Building Better Office Hours

How can I help students understand how to use office hours?

We frequently hear from faculty that students don’t come to office hours, even when they are struggling. It is initially confusing that students don’t make use of this time for extra support. What’s worse, that confusion can turn into frustration that our students are ignoring the efforts we put into our teaching when we carve out this time for them. If you’ve had these experiences, you are probably hoping there is a better way to structure office hours—and there is! 

This article will help you consider the value of office hours, understand the barriers that prevent students from getting there, and offer easy-to-implement strategies to turn things around.

Why are office hours important?

We tend to take it as a given that students should visit their professors’ offices, but it’s worth stopping to think about why we want students to come to our office hours and what we want them to learn from the experience. Research tells us that meaningful, positive interactions between students and faculty contribute to student success in a variety of ways. For example, these interactions have been shown to support development of cognitive skills, improve classroom engagement, increase academic self-challenge, and support students’ sense of belonging. You probably have additional anecdotal evidence of these positive effects as well as many other ways that taking time to visit their instructors’ office hours can help students succeed. But despite all these potential benefits, many students still don’t show up!

Why don’t students come to office hours?

It can be easy to dismiss students’ lack of engagement in office hours (or in any learning activities) in negative ways: they are lazy, they don’t care about the course, they don’t care about their learning, etc. (Ugh, kids today!!) But in fact, there are several factors that influence students’ decisions about coming to office hours that have more to do with their developmental stage and their beliefs about learning.

• Traditional-aged college students are, developmentally speaking, adolescents (until age 26!). This means that they are still developing the self-regulatory skills, like help-seeking behavior, that are important to academic success. 
• Some students may think that visiting office hours, especially to ask for additional help, is a sign of weakness and may signal that they don’t belong in the course (or in college!). This can be especially true for students who are underrepresented in an institution, a major, a discipline, or a course. 
• First-generation students who don’t know the “rules of the academic game” may not realize that building relationships with faculty is not only beneficial for them in school but can also help them form important connections to support their success beyond graduation.
• Students may be intimidated because they don’t feel like they know how to initiate a one-on-one conversation with a professor.
• Students may feel like coming to office hours is really a waste of valuable time for professors who would rather be doing their own work. This may be especially true of first-generation or low-income students.

Chances are that many students experience not just one but many of these thoughts and feelings in relation to office hours, making it really tempting for them to simply opt out. How can we help them see the value of spending time to build a relationship with us? The remainder of this article will outline two different sets of strategies for improving office hours: (1) a small steps approach that helps you encourage students to visit your office by creating a warm welcome and (2) a higher effort strategy that will guarantee to get students to visit your office. 

Small steps approach: Lower-effort strategies for getting students to your office hours

If your goal is to increase students’ comfort and lower perceived barriers to them coming to your office hours, there are four small steps that can help. You may implement all of these steps at once or try them one at a time.

Step 1: Consider what’s in a name.

Some faculty have observed that “office hours” isn’t the most welcoming term—and in fact doesn’t really explain what should happen when students come to see you! If you want to send the message to students that the times you’ve designated aren’t about your presence in your office but are instead about your willingness to help them, you may want to use a different name. For example, using a name like “student hours,” “student drop-in times,” or “ask the professor” can show that this time is theirs and that you expect to spend it with them (Felten & Lambert, 2020, 118-19).

Step 2: Help students know what to expect.

Students who aren’t experienced with visiting their professors’ offices may not know why they should visit you or what they would do there. Instead of just telling students when and where your office hours will be, let them know that coming to see you will help them be successful. For example, provide information on your syllabus that helps them prepare for a visit to your office. You might suggest that they take a little time to prepare first by making some notes about their questions, their work on upcoming assignments, or something they would like to discuss with you. You may even want to encourage students to visit your office in small groups; this can help students feel less anxious or intimidated and can also help you manage a higher volume of visits if you teach large classes. Overall, you want to help students see office hours as a normal part of what college students do, even if they aren’t struggling. Below is some sample language that you can adapt for your syllabus.