Instructor resources

Enhancing the classroom experience

The Student Success Office (SSO) collaborates with faculty, staff, and student leaders to support student success by integrating key learning skills into the student experience.

Purposely integrating academic skills into the classroom brings the resources directly to the students where they are able to apply them best. We currently have a variety of resources that you can use in your course. 

To learn more about the academic success and retention team's work, contact Angela Rooke. Or email ssolearn@uwaterloo.ca if you have questions about how we can support you.

Learning Skills Evaluation

There are key learning skills and strategies that are important for students to strengthen and/or develop in university. The Learning Skills Evaluation is a 36-item tool that helps students gain insight into their strengths and areas for improvement to help them succeed academically.

How to use this tool

Instructors could recommend the Learning Skills Evaluation to students, or could choose to assign completing the evaluation as a course activity. The evaluation takes approximately 10 minutes to complete and is designed to be a self-reflection exercise where students gain insight into the learning skills and strategies that they can improve on.

Special requests

The SSO can provide instructors with a report of the aggregate results from the evaluation and average scores per subscale, and/or recommend five minute academic skills presentations and other initiatives you could implement in your course based on those results.

We can also help instructors with confirming student participation if there is a grade incentive to complete the evaluation, however we cannot share individual student results. Contact SSO Learning at ssolearn@uwaterloo.ca to learn more. 

Five minute academic skills presentations

Short academic skills presentations are available for instructors to customize and integrate into their courses. The presentations focus on providing 'just-enough-just-in-time' information to support student academic development. 

These presentations benefit students by:

  • Introducing and/or reinforcing key academic skills
  • Supporting help-seeking behaviours by illustrating key campus resources
  • Strengthening connections and sense of support from instructors

Access the presentations

Download the presentations from the Campus Access Sharepoint folder. After you download the file, you can edit the presentation to include specific details for your course, program and/or faculty.

What presentation topics are offered?

Five minute academic skills presentations are continually adapted and developed for the following themes:

  • Introductory Skills (i.e. organizing your learning, coping with stress)
  • Reinforcement Skills (i.e. backwards planning your time, concentration)
  • Study Skills (i.e. the study cycle, Bloom’s Taxonomy)
  • Academic Integrity Skills (i.e. integrating outside sources, citation and referencing)
  • Teamwork Skills (i.e. team contracts, team meetings)
  • Test and Exam Skills (i.e. test-taking strategies, reviewing returned tests)

What's included in the presentations?

Presentation content typically includes the following:

  • Detailed speaker’s notes to help instructors communicate the content and key messages

  • Suggestions for when to implement a five-minute presentation during the term

  • Opportunities to edit the material to reflect the course and/or faculty

  • Student reflection and activity

SMART Program

The SSO provides micro-courses that students can access by self-enrolling through the Student Success Office LEARN site, titled ‘SMART Program.’ They offer a range of topics that students can explore independently to develop and reflect on their academic skills in university.

Each micro-course should take students approximately 30-45 to complete.

Current topics include: 

  • Time management: This micro-course is designed to help students recognize the importance of time management to their success, develop effective time management skills to manage their time, and identify priorities to work more efficiently.
  • Note-taking: This micro-course provides students the opportunity to explore various note-taking and active listening strategies to help them focus their attention, identify key information, and develop effective note-taking skills in the classroom.
  • Self-advocacy: This micro-course is designed to build students' skills in help-seeking, particularly in reflection upon their own learning development, recognition of when and what they need help for, where to seek help and how to communicate it.

To enrol, students should:

  1. Log into Waterloo LEARN
  2. Choose "Self Registration" from the top menu
  3. Scroll down the list of courses to find:
    Course code SSO_Academic_Support
    Course name SMART program (Student Success Office)
  4. Register and begin the micro-courses

Important note: Instructors can review the micro-courses by following the student enrollment instructions. You can also embed these micro-courses into your LEARN course shell. To do so, please email ssolearn@uwaterloo.ca for the files and instructions.

More instructor resources: