TEACHING FIRST-YEAR STUDENTS COLLABORATION SKILLS AND SHAPING ACADEMIC READINESS IN MULTI-CULTURAL SOCIETY

Student years... The best time of your life - your new social experience, the construction time of your would-be job skills, and what more, your character shaping period. Young adults take gruelling efforts to enter the best college or university and parallel to this develop new bonds of friendship with their peers, their teachers, get on well with people around and immediately soar up to A-s demonstrating advanced academic skills ... Is it always like this? What if your student is pretty unwilling to study? To get to know new people? Prefers to keep aloof? How can the teacher help here? Adaptation time is frequently stressful. Students hardly know each other, might feel introverted withing the period. The teacher's wisdom and competence should come to help here. For instance, our first-year students have numerous get-togethers: we (tutors, uni-teachers) organize "freshmen tea-parties" with making the list of "most impossible things" when you are making your first steps in independent life.

We can single out the following problems here (also introduced by students themselves - 150 students have been interviewed):
- feeling lonely and homesick, missing parents, siblings, friends and your home-town (70% of respondents);
- being afraid of making wrong opinions (fear of showing yourself worse or quite different from what you are) (10%);
- fear of not making new friends and acquaintances, of getting on well with teachers at university, of possible society-rejection (12%);
- fearing your academic skills mismatch the required level during studies (7%);
- unwillingness to interact with new people due to some personal prejudices ("What if I am not ...(good / tall / attractive / smart / urban etc.) enough?") (1%).

Fear... Humans cannot exist without it. We, teachers, are here to give our students a helping hand in controlling their fears, dispelling all their worries and doubts, being supportive and friendly to them. We are here not only to share knowledge but help students socialize in a new big uni-world, "re-edit" possible life-negative programs. Our experience says it is quite possible.

The following tips can make :
- smile (especially when it is difficult) - students scan your mood easily and might copy it;
- "no-stupid-questions" rule. Every issue matters, every question counts;
- anonymous-help-corner for lonely hearts (a box where you can put your worry or fear and then get the answer some time later);
- getting extra-tasks for students getting a little behind in terms of academic skills, knowledge of a foreign language (to make them feel at home with the group language level);
- developing collaboration skills (one of priority teacher tasks) in order to develop teamwork skills (group and pair video-targeting projects);
- having frequent "freshmen tea get-togethers" after classes for "how-was-your-day" discussions (especially if your students came from a far-away city or country and often feel blue because of that).

All this might help to set up a human-friendly atmosphere, prevent possible student life-misadventures and bring your group closer to each other. This can make a strong foundation for your would-be academic work with students.