Bryant pushes freshmen out of comfort zones

LEARNING THE ROPES: Rhode Island Community Food Bank CEO Andrew Schiff, left, explains his organization’s operations to freshmen in Bryant’s experiential learning program: Innovation and Design Experience for All. / COURTESY PAT O’CONNOR
LEARNING THE ROPES: Rhode Island Community Food Bank CEO Andrew Schiff, left, explains his organization’s operations to freshmen in Bryant’s experiential learning program: Innovation and Design Experience for All. / COURTESY PAT O’CONNOR

Bryant University freshman Andrew Morgan did not like giving up three days of winter for a course that earned him a single credit.
Worse, as the Innovation and Design Experience for All program got underway last month before the semester officially even began, he was frustrated to learn from his student mentor, junior Renee Lawlor, that creating a PowerPoint model of the project he was embarking on with four other freshmen would not be acceptable. But that frustration soon gave way to the realization that the more challenging route might be best.
“Even when we wanted to take the easy way out, she made us create the app,” said Morgan.
Using the Web-design site Weebly, their app, which actually functions, makes it easier for Providence hotel guests to discover and explore the surrounding cultural attractions, restaurants and historical sites.
Over the three-day program, with days for some teams stretching from 8 a.m. to 1 a.m. or 2 a.m. the next morning, Lawlor’s stipulation carried its own rewards. Morgan’s team, which included fellow freshmen Daniel Cash, Jacob Garfinkel, Leah Rossi and Ashley Thibodeau, would go on to create a winning prototype, one of 12 winners in the program.
The IDEA program, refined in its second year, is an immersive, entrepreneurial, boot-camp-style course, part of Bryant’s “First-year Gateway Initiative.” The Gateway initiative, required of all 893 freshmen, uses a 13-credit core curriculum designed to improve writing proficiency, critical thinking, cultural awareness and ethical reasoning.
During the program, students with differing personalities are put in teams of five, which are in turn organized in cohorts of five teams each, and overseen by more than 100 mentors that include upperclassmen, alumni, staff and faculty, said management professor Michael Roberto. The teams start out with project ideas, have to research them not only online but by going to businesses including hotels or malls or nonprofits such as the Rhode Island Community Food Bank, then use the design-thinking process to create a prototype, which includes brainstorming and testing the prototype, he said.
The prototype mockups were evaluated by 50 judges culled from community organizations, the business community and alumni.
A program like this one, that challenges students to work collaboratively, network and research in the real world as well as online, are the kinds of skills required in today’s workplace.
“The real need is because … today if [students] don’t know how to innovate and create, they will be left behind, or they will join firms that may be disrupted. We feel like we have to equip them to be innovators and be adaptive,” Roberto said.
Though not a conscious goal in the beginning, Roberto said, the Gateway program last year, as whole, helped boost retention of students from freshman to sophomore year, with fewer freshmen being put on academic probation. In addition, there were more students on the Dean’s List (3.2 GPA or above) and more on the President’s List (4.0), he said.
The IDEA program came to Roberto as a way to innovate in teaching, as well as in the way students learn, he said.
“We were going through a curriculum overhaul and looking to make it more relevant,” Roberto said.
The way it would work, he decided, was for mentors to guide and facilitate, not lecture, and to provide mentors from different groups that could actually network long term with the students that they connected with.
“Research shows if you can identify and develop a mentor early on, students are much more successful,” he said. •

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