Being available, with limits

It seems a series on teaching issues is emerging here. The purpose of the series is to help you gain some perspective on how you spend your teaching time and whether there are things you could try that would give you a better balance between teaching and research while still giving value to teaching. My goal is to help you be the kind of academic you want to be without being overwhelmed and overworked. Read other posts in the series here.

Teaching takes more time than you think

One of the things about university teaching is that no one else in your life believes that it takes lots of your time.

On paper, it looks like you teach 6 or 9 hours a week.*

And that perception might be what causes the stress you feel. I hope you don’t think there is something wrong with you that you only have 6 hours of teaching a week and still can’t find time to do any research.

*Most tenure-stream faculty I’ve come across teach either 2 or 3 courses a semester.

Looking at contact time is a student’s perspective on teaching.

Most people have been students of some sort during their life. So their perception of teaching is a student’s perspective.

Every hour of contact time requires a few hours behind the scenes.

We’ve already talked about preparation time.

You need to prepare. It takes time. But go reread that post if you think maybe you are doing too much of the wrong kind of preparation.

I’ve also talked about grading.

You need to assess student’s learning. It takes time. But go reread that post to figure out if you could take less time and still do a good job.

Today, I want to talk about time spent engaging with students outside of the classroom — responding to questions, helping with problems, etc.

Being available

There are all kinds of reasons why you need to be available to students outside the classroom.

Some students will have difficulty understanding some parts of your course.

This does not mean that you are a bad teacher. It means that you can’t reach all of the people all of the time.

So you have various means of enabling those students to ask questions outside of class time:

• Fixed hours when you are available in your office for this purpose
• An e-mail address where they can contact you
• A space in the electronic course software your institution uses

You are allowed to limit your availability

You don’t have to be available to students whenever they want to come and see you. Students just need to know when you are available.

There are probably local norms (or even contractual obligations) about office hours. Do not exceed them.

Choose times that fit with your schedule but will probably work for students.

If you find that students tend to grab you after class, then schedule an hour after one of your classes and make sure they come to your office with you. This will train them to come to the office at specified times.

Be firm

Announce your policy in the first session and remind them part way through the semester or when there might be a flood of requests (e.g. when handing back assignments).

When you do this, you can educate them that you teach other classes, you need to prepare for classes, and that you have other contractual responsibilities including research, committee work, etc.

You are not apologizing, merely socializing them into an environment that is not the same as a school environment.

If students come to you at other times, firmly but nicely remind them that you are not available right now but will be happy to see them during your office hours.

Exceptions can be made for the rare cases that genuinely cannot make your posted office hours. But these cases are not students who just couldn’t be bothered coming to your office hour and want to see you now.

You are not a cardiac surgeon. No one will die if you do not solve their problem immediately.

Setting boundaries is almost always appreciated.

Boundaries make it easier for students to come and see you.

While a very small minority of students seem to think that your reason for living is to answer their questions, it is more likely that students are reluctant to come to see you for fear that their questions are stupid, that they are wasting your time, or that you will be annoyed with them.

Providing set times when you welcome students to ask those questions enables students who really need help to ask for it.

And training the small self-centred minority to respect other people’s time is a service to them in the long term. Sooner or later they will have to learn. It might as well be now.

E-mail doesn’t have to be instant

The same thing goes for e-mail and other forms of electronic communication.

You don’t have to answer questions as soon as they are asked. You just have to answer in a reasonably timely manner.

Set up a folder for each class you teach in your e-mail program and then make a rule (again in your e-mail program) to put all messages from people in that class in that folder. (If you need help with this, ask a colleague, administrator, or even a tech savvy student.)

You can even set up an auto-reply for those messages to let students know that their e-mail has been received and you will respond within a week (or whatever your time frame is).

Then schedule some time to go into those folders and read and reply to student queries. Maybe twice a week.

Again, make students aware of this policy in the first session of the semester. You might say something like “I am happy to respond to questions by e-mail. I endeavor to reply within 3 days.”

A couple of weeks before assignment deadlines you might want to remind them that it is pointless to e-mail you the day before the deadline because you don’t respond to student e-mail every day.

Their lack of planning does not constitute an emergency for you.

Bring common questions to the classroom

Whether they come by e-mail or in person, if something seems to be coming up a lot, revisit it in class.

View the students that make the effort to ask as the tip of an iceberg. If several of them are having the same problem, you can bet there are others in the class who would benefit from you going over whatever-it-is again.

If you have an e-noticeboard or a means of sending a notice to all students in a class, once you’ve decided to do this you can announce it so that others planning to e-mail you individually or come to your office hours don’t have to do so. That saves both of you time.

You could also send an e-mail response to the whole group so that everyone is clear.

If you decide to respond to a group of students together, make sure to put their e-mail addresses in the BCC line so they don’t know who else asked the question. You don’t want to be perceived as humiliating people by announcing to the class what they didn’t understand.

Other useful policies

It is also helpful to be clear, right from the outset, about what kind of support they can expect.

I used to be very up-front with students that if they didn’t attend class regularly, they could not expect more than cursory help in office hours.

You are not required to provide private lessons.

You put time and effort into preparing classes that you expect will help them learn the material. If they choose not to attend, they cannot expect you to provide that content individually.

The flip side of this is that if someone attends regularly and does the assigned reading and doesn’t understand, I was always willing to spend lots of individual time with them to help them with whatever difficulties they were having. Sometimes it just doesn’t click.

I am also strongly in favour of being firm about grades.

It is perfectly acceptable to say that you will not change grades. This kind of policy works better if you have clear criteria and if you moderate your TAs grading so that there aren’t arbitrary differences between markers. But you are assessing their performance on a specific evaluation task. That’s it.

That isn’t to say that you don’t welcome students questions about how they can improve their performance in future assignments. Or that you won’t clarify for students how the grade was arrived at.

Having time during class to go over the general issues, talk about common problems and the kinds of things that stood out in the best papers will also prevent a flood of individual queries.

Pick one thing

You don’t want to be one of those grumpy inaccessible profs. But you do want to be able to do all of your work in a reasonable number of hours a week.

If all of this feels overwhelming and difficult, then just pick one thing and try to implement it next semester.

You might want to start with the thing that you find most stressful.

For example, if students challenging grades really upsets you, then decide which things you could do to reduce the number of challenges.

But you could also start with the thing that would be easiest to do.

Yep, I said the easiest.

Maybe you find face-to-face conflict difficult. (Lots of people do. Don’t worry about it.) So the thought of being firm with students who turn up in your office outside of office hours causes more stress than actually dealing with them.

But setting up e-mail rules and scheduling time to deal with student e-mail feels manageable. So do that.

Start with the easiest thing. Implement it. And then the next semester you can add one more thing.

You have a 20 or 30 year career ahead of you. There is plenty of time to make this work better.