Making the Connection:
How and why students should interact with their professors
One of the ways new college students know they are not in high school anymore is that teachers are now called professors. Is it just semantics? Or is a professor a different sort of instructor? And is there a difference in how to interact with them?
While day-to-day contact with a high school teacher may be more frequent, college faculty members are both accessible and approachable. It may require some initiative by the student, but professors will respond positively to those who take advantage of opportunities that go beyond merely attending class.
“I definitely encourage students to talk with us, not to be afraid of us, not to be intimidated, and to be curious about the class and how it might connect to other things in their lives and to communicate that to us,” says Greg Downey, director of the School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Sometimes it takes a bit of an icebreaker. “I have this general statement of goodwill that I always say several times in the semester, which is that, ‘No matter what you ask me, I’ll never think you are stupid,’ ” says math professor Gloria Marí Beffa.
How and when to have this interaction can vary depending on the class and the student. Marí Beffa encourages students with questions to meet her during her regularly scheduled office hours. She discourages the use of e-mail, which she finds unwieldy with a class of three-hundred-some students.
Other faculty members encourage other avenues of communication. “E-mail is like the bane of our existence in some ways... but the student e-mails are the kind of neat ones; they’re the ones we’re going to pay attention to and push other things aside in order to respond to,” Downey says. He adds that an e-mail discussion can also be a “peg” for him to remember students who may ask for a job or an internship recommendation later.
E-mail can be counterproductive if used to vent inappropriately. “The anonymity of e-mail allows students to say things that they wouldn’t say in person,” warns Aaron Brower, vice provost for teaching and learning and a social work professor, who says he has received some outrageously disrespectful messages. “Don’t just hit ‘send’ blindly,” he advises. “Think about what you wrote, have a friend read it — or a parent, particularly if you’re frustrated about something.”
Erica Halverson, an assistant professor of curriculum and instruction, who uses Facebook groups and gives her students a twenty-four-hour e-mail response guarantee, has colleagues who use an e-mail hybrid they call “online office hours.”
“So if you contact [them] during that time, [they] will get back to you right away, and you can have kind of an extended conversation,” she says.
Simply going up to the professor before or after class may open the door to a longer conversation, although this type of interaction can be limited by long lines of students and everyone’s busy schedules, says history teaching assistant Wyl Schuth. But it can be a good time to set up an appointment for later.
Faculty members say they like to hear from students who are excelling in class as well as those who are struggling. “You don’t have to have a big crisis or a big problem,” Brower says. “The best thing you want to do as a student is to give your professor and TAs early warning for any kind of negotiation you need to do about timing of assignments or quizzes or tests or whatever. Don’t go at the last minute.”
“Students don’t seem to be shy about talking to us when they have a specific question about the course —‘I’m going to be out of town the day of the exam’ … or ‘I have a question about this assignment, a question about what you said in the lecture,’ ” Downey says. “I would encourage them to ask us about other things going on in their college lives, [such as] ‘How does your course connect to other courses I’m taking? What would be a good course that could build upon this one?’ and follow it up.”
Halverson believes student-faculty contacts should come naturally. “Not every student is going to have the passion for that particular topic. I would say it’s important to find one faculty member during your four years with which you develop an extended relationship,” she says. “And I think it’s most productive when it’s genuinely based on your interest for the material, for the topic, for the work that you’re doing together.”
Marí Beffa tells of well-meaning students who try to make a good first impression. “It’s very funny because their parents tell them, ‘You should introduce yourself to the professor, it’s important.’ So they come up and say, ‘Hi, I’m so and so.’ I say, ‘Hi, nice to meet you.’ ” That’s a good start, but, Beffa adds, “it’s more of a sustained interaction that we want to have, not just a one-time hello.”
Each professor will have his or her own style of interacting, and students need to be sensitive to that. “I think the most important thing is to really take care to read the situation,” Halverson advises. “Figure out what kind of a person this is. Taking care to read all the social cues about how that interaction ought to happen is really important.”
For another way to connect, Schuth would remind students not to overlook contacting their teaching assistants (TAs). He says TAs can act as a two-way communication conduit about what’s clicking or not clicking in a course. For instance, they might glean from the number of students glazing over in a discussion group that something in the last lecture wasn’t clear. “That will vary from person to person,” he says, “but [the TA is] really the interface between the instruction side of the course and the learning side of the course. That’s where the rubber meets the road.”
How can parents play a constructive role in all of this? Stress to your students that it’s to their advantage —and it’s their right—to speak with their professors. Whenever they tell you about an issue, a problem, or even a success they are having in class, a helpful response would be, “Have you talked to your professor about it?”
While doing so is not an obligation, seeking those contacts provides a valuable opportunity for students.
“Can you get As without ever talking with someone?” asks Brower. “Yes. But talking about topics, expanding your thinking to make it relevant to your life, integrating information from one class to another—to me, that’s where the fun of learning is. You could miss out on that if you never talk to anyone about it.”
—Bill Graf
Tips for Students
- Meet with your professors early in the semester. Whether it is through talking about a specific assignment or about the class in general, professors enjoy getting to know their students.
- If the professor’s office hours do not work with your schedule, set up an appointment with the professor to meet at an alternate time. Be prompt for the appointment
- Prepare for the meeting by thinking about specific questions or comments regarding lecture content or related materials.
- Talk to your professor about things in your life that may be affecting your academic performance.
- Find out how and when the professor prefers to be contacted, whether by e-mail, during office hours, on Facebook, etc.
- Treat professors with respect, both in and out of the classroom and thank them for their time and assistance.