Time Savers: mails and appointments with students
Efficiently dealing with students
Below, you will find some suggestions of handling contact with students outside of the classroom. Students certainly have a right to claim some of our time. However, they are not always aware how precious a commodity time is form most of us. Below are some ideas to help ensure that students who really need us can reach us, whilst limiting any unnecessary claims on our time.
Setting rules about contact
Rules about when to mail
It can help to make clear to students that you will not respond to requests for information that can also be found in the course manual or syllabus, or on the UvA site, MyTimetable or on the Canvas course site. In addition, non-urgent questions that can wait until class, and may indeed be of interest to fellow students should preferably be asked in class.
If you open up a discussion page on Canvas, this will allow you to encourage students to ask each other questions. Such a discussion page needs monitoring every so often, but it can also give you information on students’ difficulties, and ideas for exam questions.
Ideally student mails should contain questions that are urgent and otherwise unanswerable, or of a highly personal or confidential nature.
Setting email filters in you mail programme
Outlook and other mail programmes allow you to set rules for how incoming mail is dealt with. It can save time to set a filter (e.g. based on a subject line that you require students to use) that automatically saves mails from students in specific courses to specific folders. This way, you can answer all mails on the same course in one sitting, without your brain having to task-switch between all you may have going on at one time.
Answering times and away messages
Make sure students have some idea of when to expect an answer from you, at the latest. Some weeks can be more hectic than others, and it is fine to be transparent about this with students. Make use of away messages if you are not able to answer your mail for four days or longer.
Communicating in concrete terms
Communicating rules
Make sure that any rules that you set for mail contact and appointments are clearly stated in the course information, workbook or syllabus that you use. Additionally, it is a good idea to prominently display this information on the Canvas course pages of the courses you teach. You can also add information, such as in-office hours to your email signature – this is especially useful for thesis students. If you have your own office space (rather than flexible working spaces), this information can be displayed there, too. Make it as hard as possible for students to miss your rules about contacting you.
Times, places and follow-ups
When mailing students to set up an appointment, it works best to immediately suggest a day, time and place. Open questions, such as: “when would suit you best?” can lead to unnecessary back-and-forth mailing. If they are unable to make it, they will let you know, and you can find an alternative slot.
It can often be helpful to clarify in a mail whether you expect an answer, and if so, by when you expect to hear from them. All those well-intended polite mails that just say “thank you” can really clog up your inbox.
Wh-agreements
When you make agreements with students, in person or through email, try to be precise about as many (relevant) Wh-questions as possible: What? When? (with) Whom? Where? Why? and (not strictly speaking a Wh-question) How? Conversely, you can ask for concrete answers to questions like this from your student.
Handling student group-work issues
In-group fighting and disagreements
As happens in real working life, students are sometimes asked to work in teams on projects or group assignments. Group assignments are often awarded with the same grade for every student in the group. Sometimes, students feel this is unfair if they have done more work than other students in the group or if the grade is lower because one individual failed to do their job. In such cases, they may come and complain to you and ask to speak to you or ask you to mediate.
In such cases, it can help to appeal to the students sense of professionalism and collective responsibility, and ask what they would do in an actual working environment. Would they expect their boss to praise their work in spite of the fact that the client was lost due to the lazy colleague? Would they take over some of the colleagues’ tasks, sensing an opportunity for a quid pro quo in the future? Would they determine to appoint someone in the team to monitor everyone’s progress, next time, rather than find out at the last moment that work had not been done?
If such an appeal to common sense does not resolve the issue, you may decide to do the following: tell students that you are willing to differentiate between their grades based on who did what, provided they all write a short paragraph describing their exact activities, and hand these in together as one document with all their signatures underneath. Most students find this too much work, and settle for the original group grade for all. In they do choose this option, this leaves you with some grading adjustments, rather than lengthy heated discussions with the group.
Times and timing
In-office hours for students
When you set appointments with individual students or small groups, make these optional whenever possible. You can reserve office hours for these types of appointments on one or two fixed days. If you set these early in the morning, this will often discourage students who do not really need to see you. You can also ask students to sign up for time slots on these days.
Set a timer during meetings with students
There is always more to say about a student’s work or ideas, and we may get carried away by our own enthusiasm on a topic. It makes sense to set a timer to indicate the end of the session is nigh. If you explain to them that time is a scarce resource, most students will appreciate that you ensure that all students get an equal and fair amount of it.