’ve been able to move forward so quickly.
Plowman: I think another big piece of it, Amber, honestly, is this word I keep coming back to a lot, which is alignment. And what we have on this campus that you can’t buy, you’ve got to build it. And I’m really fortunate it’s happened and it’s continuing to grow—it’s just really good alignment.
You can take it all the way to the chair of the Board of Trustees, the president, the chancellor, the provost, the vice provost, but in this case, our students and the faculty and the TAs and the department heads and the deans … We say we’re a strengths campus. It’s hard to find somebody on this campus who hasn’t heard about strengths. Now, not everybody can tell you their top five strengths.
Williams: We’re getting there.
Plowman: But students know, if I see them on campus, I’ll say, tell me what your top five strengths are.
And because the alignment is we’re all using it. I use it with my team. You have campuses where, “Oh, student success, that’s the provost’s job,” or “that’s the business school’s job for their students.” That doesn’t produce the results you want. Amber has the led the way.
We’re learning how to redeploy people into the kind of work we want people to be doing versus maybe what they were doing.
To have a whole week of activities the first week of school, and one night we have 7,000 kids in the union, filling the place, doing what I would call really wholesome activities.
Williams: The alignment piece is important. I talk about a lot, there’s got to be alignment amongst the administration on what the goals are. And having a chancellor and a provost that 100 percent are behind the success of our students makes my job really easy. That backing and support, it sets the tone for the culture of the campus and has a lot to of the with our success.
Inside Higher Ed: Are you one of many who keep their strengths as part of their email signature?
Plowman: I don’t put it as a tagline on my email, but I’m strategic achiever, positivity, futuristic, maximizer and woo six.
Williams: But it’s on her website. If you go to the chancellor’s page, every member of the chancellor’s cabinet has their strengths out there. She works with them on their strengths all the time. Definitely within student success, we all have our strengths, the student life team. But you know what’s really great is that our faculty also have their strengths, or many of them do. Over 500 of our faculty have done the strengths assessment and are utilizing it as well. And they’re adopting it in some ways in their classroom, and they’re also thinking about it about how they can even strengthen the work they do in their departments.
And we’ve used the knowledge we’ve learned from strengths to better understand our students and to think about how we can support them differently. So for example, we hosted this conference last year called the Thrive Summit. Arthur Brooks was our speaker at the Thrive Summit, and [we are] super excited that he’ll be at the Inside Higher Ed conference as well. He’s phenomenal.
At that conference, we talked about how to adopt a well-being pedagogy into the classroom. And we had a specific session on how to enhance students’ strengths in the classroom. There were probably 50 or so faculty in that session. And we gave them resources about how they could adopt some activities in their classroom that align with the work they’re doing in the classroom, but also helps elevate a student’s strengths at the same time, which ultimately we believe will help engage them and empower them.
Plowman: I think what was cool, too, about the faculty is that nobody said, “Here, you need to do this.” It just kind of came naturally their saying, so what is this strengths thing that all the students are doing? Amber’s even been over to departments. I won’t name them, but certain departments that you would not imagine, saying, can you lead us in a strengths thing?
Inside Higher Ed: Sounds like you’re all walking the walk and talking the talk.
Plowman: We’re trying.
Inside Higher Ed: In terms of your recent efforts, one thing from a service standpoint that kind of stands out to me is your extended services initiative. Three days a week, some offices are open till 8 p.m. now. Has that started this fall?
Williams: Yes! It started this fall right after Labor Day. We have Student Success Express, and this was again born out of our students saying that they needed to see us outside of normal business hours, and I had one student in particular that said, “I have class all day and then I go to work, but I need to go talk.” He was this specific student [who] wanted to go speak with a career coach, and, you know, we closed at 5 o’clock and it couldn’t work for him.
And again, by listening to our students, that’s how we’ve guided our work. After having some conversations with students, we went back to the team and I said, “This is what our students are saying. They’re saying they need support in the evening, so how can we make this work?”
And it’s been such a phenomenal project and it’s been the whole division on board with this. So we’re all taking turns. From a well-being perspective of our staff, because you have over 100 people volunteering, that means nobody has more than two shifts a semester. And I have office hours in the evening as well. It’s from 5 until 8 o’clock Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, and it’s been phenomenal. We’ve had students come by to get guidance like academic coaching if they’ve had some struggles in some of their courses and they want to figure out, you know, how to work through their study skills.
I will tell you our most popular sessions have actually been our career coaching and career workshops. We’re not even fully a month in, but we have been thrilled with it, and it’s something we are absolutely going to continue doing and we’ve been busy just in this first month, so I can only imagine what it’s going to look like towards the end of the semester after midterms and students are getting ready for finals.
Inside Higher Ed: So I would imagine you’re tracking the outcomes in terms of extra students reached or extra sessions?
Williams: Absolutely, and one thing I would say is kind of a note for us that I think is helping us is that not every office is open. So what we’ve done is taken the offices and moved them to the library. Our library is like the living room of the campus. It’s a beautiful space. It’s lots of traffic. And so we bring the services to the library in the evening, which is where the students are already at. That is part of the reason that we’ve been so successful because we’re not saying, “Go to five different offices on campus,” we’re saying, no, we’re where you’re at. All these people are here, and there’s peer learning assistance, whatever you need is here, and we’re here, too.
And we’ve also been hosting workshops in the evenings at the same place where the Student Success Express is being housed, and we’ve seen increased attendance in some of those workshops because it’s co-marketed with the Student Success Express.
Inside Higher Ed: That’s wonderful. It seems like one of those things that everybody kind of gets from a logical level it would be great to be able to do that. But in terms of actually implementing it, not so easy.
Williams: Yes, and I will say that we had some people who were like, are you sure you can pull this off? Absolutely. Together, we can do anything. Separately, it wouldn’t have been successful if every office would have opened their own. But I also think it’s been good for our team. Actually, I just met with our team members earlier today. It’s been good for their well-being to also build relationships from other staff from other offices because they’re working shifts together. So they’re also sharing information and just being more creative and building their own relationships by taking on these shifts as well.
Inside Higher Ed: That’s a key part of the essence of student success work, the wanting to break down silos further and get to know people. So, a natural way to do that.
Plowman: You know, we spend a lot of time here talking about how do we move this big, huge ship that’s the university, move it more quickly than we would, than sometimes happens. And stories like that are just so reinforcing, that when you let people figure it out on their own, they come up with so much more creative solutions. That just inspires me, that story so much, that this ship is moving. And it’s student-centered. And then it’s, well, let’s let the staff try to solve that problem. That inspires me.
Inside Higher Ed: When you think about student success and perhaps specific populations of students who are launching or continuing in college, what worries you the most?
Plowman: One of the things that I didn’t know enough to be worried about before I took this job was the idea that you can’t treat every student the same. I didn’t know that. If I had known it, I should have been really worried, because one bland approach to student success that’s the same for everyone, it’s not going to work. And so one of the things I like here is the way Amber’s team continues to find specialized groups, people with common needs, and work with them.
Williams: I don’t know if I would say it worries me, but I feel the sense of responsibility that, if we admit a student to the University of Tennessee, that we graduate them and that we help them to find the careers that they’re looking for. And that responsibility, I would say in some ways, weighs on me, because I understand that we’re dealing with people’s dreams and the smallest thing can sometimes divert a person from their dream. Now, I know that there are many pathways to get to a dream. And so my hope is that we’re providing the resources to help them navigate whatever pathway that is. And it doesn’t have to be the straight and narrow pathway.
And so I guess if there’s anything that worries me, it would be that a young person chooses to change the dream because they don’t see a clear path. And if that happens, then I feel like that’s on us. It is our responsibility to connect with them, to get them the right resources and to help them figure out what is the appropriate path to thrive.
That path looks different for every person. They all come to the table with different lived experiences. They all come to the table with their own anxieties and fears. And so it’s figuring out how to understand the essence of an individual so that we can kind of help them walk down whatever path that might be.
Inside Higher Ed: Individual students, individual dreams, individual pitfalls and things to look out for, right?
Plowman: And having said that, one of the things that I’m so encouraged by, again, it’s maybe it relates this idea of scaling, but in this division, they have identified that there are certain risks that, let’s say, veterans face that aren’t faced by 18-year-old students. And there are certain risks that young people from small schools in rural parts of Tennessee face, or first-generation students, or men of color—for us, that’s another unique group. And so you take the combination of every one of those students has a dream. And yet they share challenges or risks with some other folks who have their dreams. And I think I’m really proud of the way the Division of Student Success has found ways to bring people together and deliver services in a really smart way that does both: Pursue your dream, and at the same time, hey, here’s some folks who may even have similar dreams to you, but we know they’ve got some of the same types of opportunities ahead of them.
Inside Higher Ed: So you’re kind of leading into my next question. What do you celebrate the most?
Plowman: 91.9 percent retention rate. I’m so proud that we’ve done that in five years. That’s unheard-of, honestly. And I think the other thing is our four-year graduation rate has moved. And of course the great thing about the retention moving is that we’re going to really feel that in the graduation rates in another couple years. So that’s important, because this state does not have enough people with college degrees. And we have businesses moving here like crazy. And right now there are 360,000 jobs vacant in Tennessee that require a four-year degree.
And so we’re doing two things in student success. We’re absolutely helping every one of these young people find their dreams, learn their strengths and be successful in college. But we’re also responding to the state’s need for a workforce. And that’s something to be proud of, the workforce part of it. That hasn’t always been on the tip of our tongue as a university to say, you know, we owe industry good workers. I really feel strongly that we owe industry, communities, organizations, people prepared for the future. And so that’s really why I’m emotional about the success we’re having, is because the state can do better and I see us contributing to that.
Inside Higher Ed: It’s good place to be in, that’s for sure. And we will be joining you Oct. 28, 29 and 30 … for the Student Success US Conference on your campus. We’re so glad you’re hosting it. So Inside Higher Ed and Times Higher Education will be there with you putting on this event. Can you each tell me what you’re most looking forward to?
Plowman: Well, first of all thank you for letting us partner with you. I think the thing I’m most looking forward to is meeting folks from other universities and hearing and learning what they’re doing as well. I’m excited about that and I’m excited for people to hear what we’re doing.
Williams: I would just echo what the chancellor said. I attended your conference last year, and it was such a phenomenal learning experience. One of the things that I really appreciated about the conference is that it was a conference where it was very engaging. So it wasn’t people just lecturing at us, but we were a part of the conversation. I look forward to being a part of this year’s conversation as well.
I really value the way the conference is organized, and I think it really does create the opportunity to build relationships, make connections and networks, but to learn at the same time. I guess I’m also super excited that we have some phenomenal keynote speakers who I think are just gonna inspire the community and I think further, you know, push us forward and think differently from the panel that Chancellor Plowman and other presidents will be on, where they’ll be talking about how to lead, what does it look like leading with integrity in this environment right now. Or whether it’s Dr. Arthur Brooks, who will be talking to us about how to adopt happiness and well-being inside and outside of the classroom, or the CEO of Gallup, or the vice president of Lumina talking to us about the state of higher education.
I’m thrilled to have our colleagues on campus and I just can’t wait.
Inside Higher Ed: Looking forward to all the conversations, seeing people come together from different departments. Love when people bring multiple members of their team from their campus, too. We’re looking forward to that again. We are grateful that you all want to welcome us to your city and to your campus.
Williams: Thank you so much for the opportunity to partner with you, and we look forward to seeing everyone.