They’re in My Office - Now What? 3 Tips for Productive Office Hours

By Jessica Deshler, Contributing Editor, West Virginia University

For students, office hours can be an opportunity to catch up or gain additional insight to coursework that challenges them. Recently, we posted about “5 Successful Ways to Get Students to Office Hours,” but what do we do when they come? How do we make the most out of that time so that it’s productive for faculty and students? Here are a few tips you can try to help your students during office hours:

1. Tell them your expectations. Let students know early in the semester what your expectations are for office hours. Do you expect them to bring their attempts at working out problems with them to see you? Do they have to keep and bring a journal? What type of pre-meeting preparation do you require of them? Ideally, these expectations should be outlined in the syllabus and during your first class. Be specific and repeat your expectations throughout the semester.
   
2. Once you have expectations set, stick to them. Reserve the right to reschedule a meeting if a student shows up completely unprepared to engage in a productive conversation. This is fair to students who have put in the expected effort ahead of time and come to your office with specific questions. Specifically, if students have not done the readings or assignments, or have missed class, give them an additional “assignment” of reviewing another student’s class notes before coming back to you to ask for clarification (and bringing those notes with them so you know they did it - it was an assignment after all).
   
3. Let them do the work. Much like class time, the time spent in office hours is most effective if your students spend it working through the mathematics instead of watching you do problems on the board. Your goal as an instructor is not to show them how to solve questions, but to teach them how to go about solving questions and how to think while problem solving. Leading students through the work is incredibly valuable. Questions like “How would you get started on this one?” and “What have you tried so far?” are ways to help students talk to you about their troubles in working through problems.  

Recommended tools: Check out these two tools to help you schedule office hours: youcanbook.me and a cool little setting in Google calendar. Both of these allow you to set aside specific blocks of time in your calendar for students, and allows them to book just part of that time. They’ll get reminders (always helpful for students) and you’ll know that they’re actually going to show up!