Student Retention

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Dawson’s Student Retention Program is focused on helping first-term students to make a successful transition from high school to college. To this end, it pairs new students with a Dawson Partner. Chosen from among the College’s employees for their warmth and interpersonal skills, the Partners (Dawson staff) meet with their Partnees (Dawson students) three times in the first half of the term, just to ensure that all is going well. The Partners’ role is to plug their students into whatever resources might be helpful to them. To someone who is studying in English for the first time, it might be the Academic Skills Centre’s Read/ Speak/Write groups. For a member of Dawson’s biggest “club”, the “I-don’t-know-what-I-want-to-with-my-life” club, signing up for the three-session Career Planning Workshop may be in order. The objective is to ensure that new students are making the best possible use of Dawson’s many resources to make up for any deficits they have in their readiness for CEGEP.

Historically, CEGEPs have expected their students to take full responsibility for their learning. So for example, if a student does not understand a concept or does badly on a test, it has generally been up to him or her to see the teacher about the problem during the teacher’s office hours. Now, the Coordinator of Student Retention works with various departments to encourage faculty to actively seek out students who are struggling in their courses. So, instead of waiting for the student who did badly on a quiz to come and see the teacher, the teacher sets up a specific time for the student to come to his or her office and go over the quiz. The short-term objective is to help the student with the quiz so that he or she can do better on the next one. The medium- to long-term goal is to help such students discover that getting help can be a positive, confidence-building experience. Hopefully, by the time the Partnees graduate from Dawson, they will no longer wait for the teacher to call them in; rather, they will actively seek assistance whenever they run into situations they do not know how to handle.

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