Insights From Other Instructors

When Zoë Cohen’s practice of emailing students who failed her first exam was featured in The Chronicle’s Teaching newsletter, we asked readers if they had ever tried something similar. Here’s what a few of them had to say.

Molly A. Metz, an assistant professor of psychology on a teaching track at the University of Toronto, shared some insights from emailing students after exams, which she has done for years. Among them: The emails seem especially effective in large classes, where students “can feel lost in the crowd.” Even with a large class, Metz added, such emails need not take much time to send, especially with the help of a learning-management system that can distribute messages to a group.

How Can You Make Big Classes Feel Smaller?

Emails, sent at key moments during the semester, are one strategy for helping personalize the large lecture.

• Small Ways to Help Students Feel Noticed

Jeananne Nicholls, a professor of marketing at Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania, was one of several readers to mention that she finds it especially important to send messages to students who may be falling behind when she teaches online. In addition to encouraging students who appear to be struggling, Nicholls wrote, she also nudges students to participate in the online course discussions, which account for a sizable piece of their grades.

Ruth Fairbanks, an instructor in multidisciplinary studies at Indiana State University, wrote in to say that while she, too, emails students who aren’t performing well, doing so can be “depressing.” That led her to a new habit: “mostly to cheer myself up, and remind myself that I had students who were doing well,” she writes complimentary notes to students who are succeeding.

The only downside: Doing so, Fairbanks writes, has “substantially increased the number of students who come to me to write letters of recommendation.” Still, she says, it’s worth it.