Helping Students Reconnect
We’ve been hearing from colleagues who are concerned about students who have already missed several class meetings this semester, and/or haven’t handed in assignments. There are plenty of explanations for these lapses: Students may be feeling overextended, and they often have trouble managing competing priorities. They may stop showing up because they’re feeling intimidated by the class. They may have been ill—multiple viruses are making the rounds. After a student has missed a class or two, it’s all too easy to give up on a course or to be embarrassed to return. There’s still time to salvage the semester, even for students who have missed a week or more, but they need to get back on track right away.
The seventh-week drop deadline is coming up next Friday. After October 9, students will need permission from their Dean’s office in order to drop a course. After this deadline, they also cannot drop without receiving a grade on their transcript. This means it’s important for students who may be falling behind to have a good sense of how feasible it will be to catch up. There are many factors to weigh, however, and there have been major changes in financial aid requirements, so if students ask for your advice about dropping, it’s best to recommend that they talk to their advisors about the financial impact. A lot of students may need to stay in their courses and do their best to make up for lost time.
Absences can present us with a conundrum, though. When we’ve designed engaging class sessions that advance students’ learning, we want to communicate that it’s essential to attend. At the same time, we need to be humane and flexible, since illnesses and other disruptions happen to everyone, including college students. And of course, they may infect others if they come to class when they’re ill, so we want sick students to stay home and recover.
So what can faculty do to help students who miss class? Here are some ideas:
- Keep updated information about each class session’s goals, activities, and assignments on Canvas so that students can see what they’re missing when they’re absent. Providing a guide to what’s happening in and out of class can also reduce the number of queries you receive asking, “Did I miss anything when I was absent?” (The answer is always yes.)
- Let students know your expectations with regard to communications about absences. Since students may be taking five courses a semester, all with different policies, communicating these expectations in a redundant way will be helpful (e.g., on the syllabus, in Canvas, and in class).
- Encourage students to make connections with each other during class. If they work together and get to know each other, they can help one another keep up with what’s happening in the course and catch up if they fall behind.
- Ensure that assignments, exams, and grades are well distributed so that there is flexibility for the inevitabilities of life. Frequent low-stakes assessments have many other benefits, too.
- Make reasonable adjustments. Allowing students to make up the same assignment or activity that they would have done if they were present works well in some cases, and in others, you might need to adjust what students should do to catch up on their learning.
- Write yourself a few email templates that you can use in different circumstances related to absences. This will save you time when reaching out or responding to students.
- Proactively reach out to students who have missed multiple classes, communicating both concern and your expectations. A student who has missed several classes might feel too embarrassed or hopeless to reach out to you, but may respond if you contact them first.
- If a student seems to have disappeared from class and you’re worried about their well-being, you can report “concerning behavior,” like unexplained absences or deteriorating health, at report.fsu.edu.
Some approaches to attendance can actually be counterproductive. Here are a few to avoid:
- Creating attendance policies so rigid that sick students feel compelled to come to class.
- Ignoring attendance altogether, or communicating that you don’t have a preference whether students attend or not. (We need to balance holding students accountable for coming to class with helping them continue to learn and make progress if they do have to miss.)
- Communicating about attendance, in the syllabus or in class, in a way that conveys suspicion or annoyance.
- Making attendance policies that are too complicated and time-consuming for you to manage.
- Responding to student explanations or apologies for absences by disregarding or minimizing their concerns, or by assuming they’re untruthful.
Responding too quickly to student requests to make up missed work. It’s okay to let students know that you need some time to think about whether or how they can catch up.
If you’d like support communicating with students about their attendance or missed assignments, or with creating opportunities for them to catch up, please contact us at pro-teaching@fsu.edu. We look forward to working with you!