Happy New Year!  I hope the break provided you with an opportunity to refresh and reflect. My resolution this year aligns with the start of the semester and a topic we highlighted previously: being reflective about my practices.

While you can start your reflective journey at any point, the start of a new semester is the optimal time to build reflection into your practice. There are any number of frameworks out there to help guide you (I favor Gibbs reflective cycle), but in essence the first step is to stop to take stock of both the “what” (your teaching, an assessment or assignment, a new practice) and your response to the what. My resolution this year is to take that time to stop and reflect and then, after some time has passed, revisit my reflection and see what I can learn. If you’ve not done reflective practice, I encourage you to join me on this journey. If this is a part of your routine, I’d love to hear your thoughts on how to do it well, and what makes it work for you.

Looking for Help

I had a great discussion with the inimitable Joe Fernander, Data Scientist and Learning Analyst for eCampus, about some of the lessons that emerged this fall from the Mindset Learning Project (MLP). One of the most interesting of these (and Joe is a very interesting person to spend an hour with) is the types of help seeking students report. Research (and our own practice) teaches us that help seeking behaviors, and specifically reaching out to faculty, in-person and online tutors, and in-class peers can have positive impacts on student learning and outcomes. In the MLP students in general report a relatively high likelihood of seeking assistance on assignments or challenging material. That’s great news!

The flip side, and what really drew my attention, is that students report being more likely to gravitate toward the types of help that may be least efficient, least accurate, and least aligned with the material. Specifically, students are more likely to report using search engine, YouTube, and friends and family for help. Visiting faculty during office hours, which has the greatest and most direct impact on student learning and outcomes is actually the lowest ranked help-seeking behavior in the MLP survey. 

I know this isn’t a surprise to any of you, but knowing this creates an opportunity. As you start the semester, and particularly the spring semester (since almost all of your students now have the experience of at least one semester behind them), I encourage you to draw on this. Tell your students that when they are stumped in your class, as you hope they will be (you want them to stretch in their learning, after all), that they will likely turn to a range of resources, most typically the ones near at hand, but those may not be the ones to provide the best results. This would be the point to not only highlight any aligned tutoring or student support services, but also to invite them all to meet with you at the times you make available and to let them know what they may do with this time. Demystifying your office hours (and I encourage you to rethink the term – student support hours, available time, open sessions) can mean explicitly outlining what sorts of conversations your students may want to have, what questions they might bring, or even suggesting to them things that you may want to learn from them in this time.