Practical things to try

There are a number of things, activities we can do, that can increase the sense students have that we care about them, help them see us as natural mentors. Let me start with activity one, and that’s learning students’ names. Frankly, of all the things we can do, I think this one has the biggest impact. If you could choose to invest one hour of time to do anything, I would suggest spending an hour to learn students’ names. As we’ve done focus groups, I’ve been amazed at how important this is to them. When we call them by name, they feel like we see them, like we know them, like they’re real people to us, not just academic widgets, objects sitting in our classrooms.

Similarly, before class starts, for me, it takes several times to really get their names down so that I’m comfortable with it. I’m often tempted to be refining a PowerPoint or diving into the discipline a little more or worse yet, checking out scores of my favourite teams the night before. Spend five minutes before you go to class just reviewing that seating chart or that picture chart and their names, and it’ll make all the difference when a student raises their hand and you’re able to call them by name. I find when I reach that point in the semester, hopefully by the second week, where I comfortably can call all my students by name in my smaller classes, that there’s a different vibe in the classroom.

Now I’m about to start teaching some much bigger classes, and that will be much more challenging. Frankly, I’m not gonna be able to learn 200 students’ names, but I can use name cards, placards and read those, and I can try to learn the names of a few students. Studies have shown that even in those situations when you’re calling students by name, by reading their placard, they still like it better than when you don’t call them by name. So check out that study in some other great links in the research below.

Our second activity is to mentor in the moment or mentor on the fly. We get those phrases from Felton and Lambert’s wonderful book, “Relationship-Rich Education,” and they get them from some other people to whom they give credit in their book. They’re really important phrases because instinctively, I, and maybe some of you, tend to think of mentoring as what happened when I was a research assistant and had a mentor-protege kind of relationship with a professor where we were crunching numbers and eating pizza at 2:00 AM the night after an election and talking about life’s deep questions. We don’t have to have that kind of relationship with our students to make a difference in their lives. We can do simple, small things that help them feel like they can turn to us for help if they need it.

Let me give you just a couple of practical examples. One is, in our email interactions, to be less transactional and more relational. I was preparing to give a presentation on this very subject one day, and I got an email from a student saying that she was gonna have to miss class because she had a funeral, and would she be able to make up that absence. I was quickly typing just how it was that she could make up the absence and was about to send it, but the thought occurred to me, she had said she had a funeral she was having to attend. That meant someone she cared about, someone close to her had passed away, so I went back and responded to that first and said, “I’m so sorry to hear that someone you care about has passed away. Do you mind telling me about them?” We had a little exchange, two or three emails that probably took me a total of 90 seconds extra time, but it fundamentally transformed the nature of that interaction from transactional, can I miss class, how do I make it up, here’s how you make it up, to human.

Here’s the second example. One day I was walking through the halls and noticed a student I knew and remembered from the previous semester, and she looked down. I said hello and asked how she was doing, and she said all right. I said tell me more. She just bombed a test and she was depressed about it. Now, I’ve been studying emotional resilience and reframing, so I decided to try it out and I said, you know, “Think about this less as a validation of how smart you are in this particular subject, and more as how much you know and whether there’s some gaps in your knowledge that you need to fill in. Think about how you could study differently for the next test so that it goes better.” Three days later, she sent me an email thanking me, telling me that she’d taken my advice and had done much better on her next test. That little bit of mentoring took maybe 60 seconds, but it may have been the most important 60 seconds of my day.

Let me talk about the third activity, which is reaching out proactively early in the semester to students who are struggling academically. Incidentally, I find that a disproportionate number of those who are struggling academically are also struggling with mental health challenges. When I first got back into the classroom a few years ago, on a full-time basis, at the end of the semester, as I noticed maybe a week or two before the semester ended that some students were failing, I was inviting them in and discovered it was really too late to do much good. So I shifted that up to the second or third semester. As soon as I noticed some students were falling behind, sent them an email by name saying, “Hey, I was going through the grade book, “noticed that you were getting behind, “thought we should get together “so we can help you get back on track “and see if there’s anything I can help you with.”

A surprisingly high percentage of students respond to these emails. I also use a link now that gives more flexibility than my old office hours and lets them schedule a time anytime between 8:00 AM and 5:00 PM when my calendar’s not otherwise showing me as busy. When they come in, rather than cut right to the chase, I take a little bit of time to get to know them. I’ve discovered a new favourite technique. I ask them to show me a picture or two on their cell phone or a video that will help me get to know them better. It’s intriguing, the things that they show me, and how much that does to begin to help me see them as a real person and help them feel like we’ve got a human connection. And then I discuss what’s going on.

Frankly, most of them, when I talk to them, have challenges that affect them, not only in my class, but in other classes. So whether it’s not getting enough sleep or struggling with some mental health challenges, I’m often able either to give them some advice or to connect them in mental in the case of mental health challenges to some professional resources and other resources on campus that can help them. And by sometimes cutting them just a little bit of slack to get them back on track, I give them hope and energy to make some changes and get going again.

I found this particular activity especially potent, intervening early in the semester when there’s still time. Even students who failed my class in the end have thanked me for giving them a chance. It’s given them more hope throughout the semester. And again, that sense of knowing that a professor cares about them, seems to make a great difference to them.