Teaching

This week:

• I share readers’ strategies for getting to know their students.
• I ask for suggestions of community-college professors to follow.
• I pass along some recent articles on teaching that you may have missed.

The Power of Connecting With Students

Getting to know students on a personal level is critical. It’s also incredibly time-consuming. Those were two themes in the responses readers have shared to last week’s newsletter, which described the Persistence Project at Oakton Community College, in Illinois. The program is multifaceted, but officials say the 15-minute meetings they ask professors to hold with each student in one of their courses are particularly important.

Several readers told me that they hold similar student meetings. One thoughtful response came from Bob Remedi, a faculty member in the biology department at College of Lake County. Remedi gives his students a “Meet the Teacher” assignment to visit with him for 10 to 15 minutes. Before they get together, students answer a series of questions, including, “Is there anything about the class that scares you? What can I do to help?” Remedi also explains to students the purpose of some of his questions. Several related to hope, or the expectation of meeting a goal, which research links to student success, the survey explains. Others are meant to help students form a study plan.

This system, Remedi wrote, “helps me know more about the students and anecdotally seems to help students feel more comfortable with me and the course.” It is also, he noted, “a huge time commitment during the first three weeks of the semester.”

Some readers weren’t sure where to find that kind of time. On Twitter, Carolyn Brown, a faculty member in the fine arts and communication department at Foothill College, in California, wrote that holding 15-minute meetings “would take me 60 hours. Would there be time left for teaching?”

Others had suggestions for demonstrating care that might work more easily with large groups of students. Priya Kumar, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland’s College of Information Studies, passed along some tweets from Katie Day Good, an assistant professor of strategic communication at Miami University, in Ohio, who described using notecards to get to know her students on the first day. “This is something I want to do when I start teaching,” Kumar added.

Heather Mayer, the director of educational technology at Everett Community College, shared an email she sends to students in a history course she teaches online. It says, in part: “Please be sure to contact me if you have any difficulties over the course of the term, either in not understanding the assignments or material, or if there is some reason that you are unable to complete the assignments on time. My goal is to work with you to make this a successful term.”

Mayer included a response from one student, who wrote: “I appreciate you reaching out, you’re the only professor who has ever done so.” The message explained that the student was facing a heavy course load and had thought about dropping Mayer’s course, but went on to say that “seeing your email showed me that you genuinely care, which has persuaded me to rise to the occasion.”

Another option: Hold shorter meetings. Viji Sathy, a teaching associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, recently tweeted about the various ways she encourages students to meet her in person, including get-to-know-you sessions that are just five minutes each.

Finally, John Braxton, a professor emeritus in Vanderbilt University’s higher-education leadership and policy program, offered some encouragement for professors who do make the time to meet with students: Research suggests it matters. These conversations with students, he wrote, “demonstrate to students that faculty have a genuine interest in them. Faculty having a genuine interest in students has an indirect relationship with student persistence. This statistically significant relationship is described in my book,” he wrote, referring to Rethinking College Student Retention, in which Braxton and his co-authors examined persistence at both residential and commuter colleges.

Thanks to everyone who wrote in!

Professors to Follow

A good number of the responses I got to last week’s questions about connecting with students came from professors at community colleges. That makes sense — the original article was about a program at a community college, and community colleges tend to be teaching-focused. It was also a good reminder that the newsletter should draw on the insights of such professors more frequently.

Last month, a number of you sent in suggestions of K-12 teachers whom readers might want to follow, on Twitter or through other channels. So I thought we’d try something similar. Are there community-college instructors whose insights on teaching you find particularly useful? Please send them my way: beckie.supiano@chronicle.com. If we get a good list, I’ll share it.

ICYMI

• Jesse Stommel, a senior lecturer and digital-learning fellow at the University of Mary Washington, explains his discomfort with the idea of “scaffolding,” which he argues breaks learning into neat chunks without being responsive to students, in an essay for the American Association of University Professors.
• Male students are 18.6 percent more likely than their female classmates to receive favorable changes in their grades initiated by instructors, according to a working paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research.
• What’s it like to teach when you’re an introvert? James Lang shares some personal reflections and insights from Jessamyn Neuhaus’s book, Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers, in a column for The Chronicle.

Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us: dan.berrett@chronicle.com, beckie.supiano@chronicle.com, or beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.