Office hours for Patrick Cafferty’s biology classes are anything but traditional. Sometimes, students will go on runs with Cafferty, who is a teaching professor at Emory University. Other times, they’ll meet for coloring sessions or use chalk to draw anatomical diagrams on the sidewalk outside the medical school on campus.
This year, the office hours became a time for students to play games together. They’ve played Exploding Kittens and Unstoppable Unicorns, both strategic card games. Cafferty even got a small grant recently to purchase more games to play with his students. The sessions are scheduled to last just an hour, but Mcafferty usually has to usher his students out after an hour and a half or an hour and 45 minutes.
Cafferty began offering what he calls “alternative office hours” shortly before the pandemic. He started off with the running sessions — or “active office hours” — after helping some students train for a half or full marathon as a faculty in residence. Once the pandemic started, Cafferty found that many students enjoyed the calming togetherness of coloring while on a shared Zoom call. He downloaded outlines of biology diagrams and sent them to students to print on their own.
Now, he polls his classes at the beginning of the week on what type of activity they’d like to do. Often, games and coloring are the most popular.
“It's fun,” Cafferty says. “It's in a common area, so it's lower key. Students don't need to have a burning question to come. They're coming to play games.”
Cafferty is among a growing number of instructors who view office hours as more than simply homework help. He uses them as a way to connect with students and build relationships that he says helps them perform better in class.
But convincing students to attend office hours has always been a struggle. Many are intimidated by their professors, see attending office hours as a failure to figure the material out on their own or simply don’t understand what their purpose is. In a 2022 poll from Inside Higher Ed and College Pulse, 28 percent of survey recipients said they never visit with professors for office hours. And of the students who said they did attend, 55 percent said they did so only once or twice a semester. Plus, first generation students, low income students and those from marginalized groups are often the least likely to attend, but the ones who need it the most, experts say.
As students struggle to complete homework and face severe social anxiety coming out of the pandemic, office hours are more crucial than ever. They help students connect with professors for when they need to enter the workforce or continue their education. They also offer a sense of belonging and support that keeps some students from feeling lost in the back of a classroom.
So some instructors, like Cafferty, have started to rethink what office hours look like to try to draw in more students. They’re trying things like calling them “student hours,” bribing students with snacks and getting outside of their offices, all in an attempt to demonstrate how valuable office hours can be.
As students have more access to technology that will help them with their work outside of class, like the rush of new AI productivity tools like ChatGPT, some instructors say the role of office hours should change altogether.
“It is unlikely that students couldn't find the answers to content questions just using tools on their own,” says Mary Stairs Vaughn, a communications studies professor at Belmont University. “But that's not such a bad thing if they understand office hours not as a place where struggling kids get help or you come to talk about a grade,” she adds, “but rather as a place where you come and develop a relationship with a professor.”
Intimidation and Misunderstanding
Many students avoid office hours because they don’t fully understand their value, not because of laziness, Vaughn argues.
Through a series of focus groups about student perceptions of office hours, Vaughn found that many felt intimidated by their professors or scared to talk to them one on one. In the study, students said they thought their professors were too smart, and that they’d end up asking the “wrong questions.” Others said they felt like their professors were overly strict in their class policies and felt anxious about talking to them outside of class, she says.
While intimidation has always been an issue for students, the lingering effects of the pandemic have made it worse. Students are more “socially reluctant” since the pandemic, especially in working to build relationships with professors, says Cate Denial, a history professor at Knox College. Many already feel nervous to connect with their classmates, she says, so adding a power dynamic of a student-faculty relationship can make things even tougher.
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“Even at a small campus, there is this reluctance, and I think it comes out of not understanding — perhaps not knowing what the advantages are — of going to see someone,” says Denial, who also consults with instructors at other colleges on teaching practices. Students, she adds, “have struggled through a lot of things on their own, and I think that, for some of them, taking the moment to ask for help or really connect is a really alien concept.”
Students can also feel like they’re a burden on professors or like they’d be a bother if they come to office hours, says Eduardo J. Gonzalez Niño, an associate teaching professor in the biology department at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Through his research on office hours, Gonzalez Niño has found that many students, especially those who are the first in their family to attend college, don’t understand the purpose of office hours or don’t know what the term even means. Some said they think it’s a time for professors to get work done rather than help their students, he says.
“We don't communicate office hours or about office hours enough,” Gonzalez Niño says. “Often the extent to our communication about office hours as instructors is, ‘My office hours are from 7 to 9 at Campbell Hall.’”
Liz Norell, associate director of instructional support at the University of Mississippi, predicts that many of the misunderstandings around office hours also stem from faculty burnout, which she says most students can pick up on in classes.
Since the pandemic, many faculty members have felt the pressures of increasing class sizes, more sections to teach, and more responsibilities outside the classroom, she says. Students detect the stress their instructors are under, Norell says, and may think that going to office hours would just be an added inconvenience.
“A lot of this is kind of non-verbal communication that students are picking up on from their instructors,” Norell says, “where they feel like they're bothering us if they come to office hours or they may just perceive that somebody is overwhelmed and exhausted and burned out and doesn't want more things on their plate.”
In Vaughn’s study, students also viewed visiting office hours as a sign of weakness or a form of academic failure. Gonzalez Niño partially blames the culture of academia for that. Struggling in learning isn’t talked about enough, he says, and students don’t realize that it is an important — and necessary — part of the process that even their professors went through. When students struggle, they feel like they don’t belong in that class and that they should just give up, he says.
“When struggle is normalized — when we know that we have to struggle to learn something new — then we are more capable of accepting that and then trying again,” he says. “But when you're alone and you think you're the only one struggling, then that becomes a problem because you don't have any point of reference of what's normal and what's not.”
A New Type of Office Hour
To Gonzalez Niño, instructors need to create a “cultural shift” around office hours. Faculty members should make them more accessible and inviting, he says, and view them as a place for students to not only receive help with the content of their class, but also career advice, mentorship and study strategies.
For his classes, Gonzalez Niño is explicit in his syllabi about what office hours are. He also adds information about himself, such as the fact that he’s a Harry Potter fan, learning the ukulele and a first generation Latino in STEM. He then tells his students, “If you want to talk to me about these experiences or my other intersectionalities, please feel free to come.”
Norell, of the University of Mississippi, has also tried to make her office hours more accessible. While teaching at a community college in Tennessee, her first assignment of every semester was for students to find her office and send her a selfie next to it. This way, she could begin learning students' names and they would already feel comfortable coming to her office.
At the beginning of the year, Denial walks her students at Knox College from her classroom to her office so they know where to go when they come to office hours. She has also worked to make her office space more inviting — she set up a loveseat, hung up artwork that talks about inclusivity, pinned buttons to a board on her door describing her identity and put up a whiteboard outside for students to leave messages.
Professors should “put themselves in the shoes of someone for whom college is a brand new and bewildering experience,” Denial says. “Imagine what that would feel like and how that might condition someone's responses to things that seem obvious and inconsequential to someone else.”
Instructors have also started moving office hours out of their offices.
Norell, for instance, will sometimes tell her students that she’s at the campus Starbucks or in the library working and to come find her there with questions. This lowers the bar, she says, and makes the meeting feel less intimidating. “It doesn't feel like a thing,” she says. “I'm just kind of hanging out where people are hanging out.”
Last year, Lauren Sloane, a biology professor at the State University of New York at Delhi, took her students outside in the snow, where they used colored water to draw diagrams of what they were learning in class. When it hadn’t snowed in a while, she gave them sidewalk chalk, and if the weather was bad, they’d come into a large classroom and draw on poster paper.
Giving them a fun, nontraditional way to learn the content motivated students to engage with the material, Sloane says. She also found that students began teaching each other, which helped them learn better as well.
“I was there to watch them and guide them and ask them questions because if I just tell them what to do, they're not necessarily going to learn it,” Sloane says. “But if they are working with each other to try and work through things — and asking questions about this or how does this work — then they got the concept and they had fun with it because it was in the snow.”
For Cafferty, building relationships with students is essential to their success both in and outside of class. During his alternative office hours, students typically don’t talk too much about the course material. They tell him about their other classes, professors, research or their lives outside of school. Then, when they have questions related to the content of the class, many seem more comfortable coming to his normal office hours or seeing him after class, he says.
Rachel Davenport, a professor of instruction in Texas State’s biology department, observes a similar trend when she hosts her office hours, which she describes as “chat and hang out time.” She usually sets up her chairs in a circle and has six or seven students show up. They may go over questions from the homework or lecture, but they also talk about Davenport’s research or new restaurants in town.
Connecting with students helps Davenport as well, she says. She can write better letters of recommendation or determine what questions students in the rest of the class might have, even if they don’t attend her office hours. Most of all, though, she says it keeps her motivated and reminds her why she enjoys teaching.
“Even though I would rather catch up on email probably everyday, in the long run, feeling like I'm engaging those students, feeling like they're enthusiastic and they're excited to learn, feeling like they're learning and feeling like I'm helping to boost their career — all of that is probably feeding me in ways that are intangible,” Davenport says. “It's probably why I keep doing what I'm doing.”
