One thing that I've been doing badly across the first half of the semester is keeping myself accessible between tutorials to the students as a source of assistance.
I've noticed that I haven't been getting as many email questions from the students as I would have liked. I believe this is because I am not available enough to my students - I do not exist strongly enough as a presence in the student's mind. I am making the mistake that I so easily observed in other tutors.
Awhile ago, I applied for a job via online application. The application asked something like, "How should you best build rapport with your students?"
I replied something along the lines of, show that you are a collaborator with the student in the path of learning. Make sure you give them lots of assistance and make sure you are available to give the students assistance when they need it.
I need to keep a stronger contact with students - for example, by emailing them a helpful resource when they probably need it, by commending them when they are doing well, and by telling them what activities are most helpful to do if helping them catch up. The content of the email perhaps is less important than the fact you are staying in contact with them. You are reminding them that you are there, and you are available to help, and you want to help.
The structure of our courses perhaps has taken some of this away. Protactinium is an online course, which means that it is easy to ask questions under the activity, and icecold has the online service Piazza as a superbly well-designed assistance service for students. Both have consultations for students to get extra assistance. Now I'm thinking, is there really any point in providing myself as an additional form of assistance? The students are already so well-supported.
Most students find these services as good sources of support. The better student may even find these services as good places to help other people. Community collaboration to assist other students - a great way to take some of the workload off the tutors so they can focus on making their tutorials excellent.
I suppose, really, the primary reason the tutor needs to in contact between tutorials is for the struggling students is the students that are having trouble catching up. The students that are behind, that aren't sure how they should get up to date on the work, that are being confused by content that is far beyond their learning curve. They aren't comfortable putting out questions on a public forum, and thus have nowhere to turn to.
You have to show the student that it's okay to be behind. That you know that they're behind, and that's completely okay. But you have to simultaneously assist them to put work in the course.
Catching up with lost work is a difficult task that takes a lot of motivation. If you're not up to date, it's not immediately obvious where you should start to catch up. You don't have a goal, and when you don't have a goal there's no way you can dredge up the motivation to get started. The task is difficult, and there is no immediate reward. You have to trudge through many web pages looking for activities, familiarising yourself with what you have to catch up on, and making no concrete progress in the meantime.
As TAs, we can ease that process by identifying a goal for the student. If ____, then ____. A clear goal, a clear result/reward for completing the goal, and how to make the first step onto the path towards the goal. A student might be naturally unconfident, but if the tutor is confident in them, and shows them something they think they can do, I think the end result would be good for the student.
Is it worth emailing stronger students? The stronger students don't really need the tutor to identify a goal for them, or to express confidence in them, because they are just naturally confident in themselves. However, I think it would be really good if I expressed positivity. As with the highlights at the start of each tutorial, I could email them during the break between classes and highlight some cool things they've done, or highlight their progress across the course (preferably the former. Ideally we want to move the focus away from their numerical statistics, though. Effective learning is much more than statistics.
There's a whole huge article on effective learning etc. https://www.openlearning.com/blog/DoYourStudentsHaveHarmfulExpectations0 - I should probably think a bit more about that later. Regardless of the article, though, I don't feel great highlighting students' marks - it puts students on a cold hard ranking system and moves the focus on the result rather than the actual learning process. It's just not very nice, causes a lot of unnecessary stress, and makes the process a lot less fun.
The secondary reason that I think that keeping in touch with the students between tutorials is useful is so I can help build a sense of team and community. If I keep up a cheerful attitude with emails towards students, then the students feel more positive towards the class - more confident, more likely to take action and learn.
You also make yourself much more accessible via email - you say to the student, "hey, I use email a lot! If you email me you're likely to be able to get assistance!".
As to replying to email as a tutor, keep in mind you're running something very similar to a public-facing customer service. The key here is turnaround time - the more quickly you can provide a useful and informative reply to an email, the better your public relations will be, and the more likely people will be to use your emailing help service in the future. If you want to provide the best emailing help service, you have to make sure your replies are on time, that they're useful, and that the student is encouraged to ask for help in the future. A line similar to "Feel free to ask me if you have any more questions!" or even "I love answering questions!", I think, is compulsory for every email - it takes little effort and is very encouraging to a student who is worrying about bothering the tutor too much.
Sometimes, when the problem will take awhile, or you're busy, you can tell the student "I'm working on this and I will get back to you in X hours". All properties of good customer service.
To do (as of now):
- Student survey email (reminder in class) + telling them I'm free to help + student consultation
To do between every tutorial:
- Send out emails to all the students from the course (especially the
struggling or confused ones), suggesting catchup work for them to do.
- Send out emails to the entire tutorial making announcements telling them about interesting stuff in computing. Try to keep it limited (perhaps integrate as part of another email), because excessive spam decreases the value of each email and is more likely to be ignored
- Replicate all of the above when necessary in the group page in openlearning.
Effective emailing between tutorials is a skill I have not had much opportunity to practise, but I'm sure I'll get a lot better at it after thinking about how best to email a great variety of people and seeing how they respond to my emails.
The top of the mountain is so far out of reach.
No comments:
Post a Comment