Longwood University requires each freshman student, as well as each transfer student with 24 or fewer credits, to take a one-credit course called Longwood Seminar, known by the more familiar name, LSEM. Each LSEM class has one professor and one student peer mentor guiding a class of no more than 25 students.
Dr. Chris McGee, LSEM director and associate professor of English, said the class is designed as an "intro to college" class. The purpose of it is "getting freshmen used to being in college and keeping them there, and peer mentors sort of fulfill that goal," stated McGee.
Over the past year, McGee has been administering some changes to this course. The class was once designed to last for a whole semester, but it was cut back to half a semester. "Faculty felt that it became an afterthought class for the students," said McGee. He added this year they have tried to meet in the middle; the class now meets twice a week for the first four weeks and then once a week until mid-November. The class does not meet during the last three weeks of the semester so students have time to focus on their final exams.
Kristyn D'Angiolillo, a sophomore peer mentor at Longwood University, works with Associate Professor of Communication Studies Dr. Pamela Tracy. The two lead an Honors LSEM class. D'Angiolillo stated, "We're kind of co-teaching the class. She runs most of the lessons while I kind of interject different ideas and opinions; more-so outside of the classroom, I handle personal issues the students may not want to talk about with a professor."
D'Angiolillo, first year peer mentor, was a student of LSEM just a year ago. She believes LSEM is here to help freshmen realize that college is not as big and scary as many people think.
It has helped students adjust to how college really works and how to manage their time most efficiently.
The peer mentors are there for the students as a guide for when things become too stressful. They offer advice from a more experienced perspective as well as a friend perspective. LSEM is provided to help aid freshmen "map out their time to a way that is going to benefit them the most," said D'Angiolillo.
Another one of the major changes in LSEM is that each student peer mentor is required to teach one class by themselves. McGee said, "We're devoting time to helping peer mentors become teachers and the topic every peer mentor was assigned to talk about was citizen leadership. So, they have to talk for fifty minutes to their class about what citizen leadership means; they have to develop an activity, and they get something for the students to look at." Citizen leadership was chosen as a topic of discussion because it is one of the goals of the class, and faculty felt it had not received enough focus in previous years.
Along with these changes, professors are also trying to develop some assessment for the class. All freshmen are required to do a short writing assignment that will be collected and evaluated to get a sense of their writing ability. Another new assessment being used is a self-administered test called the College Persistence Questionnaire (CPQ), which replaces the College Student Inventory (CSI). The CPQ "gives more revealing feedback. It shows how you are doing academically, financially and socially to see if you can handle the rest of college," stated McGee.
McGee said he hopes students and faculty see these changes to Longwood Seminar as improvements.
