Tip: Helping Students Navigate Expectations
Resist feelings of detachment with an approach that focuses on responding with empathy rather than judgment.
I have been considering lately a tension between wanting to support students in ways that are truly helpful to their learning and needing to maintain boundaries around our work lives. The conversation around setting boundaries is one I have felt to be increasingly urgent since I wrote about setting boundaries and tips for managing communications from students back in fall 2020. On an individual level and at an institutional level, I believe we are seeing more persistent concerns about staff and faculty burnout.
In a recent interview on the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, Dr. Rebecca Pope-Ruark talks about her new book, Unraveling Faculty Burnout: Pathways to Reckoning and Renewal. In the course of her conversation with host Dr. Bonni Stachowiak, Dr. Pope-Ruark describes recognizing burnout in herself:
For me, I was really a teacher’s teacher. I loved being in the classroom, I loved working with students. I was really involved in student organizations, always on campus for students. Over time, I found myself really being judgmental of students for the first time, really very judgmental. Not really seeing them as individuals, seeing them as this kind of posse that was always out to get me, in a way, so I pulled back. I was pulling back as far as I possibly could from their needs and from their emotions . . . That sense of detachment really is, “I’m pulling back from the people I care for.” We see it a lot in the caregiver literature for social workers and healthcare professionals, teachers specifically. . . . [W]hen we start feeling those feelings of detachment and pulling back, that can be a cue that there might be something going on at a higher level, that you might want to check out.
I have found that my ability to work most effectively with students from a place of non-judgmental empathy is impacted by two specific and concrete issues that frequently arise: how frequently students email me to ask questions that (I believe) are already answered in course materials, and how frequently I have to address issues of academic honesty or plagiarism. These may seem like arbitrary and unconnected issues, but I promise they feel very connected in my mind - each is about the student-instructor relationship and the trust that we build between us. Too, each requires time on my part to address that is somewhat hard to plan for (will this be a week of many or few emails?) and that pulls my attention away from the concerns of the whole class to spend significant time focusing on a small handful of students.
Rather than spending time complaining about what students should or should not do, I prefer to spend that time thinking about how I can help them to navigate these issues in ways that feel more productive and sensible.
Teaching students to navigate asking questions
Rather than assuming students already know what academic communication looks like, I try to be explicit with students about my expectations. I know from my own high school children that they really, honestly, need guidance about communicating with instructors - this being one of many things that students with pandemic-interrupted schooling just seem to struggle with a bit more.
What works?
My order of operations for managing student communications has four parts: having a consistent schedule of announcements, using the "General Q&A" discussion forum, inviting students to schedule a Zoom/phone chat, and only answering emails in specific time blocks. I have found that these techniques are particularly important with online students, whether in a synchronous or asynchronous course.
Use technology to your advantage: tools like phrase expanders and voice-to-text allow me to provide more in-depth communication without retyping the same messages, saving time and giving me a bit more space to focus on responding from a place of empathy rather than judgment.
Teaching students to navigate assignment expectations
Most of the time - truly, almost all of the time - issues with plagiarism or other academic integrity concerns happen because students feel too much pressure to perform well, or they run out of time to complete an assignment. Every semester I have a handful of instances of plagiarism on an assignment, and over my 15+ years of teaching, I really can’t think of any students who weren't motivated either by a lack of confidence in their ability to do the work or a lack of time.
What works?
Since I started doing a time management/setting expectations activity at the beginning of every semester, I have had so many fruitful conversations with students about time and balancing expectations.
I have found that applying principles of transparent design not only helps students to better understand expectations - which increases their sense of confidence that they can successfully complete the work - it also increases my empathy for students as I put myself in their shoes.
How do you help students navigate these expectations?
