Supporting Your Students

Mentoring NYU Abu Dhabi students for academic success involves guiding them in thoughtful academic planning, decision making, and goal setting. A powerful place to start is by asking your students: “What is your learning strategy for thriving in this course?” This will prompt students to actually identify their tools for success and where the support is available to do meet their goals.

3 Ways to Support Students in Your Class

Trauma-Informed and Equity-Centered Pedagogy

Trauma-informed and equity-centered practices and resources

Encourage (or require) students to visit your office hours, either face-to-face or virtually. Build rapport around thriving in the course generally and around future goals, to make the relationship more comfortable. Your availability will yield connectedness to evolve into constructive and education engagements for your learners.
Establishing trust in your classroom will help support your learners as individuals. When students feel like they belong, this also encourages their responsibility to the classroom community. When students feel as though they do not belong this can distract them, and prevent them from being full present for their learning. You can send group voice/audio messages via email regularly. You can host small group office hours in 3-4 students from your class.
Undergraduate students are face extraordinary pressure during their college experience. They are learning to self-regulate their responsibilities and time-commitments while adjusting to adult life. Be generous in feedback and maintain empathy for your students. We want students to experience product struggle so they can be independent learners. But we want to guide them through that process with empathy.

“For culturally and linguistically diverse students, their opportunities to develop habits of mind and cognitive capacities are limited or non-existent because of education inequality. The result is their cognitive growth is stunted, leaving them dependent learners, unable to work to their full potential.” - Zaretta Hammond, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students, 2014

At NYU Abu Dhabi we have extensive support for all our learners. As their teacher, you can guide them to the below additional support mechanisms.

Holding Effective Office Hours

Close student-faculty interaction is a key characteristic of NYU Abu Dhabi, office hours are excellent opportunities for student mentorship, and can enhance student motivation and learning.

What are office hours?

Office hours are student-faculty consultations where students may ask additional questions related to course content, get feedback, seek clarification on assignments, and get academic support. Faculty at NYUAD are required to hold office hours.

Enhancing Office Hours

Office hours are used by faculty and instructors to reinforce the tone they create in their courses, giving students the impression that they are available, personable, caring, and ready to listen and provide aid. Learn how to use office hours to successfully expand the possibility to improve teaching and learning.

Our teaching-related support videos are currently only available to the NYU/NYU Shanghai/NYU Abu Dhabi Faculty via login.

Office Hours Best Practices

Whether you have set office hours or have them by appointment only, be sure that your students are well aware of how they can meet with you.

Try to make office hours at a time when students have fewer conflicts or provide appointment options for students who have a more crowded schedule.

Give an estimated time-frame for each visit, and the maximum number of students you can see each day.

If you see students by appointment, offer a specific place where students can sign up. Make it as user-friendly as possible. Some options include: Bookme, Calendy, Google Calendar, or NYU Connect.

Make sure you provide the location of the office hours, and specify whether online or in-person.

Be clear about when and where you hold office hours in your syllabus
Whether you have set office hours or have them by appointment only, be sure that your students are well aware of how they can meet with you.
Try to make office hours at a time when students have fewer conflicts or provide appointment options for students who have a more crowded schedule.
Give an estimated time-frame for each visit, and the maximum number of students you can see each day.
If you see students by appointment, offer a specific place where students can sign up. Make it as user-friendly as possible. Some options include: Bookme, Calendy, Google Calendar, or NYU Connect.
Make sure you provide the location of the office hours, and specify whether online or in-person.

If office hour attendance is mandatory, specify whether students are required to prepare or come prepared to discuss.
Some students may not be familiar with the concept of office hours. Explain why students should come to office hours and make clear what purpose they serve.

Examples include:
- To discuss an assignment.
- To discuss strategies for studying the material or engaging better in class.
- To discuss readings or problem sets.
- To review an exam or research project outcome
Traditionally, students meet one-on-one with the faculty member. However, a group setting sometimes works better because it creates a less intimidating atmosphere, is less awkward, and more fun. Being in a group can put students at ease and for larger classes, this is more efficient for the faculty member.

To make office hours less intimidating, think about alternate names such as: feedback sessions, course consultations, or mentoring time.

Student Success Coaching

Academic and personal coaching is available for your students:

Student Success supports students with academic and personal coaching to help students thrive at NYUAD. Our success coaches meet with students individually to provide one-to-one coaching where they share strategies, build specific skills and create action plans to help students meet their personal and academic goals.

These coaches can help your students with the transition to and through their college years. You can refer students here if you think they need more guidance on self-regulated behavior, and how to navigate college-life practices. These services are important, because when students can reach their full potential, it significantly improves their well-being, creates a more meaningful academic journey — and most importantly — fosters a greater sense of belonging for them.

Who is the NYUAD Student Learner?

It is critical to understand who the NYUAD learner is to support effective teaching and deeper student learning. Each learner from our diverse student body is distinctive, but they all share a desire to learn, and to live together in Abu Dhabi, UAE. This video shares some practical strategies for fostering belonging in your classroom amongst NYUAD’s diverse student body.

Our teaching-related support videos are currently only available to the NYU/NYU Shanghai/NYU Abu Dhabi Faculty via login

NYUAD Success Coaches can help students with:

Identifying what it means to be a successful college student
Goal-setting
Building capacity around college-level study techniques and exam preparation
Resiliency
Cultivating or improving time management skills
Combating imposter syndrome
Managing stress
Navigating classroom dynamics
Managing communication with faculty
Cultivating healthy relationships
Supporting first-generation and low-income students with accessing university resources
Schedule a session with the Student Success team

For questions, or to make a referral contact:
Tina Wadhwa, Director, Student Success and Well-being

Library for Learning

The NYU Abu Dhabi Library provides resources and technologies needed for research and teaching and an extensive range of physical and electronic resources for the NYUAD community.

Research librarians have specific subject expertise that can applied to the content development of your syllabus. They are available to host research sessions for your students to walk them through relevant databases and research strategies. They are also available to help cover citations and academic integrity with your students.

Research librarians also create customized, online research guides with detailed research guidelines and links to library resources and services that will be beneficial for class assignments and research projects.

Find a Research Librarian specific to a subject area
Archives and Special Collections materials are available to NYUAD students, faculty, and staff, as well as qualified researchers from the UAE and abroad. Their goal is to provide access to rare and unique primary sources to support, enrich, and augment the research interests of students and faculty, and to document the history of NYUAD through the collection and preservation of archival material.

They offer access to the NYUAD reading room, short-term loans for teaching and/or exhibition on a case-by-case basis, photocopies, and digital photography services.

View the NYUAD Special collections list
Arabic Collections Online (ACO) is a publicly available digital library of public domain Arabic language content, providing digital access to printed books drawn from rich Arabic collections of prominent libraries.

Browse the Collection

The Center for Academic Technology (CAT) is the one-stop shop where NYU Abu Dhabi students, faculty, and staff can receive help with their academic technology needs.

The team supports students, faculty, and staff in using technology, software, and equipment for their teaching and research. This team also supports classroom technology services and audio-visual services on campus. They are located in the NYUAD Library.

Services CAT Offer

They have specialized equipment, software, and training sessions to get you up to speed.

Service	Description
Equipment Loans	Borrow equipment — including laptops, DSLR and video cameras, headphones, tablets, hard drives, and accessories.
NYU Classes	Step-by-step instructions for faculty and students so you can get the most out of NYU Classes.
Software for Research and Teaching	From Adobe Creative Cloud to Visual Studio, we provide support in procuring, licensing, installation, and troubleshooting of academic software.
Specialized Printing	We offer a variety of high-quality, customized printing options to support your curricular and research needs, including large format, photo, and 3D printing.

Writing Center

The Writing Center is a resource for students to gain 1-to-1 support, and it is also through the Writing Center that workshops are administered for Core Curriculum classes at the request of faculty. Instructors are activated via consultation with faculty, they help design a bespoke writing workshop for the class, and then invite students to follow up with visits to the Writing Center.

The Writing Program's Directors offer 1-to-1 faculty consultation regarding the teaching of writing across the curriculum. The Directors can help with syllabus design, the development of writing prompts, and conversations about commenting on papers. The Directors also collaborate on faculty development workshops for the faculty in the core. Contact Marion Wrenn or Ken Nielsen if you would like to set up a consultation.

Visit these two sources for detailed guidance on how to teach writing:

John C. Bean, Engaging Ideas: The Professor's Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom, Second Edition, Jossey-Bass 2011.

“Learn to design interest-provoking writing and critical thinking activities and incorporate them into your courses in a way that encourages inquiry, exploration, discussion, and debate, with Engaging Ideas, a practical nuts-and-bolts guide for teachers from any discipline. Integrating critical thinking with writing-across-the-curriculum approaches, the book shows how teachers from any discipline can incorporate these activities into their courses.” Kerry Walk, Teaching with Writing.

Learning Accommodation Support

NYU is committed to providing equal educational opportunity and participation for students of all abilities. The Moses Center for Student Accessibility works with NYU students (across all sites) to determine appropriate and reasonable accommodations that support equal access to a world-class education. Students can submit an online application for academic accommodations directly with the Moses Center. Faculty will be informed via a letter from the Moses Center if any of their students require accommodations.

For the administration of academic accommodations during this period of online learning, please contact Aisha al Naqbi, the Moses Center liaison at NYUAD.

Health and Wellness Support for Students

Located on the ground floor of C2 building, the Health Center provides medical, counseling and dietitian services to NYUAD students. The Health Center deploys a best practices model of healthcare for our global student body in consideration of their unique needs, available resources, and regional laws. Contact Dr. Ayaz Virji, Medical Director or the Health Center for student appointments.

Students also have access to a number of wellness initiatives facilitated by Wellness at NYUAD. They aim to provide a nurturing, challenging and supportive environment for students to develop physically, emotionally, personally and socially as part of their wellness journey. Programs include an array of fitness, athletics, wellness, and well-being workshops.

Fast Facts

Discover more about the make up of the student body and faculty at NYUAD.