University of Washington professor Elizabeth Kirk regularly arrives early to her introduction to nutrition class and stands outside the lecture hall to welcome her students inside — all 500 of them. She also grants every student email a personal response, reflecting a philosophy that the essential transaction of higher education is the connection between instructors and students.

But lately, Kirk has watched her students become increasingly withdrawn and has been eager to try out new ways to engage them. A recently launched, interdisciplinary initiative at U.W., called Five for Flourishing, wants to help. 

In 2024, a team of U.W. administrators spanning student and academic affairs developed Five for Flourishing to guide faculty members like Kirk in the implementation of strategies to promote connection in the biggest classes across the university's three campuses. 

The strategies are: adding language to class syllabi that expresses support for student wellbeing; setting up a slide before each class offering wellness resources or prompting students to engage with one another; reminding students before major assignments that they are opportunities to grow rather than reflections of intelligence; organizing small student groups that meet weekly; and instituting mid-quarter evaluations for students to offer feedback on the course.

Taken together, the strategies mean to improve wellbeing by cutting through the feelings of anonymity that can run rampant in huge classes. The interventions set the precedent that professors want to connect with students and care about their personal and academic success. The intended outcomes — sense of belonging, classroom engagement, and intellectual risk-taking, among others — are those often associated with smaller courses and more intimate faculty-student dynamics.

Part wellness intervention, part student success initiative, Five for Flourishing grew out of the needs of several departments. Its dual focus is captured in its interdisciplinary leadership, which includes the provost’s office, the Center for Teaching and Learning, and the U.W. Resilience Lab, a hub for campus wellbeing efforts.

The interventions set the precedent that professors want to connect with students and care about their personal and academic success.

According to Penelope Moon, the director of the Center for Teaching and Learning, what makes Five for Flourishing unique is the way all five interventions come together, and the unlikely team that assembled them. “The package is an innovation,” she said. “The partnership is an innovation.”

Marisa Nickle, the senior director of strategy and academic initiatives, laid the groundwork for Five for Flourishing. While U.W. staff may be “naturally collaborative,” she said, they tend to be “structurally siloed.” That was a barrier she was prepared to overcome.

With her boss, vice provost for academic and student affairs Philip Reid, Nickle had attended the presentation of another wellbeing initiative that she liked but feared was overly complicated. Curious about how a simpler version could work at U.W., they sought advice from Moon as well as Megan Kennedy, the director of the Resilience Lab, which promotes campus wellbeing through research, education, and strategic programs.  

Kennedy was ready to lend her expertise and welcomed the cross-departmental nature of the initiative. “I think the question universities are trying to answer around mental health is: How do we distribute the responsibility beyond student life and the counseling center and crisis services?” she said.

What many institutions need, Kennedy added, is “a really clear pathway for how everyone can take responsibility.”

But wellbeing interventions in academic spaces are not always easy to implement for time-pressed faculty. Nickle said a major question steering the work was: “How can we bring student success into the classroom and do that in that lightweight way that also thanks faculty for their time and effort?” 

With Kennedy and Moon both on board, and critical support and funding from Vice Provost Reid, the group began to develop an official program, first by deciding on the strategies themselves.  

“It came together fairly quickly,” Moon said. "It was pretty easy to identify the things that probably would help, and then we dug into the literature to confirm suspicions.”

“How can we bring student success into the classroom and do that in that lightweight way that also thanks faculty for their time and effort?” 

Once the five strategies were established, the team turned to enlisting faculty members for a two-year pilot phase of the project, during which educators would institute the interventions in two classes. The recruitment didn’t present much trouble, given plenty of professors, like Kirk, were already interested in incorporating these kinds of learner-centered techniques. 

Not surprisingly, Kirk had been using some of the Five for Flourishing strategies before the program existed. Mid-term evaluations, for example, were standard practice for her and continue to be. She’s long valued how they allow students to feel heard and her to respond to their needs in real time.

Other interventions, though, were new to Kirk, like the “growth-mindset” reminders. It’s another way she’s appreciated being able to establish a rapport with her students. 

“This is just my way of assessing how well I'm getting across to you — how well you are understanding what it is I'm saying,” she now tells her class before tests. “Because if I need to revisit some things, I want to do that.”

While Kirk doesn’t expect one practice to expel her students’ performance anxiety completely, she thinks they appreciate the sentiment. One even wrote in the course feedback that the language “made me feel calmer.”

Samantha Robinson, a professor in the chemistry department, teaches lectures with between 100 and 300 students. The uphill battle is made steeper by chemistry’s reputation as one of the most difficult and demanding subjects. 

“They hear horror stories. They’re under this impression that we're ‘weed-out’ classes,” Robinson said. “And that isn't ever our goal.”

In 2025, Robinson started implementing Five for Flourishing in two courses that tend to draw those without strong chemistry backgrounds — those who might feel particularly uncomfortable or nervous about the class.

“Those are really great student populations for this sort of an initiative because they are feeling pretty intimidated to be in a STEM class in a lot of cases,” Robinson said. Five for Flourishing, she hoped, could increase their sense of belonging and support. 

Over time, Robinson determined which elements of the program she found helpful. She likes the syllabus and growth-mindset language and the “moment-to-arrive” slides. The midterm evaluations present more of a challenge because, given the highly structured nature of her courses, she can’t plan to change much about them half-way through the term.

Both Robinson and Kirk came out with mixed reviews of the effort to have students meet weekly in small groups. They know it’s difficult to get students to get together on their own outside of class.

Robinson found that the students in a 120-person course were more likely to meet than those in her 285-person class. Kirk tweaked the structure so that the groups gathered during “quiz sections,” a pre-existing T.A.-led class time. 

More formal assessment of the initiative has also been ongoing since the beginning thanks to the contributions of Lovenoor Aulck, a data scientist working in the provost’s office. 

Aulck developed pre- and post-course surveys to assess the impact of the five interventions on students’ reported sense of belonging, confidence, and academic support, among other measures. Aulck said he’s found “small positive gains,” based on data from the first year of implementation. 

Some of the promising findings include that, by course end, students were more likely to indicate feeling accepted and comfortable being themselves in class and less likely to indicate feeling worried about being judged negatively based on their identity.

But data collection is in its pilot phase as much as the rest of the program; and the Five for Flourishing staff plans to continue tweaking each facet of the work as needed.

That doesn’t mean the program can’t grow at the same time. Already, the group has collaborated with the University of Georgia to help engineer its own version of Five for Flourishing called Wellbeing by Design.  

As the U.W. team monitors their own progress, and swaps stories with partners near and far, perhaps students nationwide will begin to find their big classrooms feel a little smaller.

You can reach LearningWell Reporter Mollie Ames at mames@learningwellmag.org with comments, ideas, or tips.