Why do so many students have the impression that they should attend office hours only if they’ve got a question? Here’s my hunch: Well-meaning, supportive professors mention their office hours at various points throughout the course: If you have questions about fill-in-the-blank, come to my office hours. The professors mean, “I am here to help! Come talk to me.” Students hear: “If you have a question.”
It’s a frustrating misunderstanding, because it contributes to the big problem my article focuses on: Many students miss out on the support professors stand to provide.
That support can take many forms, with variables like discipline, class size, and professor personality playing into the design of office hours. Some office hours are designed to give students practice on course content — especially in content-heavy courses with a reputation for being difficult. But even then, showing up without a question can pay off. Some students, professors told me, made a point of attending what are essentially group practice sessions to hear other students’ questions — and to give themselves more time on task with the material.
In other cases, professors have structured their office hours to provide very different kinds of support. Here are a couple of examples:
Hailey Sheets has created a snack station stocked with foods like granola bars, crackers, cookies, gum, fruit snacks, nuts, chocolate, hot cocoa, and popcorn in her office at Southwestern Michigan College, where she is a professor of English and communications-department chairperson. Many students at Southwestern, a rural community college, don’t eat before class, because they face food insecurity or simply don’t have time for a break, she said. Sheets is happy to chat with students about class, or anything else, when they come by for a snack, but she tells students they’re also welcome to pop in and take a snack without speaking with her at all.
Sheets was tuned in to the problem of food insecurity among students because she is a faculty adviser for the honor society Phi Theta Kappa, which helps run the campus food pantry as a community service. She directs students to that resource, and also began bringing snacks — often leftover items from her family’s Costco runs — to class on days when students were workshopping their writing. Then she started inviting any students who wanted a snack to her office after class. It has grown from there — because she’s a department chair, Sheets works with more students than the ones in her own classes.
Sheets’s snack station, she says, helps her build connections with students, many of whom come by repeatedly. Her colleagues sometimes partake, too, allowing Sheets to connect with them as well.
When students come to see Matt Bowers, program director and an associate professor of instruction in sport management at the University of Texas at Austin, it’s not usually because they have questions about his courses. Bowers, who lets students book 15-minute appointments and finds they are in high demand, estimates that three-quarters of those appointments are used to talk about students’ career aspirations and their lives more broadly.
How has he become a go-to instructor for such office-hour conversation — one that many professors want to have but that many students don’t seem to know is a possibility? Some of it stems from context and approach: Bowers, who teaches both majors and nonmajors in everything from intro to capstone courses, thinks he’s doing something wrong if his classes are so difficult that students need office hours to do well. And it makes sense that he’d be seen as a resource for career advice: Lots of students want to work in sports in some capacity, and he also teaches a large leadership course called “Building Winning Teams.”
While he has too many students to build a strong connection with each one, Bowers strives to present himself in class in such a way that any student would feel comfortable setting up a 15-minute appointment with him. So another reason he gets those questions may be as simple as his orientation to students. When new acquaintances learn he’s a professor, Bowers says, they often make some kind of dig at Gen Z. “And I’m like, ‘Are you kidding? They’re incredible. Yeah, they’ve got all these things that they’re dealing with,’” which students didn’t face in decades past — especially because many of his students are first-generation or students of color. “‘But to a person, they’re strong, they’re fascinating — in many ways, they’re hurting.’” It stands to reason that when a professor sees talking with students about their plans as an honor, more of them will want to do that.
Getting more students through calculus
Students pass calculus at higher rates when it is taught with an active-learning approach, increasing the pool of students able to continue in STEM majors. That’s according to new research, published in Science, by a team at Florida International University. The study followed some 800 students who were randomly assigned to calculus sections taught in a traditional lecture format or under the modeling practices in calculus curriculum and pedagogy, which uses collaborative group work in class and is meant to help students develop mathematical habits of mind. The active-learning version had a pass rate 11 percent higher than the traditional format, and the benefits held regardless of race, gender, or major. “Applying this study’s 11-percent average improvement in pass rate to all 2,000 first-time calculus students at FIU would translate to 220 additional students succeeding in calculus annually and reducing the instructional load by five sections annually,” the authors concluded.
Not only that, but the researchers were also able to show that the reason the active-learning students earned higher grades was that they understood the material better — students in both groups were given some identical exam questions, which were scored blindly, and those in the active-learning group performed better on them.
‘Adjunct Faculty 101’
Recently, I shared a question from a reader seeking models for onboarding new professors, especially adjuncts. Here’s one approach, described by Anne K. Huebel, an online/hybrid-support specialist and instructional designer in the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Saginaw Valley State University:
The Michigan university offers adjunct orientation in the evenings in August, when most new instructors start, and a smaller version in January, Huebel writes.
“The August orientation consists of dinner and then three sessions of workshops/presentations. In each of the three sessions, faculty choose between about five different workshops on teaching issues. The first session always includes ‘Adjunct Faculty 101,’ which all new faculty are required to attend. It is led by the center’s director and focuses on everything from the office space that is available to them, what the attendance-taking requirements are, how to make copies, how to get technology help, how to get paid, how to find professional-development workshops, and what compensation is offered for attending, to a general welcome and some basic teaching tips.
“Sessions offered this year included ‘An Orientation to the Canvas LMS,’ ‘The First Day of Class,’ ‘Creating Student-Centered Course Materials,’ ‘Classroom-Management Tips,’ ‘Academic-Integrity Tips and Processes,’ ‘An Introduction to Our Tutoring Services and Writing Center,’ ‘Writing Across the Disciplines With AI,’ and more.”
Virtual learning’s future?
The future of hybrid and virtual learning is at a crossroads. The share of students enrolled only in online courses is growing, and many students have said they want more hybrid courses. But many colleges have opted to return to in-person teaching as much as possible. Some say the best way to serve their students is by focusing on in-person classes. And faculty members have complained that workloads ballooned when trying to teach classes in both traditional ways and online. So where do we go from here?
On September 20 at 2 p.m. ET, Beth will be exploring those issues with a panel of experts. You can register here to attend live, or watch the session on demand later.
And if you’ve got questions or ideas you want to share in advance, please write to her, at beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.
Thanks for reading Teaching. If you have suggestions or ideas, please feel free to email us, at beckie.supiano@chronicle.com or beth.mcmurtrie@chronicle.com.
—Beckie
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