Professors Reach Out to Their Students

Mesa College history professor Donald Abbott and his colleagues came up with an unusual idea last year.

They started an informal center where students can talk to faculty members from the social studies department, not only about their own courses, but about current affairs, study habits, college life--in short, a way to mix outside the classroom.

“I think most of us found it rewarding,” Abbott said. “It encouraged students to approach history and related topics in a cross-discipline way, it allowed us to talk in small groups, and it helped get across to students that we are interested in their future.”

For San Diego Community College District Chancellor Augustine Gallego, the social studies center illustrates what all professors across the sprawling three-campus system should be doing.

Gallego wants to revamp the typical faculty work week to encourage greater professor-student interaction.

He wants professors to become more involved in counseling students, in helping them to understand how one course relates to another, in giving career advice--all so that they will pay more attention to students and improve the campus environment.

Too many students simply commute to the Mesa, Miramar or City College campuses, file in and out of lecture classes, then leave, Gallego said. As a result, students uncertain about or struggling with their studies fall through the cracks when they could be saved with greater attention from a professor or two.

Gallego emphasized that many professors take time to work with students informally. But those examples somehow need to be expanded across the institutions, he added.

“If all faculty helped students succeed both in the classroom and in support service roles, many more students would stay in college and achieve their educational goals,” Gallego said.

“We don’t know enough about our students.”

Though the idea is in its early stages, it already has met with enthusiastic endorsements from several of the trustees who oversee the 108,000-student district. The board feels pressure not only to open more academic doors to San Diego’s growing number of minority students, but to have them succeed as well.

“The best factor in terms of retention of a student is the quality of the contact between the professor and the student outside of class,” board member Maria Senour, a professor of counseling education at San Diego State University, said. “One of the reasons that I ran for the board was to try and make the institution more personal in its dealings with students.”

She added, “Just having a professor volunteer a couple of hours a week for some special activity, whether in a tutoring center or just mentoring one or two students--that would make a big difference.

“It did in my own case, when a high school teacher talked with me about why I should go to college when I never had thought about doing so.”

Board member Evonne Schulze said the community colleges should be the academic leaders in improving professor-student relationships because “that’s the one thing we’ve always had going for us.”

Unlike the University of California or California State University systems, “our professors are hired to teach and to work with students, and they aren’t forced into the ‘publish or perish’ syndrome,” where research requirements become a large measure of job evaluations, Shulze said.

(UC San Diego recently announced a major reform effort to improve its own undergraduate education by emphasizing more small-group interaction between students and faculty.)

Both Schulze and Senour stressed the need to work out the mechanics of Gallego’s idea cooperatively with the faculty, and not force changes through board directives.

“I don’t think you can simply mandate it, but there are certainly a lot of ways that you can encourage it,” Senour said.

Under present faculty union contracts, the typical weekly work week requires 15 hours of instructional time, five hours of office hours, 10 hours of campus-assigned activities including curriculum development and committee meetings, and 10 hours of optional off-campus activities, mainly preparation for lectures.

Gallego wants to have several departments, or maybe an entire college, volunteer to revamp their instructional strategies.

“We could have faculty helping to advise students on programs, to help with orientation, to participate in writing and math labs, all to connect the classroom with what we call student support services,” Gallego said.

For example, Gallego said many students do not go to faculty office hours because they are either intimidated or have little experience in striking up conversations with a professor. In those cases, he said, a professor’s time could be better spent in a tutorial center or some type of group activity where the student-faculty “barrier” might be more easily bridged.

“I want a prototype where the student no longer sees counseling, tutorials, learning centers, orientation, as somehow all separate from instruction.”

Gallego’s general theme resonates with many professors, such as Abbott, who are involved with their own experiments to expand faculty-student contact.

“I think a lot of faculty will say ‘Great!’ ” Abbott said. In talking about the first year of the social studies center, Abbott said: “I’d come back from a session and say, ‘Wow, the students really had a great talk!’ and when I came back enthusiastic, that sent a message to (my colleagues) that they should try it as well.”

Abbott pointed to the design of Mesa’s physical plant as one barrier to encouraging more informal contact. Because the campus has no student center, the social studies center has had to move from classroom to classroom, depending on the availability of space from week to week.

That meant students had to work harder to find it and “drop in,” he said.

Abbott said he hopes that the student services center now under construction at Mesa will provide room for such activities.

A group of science and math professors at City College got around their space problem by last year converting a computer center into a tutorial room.

“We’ve been giving up some of our office hour time to work in the center,” Prof. Harold Kane said. “It’s actually been rather fun to use the time to be in the walk-in center because we meet students who have other courses and other professors as well.”

Kane said that any districtwide effort should be step-by-step as a way to persuade skeptics and to work out problems that are sure to develop.

“I believe that most of us would welcome a reorganization of our work to contribute in a new way to student success,” he said.

The first steps can be as simple as “beginning on the first day of a class to give the message early and often that the student is important, and that the faculty does want to be available to all of them,” Kane said.

Already, City’s math department chairman Jim Mahler announces office hours for all math professors to students in all math classes, no matter their professor. By doing so, Mahler encourages students to pick a faculty member at times convenient to the students.

Math professor Carolyn Thomas finds that her office frequently turns into a spur-of-the-moment tutoring center, with a dozen students or more crowding around as she guides the group through mathematical concepts.

“I always kid them in class that, if they don’t come, I’ll get very bored,” Thomas said, adding that her enthusiasm is meant in large part to “reach out to the quieter students, the ones who don’t say a lot but those whom one day you find have disappeared” from the campus.

Thomas said, “My colleagues always comment when they pass by and see the crowds, and they ask me how I do it.”

For some professors, the idea of approaching students informally is as scary as it is for students to approach professors, Thomas said.

“Everyone knows that students are afraid, but not everyone knows that many professors are also intimidated,” she said.

Added Kane: “Some of us could use some coaching in simple person-to-person communication.”

Mesa music professor Liz Hamilton will be offering what she calls “cultural diversity informances” this fall to her colleagues so that more of them will become familiar with the cultural backgrounds of their students. Ethnic and other non-traditional cultures will be presented through dance, art and music so that professors can better appreciate the backgrounds, she said.

“My idea is to provide an artistic forum so that students and faculty can begin to fill in the gaps between them,” Hamilton said.

A third of the district’s 3,000 full- and part-time professors are eligible for retirement today, and more than half could retire in five years, Gallego said. “Not that we want many of them to retire and not that most aren’t still excellent teachers,” but the nature of our students has changed significantly since they first began teaching, he said.

City college business professor Barbara Hansen said the faculty would welcome assistance to break down such barriers.

“There are a tremendous amount of cultures on our campuses now, and there are many students who are tremendously uncomfortable with coming to see us during office hours, for example,” Hansen said.

Hansen meets the challenge in part by organizing her students into teams, where they work together on class projects.

“And that almost (forces) them to work with themselves and with me outside of class,” she said, “both on projects as well as on how to mesh their personalities together better.

“A lot of this is trust. Are you really accessible, even if you’re in the office? Can they get more than an academic answer to a question that’s not always academic?”