Strategies for reaching out to students who have gone missing or are falling behind

Put a Glock to their heads.

Harry, in my experience as a teacher and as a manager, I can’t think of anything more effective (in a broad-spectrum way) than the kind of email you suggested, in an explicitly nonjudgmental tone. If I’m close enough to the person, as in a seminar or an employer-employee relationship, I might add a phone call after an initial email has not been answered for about two days.

When I was doing my bachelor’s and I flaked on an undergrad research assistant gig, I was embarrassed to get back in touch with the professor after what felt like a super long time had passed, and I would have welcomed the kind of note you mention.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-improve-your-life-with-story-editing/
“For example, I did a study with first-year college students who were not doing well academically. They were at risk of adopting a negative, self-defeating thinking pattern in which they blamed themselves and concluded that they weren’t “college material.” We randomly divided the students into two groups. One group got information indicating that many people do poorly their first year but do better after they learn the ropes, and watched videotaped interviews of upperclass students who reinforced this message. The idea was to encourage students to change how they interpreted their own academic difficulties, redirecting them away from the negative, self-defeating idea that they weren’t cut out for college, to a more positive interpretation that they needed to learn how to do better. It worked: This group of students, compared to the control group (who got no information), achieved better grades the next semester and were less likely to drop out of college.”

And when there’s no reply to the email? In that case, you are watching a slow-motion fall from a ten-story roof.

A human being needs to talk to the student, in person, about the effect of failing a class. Promptly. This can be you or someone else.

Find out if the student participates in an activity. A club sport? A music-acting-debate-journalism-tutoring-student government activity? Ask the coach or whatever to help. This person can impose consequences. (Before you get on the bus for the away meet, you need to talk to Prof B.)

Is there a dorm mommy/daddy? Or does the kid belong to a Newman Club? Hillel?

If nothing is working, go to the dean for student affairs. Someone needs to tell the student that s/he is in danger of being asked to leave. Someone needs to say, which will be more embarrassing – talking to Prof B, or telling your parents that you flunked out? Someone needs to see if the kid is clinically depressed or has overwhelming financial, substance abuse/video game addiction (seriously!), relationship, or other difficulties.

Aside from the effects on the kid’s future – Starbucks, here we come! with $50,000 debt and no degree! – a failed class is $5000 down the toilet. Saving that kind of money is worth a vigorous intervention.

I like the way you keep it concerned but light. I wouldn’t say ‘don’t worry I’m not giving you a hard time…’ because I’d worry they’d get the idea their lack of attendance won’t affect their grade. I try to shoot for kind but firm– ‘just checking in…let me know if you need help with …midterm is in 2 weeks…’ I think keeping a tiny edge in there but showing you care is better because they may be looking for a reason why it’s OK to stay home. Totally made up figures but I’d say they respond about 80% of the time and about 50% return from their wanderings when given a breadcrumb trail to complete the course.

If they keep not showing up I say they have to meet with me or withdraw because they won’t pass without attending class–while also giving them that one last chance to catch up when this is possible.

A second suggestion is to talk to student advising. They sometimes have strategies to contact students and offer them more personalized assistance than is appropriate from a professor.

Some of my most brilliant students had periods of very poor attendance or bad grades. Usually it is due to life circumstances but it is also common for people of high ability and potential to become perfectionists and choke under pressure–both within and outside of school. Often it is temporary and they pull it together. I’ve even seen students go on to do wonderfully after a very serious bump in the road that required a leave for poor grades.

You should never shoot bunnies but I doubt anyone can perfectly identify bunnies in one semester or even in Freshman year. And even the bunnies may turn out very well.

Many years ago I failed out of an ivy league school at the end of my sophomore year. Looking back on it now, it’s easy to see that after I’d missed a handful of classes due to hung over sleeping in/wanting just one more bong hit on the way out of the door/ just being lazy I got to the point where I was just plain embarrassed to show up, and so I didn’t. I think an email similar in tone to the one in the OP might have done wonders for me, in that it would “give me permission” to return to class without feeling too humiliated. Of course this was so long ago that email wasn’t a thing yet, so a prof might have had to make a phone call – an interaction that I suspect neither I nor the professors would have relished.

Best of luck to your friend with this. Sincerely.

I’m basically technophobic, but TheSophist’s last point about emails and phone calls is something I have often thought about (and thought about blogging about) — I can’t imagine making a phone call with the content of the email I described, and, furthermore, I can’t imagine it prompting the valuable kind of correspondence I have sometimes had as a result. Email facilitates a different kind of communication in other words.

In addition to the fact that there are pathways to passing I am trying to communicate something else in the emails– without being too explicit (and thus seemingly pushy) about it I am trying to signal openness to hearing about the reasons for absence, which in some cases has been successful, with very nice outcomes. Students often have problems that are much more easily mitigated than they think; its just that they need to find the people who have the resources to help (and, often, professors know what those resources are, even if they don’t always know how to get the students to them!)

“No, they really, really don’t, Bloix.”
Yes, really, really, they do, Collin Street.

“A communication is only useful if it contains information not known to both parties.”

I cannot begin to count the ways that this is a false statement.
A husband says “I love you” to his wife. Is that a non-useful communication? And we can go from there.

“by and large students who fail classes are fully aware of the consequences”

That by and large is doing a hell of a lot of work there.

Before email, in fact, we had no way of contacting student, now I think of it — neither addresses nor phone numbers were available to faculty (here). I guess you could have gathered them at the beginning of the semester, but I’d bet that would have seemed creepy (as, eg, collecting phone numbers still would have 5 years ago, though I’d guess it would be just fine now — and, indeed, I do sometimes ask for phone numbers, especially from students who are bad emailers)

Before email, in fact, we had no way of contacting student, now I think of it

I’m surprised to hear that – I was assuming they had pigeon holes or similar (like we did).

Harry your approach seems very reasonable and charitable (in contrast to PJW@18’s experience!) .

One anecdatum about students’ reluctance to contact professors. . .

Many years ago when we were first using an electronic means of entering final grades on an institutional platform, I received a call from the mother of one of my best students about three weeks after the semester. She inquired on behalf of her child why s/he had received an F. I immediately replied, that’s not possible–the student got an A. She said, no–my child got an F. I assured her that was wrong and I’d look into it.

Consulting student services quickly revealed it was my entry error: a student who had stopped coming to my class early on was listed on the electronic roll just before my A student. That student, not having dropped the course, of course had an F. Somehow I not only gave the missing student an F–I accidentally also gave the following A student an F too! Even though I reviewed my entries, I’d missed the mistake.

Here’s the kicker–the A student just assumed the s/he had failed the final! (Even though had s/he done so, s/he had enough points for a solid C, and should have known that.) S/he refused to contact me because s/he was so convinced I was a diligent professional that failure on the final was the only plausible hypothesis!

(Of course the irony for this thread is that a missing student became a factor in all this.)

Thank heavens the Mom called me and had enough confidence in her child to step up and ask. Believe me–I now triple check my final grade entries.

So students can have a number of reasons for failing to contact professors–including over-confidence in the conduct of their professors’ professional lives.

Maybe we sometimes need to remind students we are not perfect, even while we also try to model strong intellectual values about responsible learning. Humility seems a nice addition to the mix.

At my particular institution, procedural mechanisms attempt to address both employment guidelines and legal or otherwise behavioral modes of conduct for the fulfillment of Instructor responsibilities. But procedure does not necessarily *preclude instructor advocacy for all students as well as an individual student with prior documentation.*

“Before email, in fact, we had no way of contacting student,”

Anyone know Mr Jones? Ms Smith, you do? Would you please see me after class? Thanks.

“the perceived responsibility of what faculty members owe their students”

The employees of an institution that is selling a service that costs $50,000 per year, knowing full well that the money is borrowed and that failure to receive the service can ruin the recipient’s life, perhaps have the responsibility to make an effort to deliver that service.

Shorter Bloix: the best way to deal with students who have gone missing or are falling behind is to threaten or belittle them; assistance and guidance are neither useful nor advisable.

I show up, I deliver. I can email repeat absentees to remind them they are welcome in the class, but aren’t there possible negative knock-on effects to this type of hand-holding? I understand the urge to care for students, they are fellow human beings, and I do actually care about education. And I understand that as education “democratizes” it brings in students who, for a variety of reasons, have a difficult time applying themselves to something with no immediate pay-off. Some are working a lot of hours, some have family responsibilities, and some may end up in college just because there wasn’t anything else to do. I understand that the academic teacher-student relation, including expected duties on both sides, was founded in an era when students were relatively privileged. But what Harry is referring to strikes me as part of the general swing in the academic relation towards customer service. Not sure how I feel about this.

I like being able to run into students in the hall or on the quad ‘by chance’, and take them aside for a quick check-in. (This is one advantage of a tiny school.)

One question is whether there is a shared understanding between faculty and students as to the educational significance of attending classes. At some schools, this understanding and its corresponding expectations might differ vastly between different departments, or even within a department.

Bloix–

All missing students are informed at midterm by email and snail mail if they are below a C, with a request to please drop the course. It works about 3/4 of the time.

And — I do not perceive a general swing in the academic relation toward customer service at all! But obviously, its really hard to know what’s going on!

No one really picked up on what Tim Wilson said @5. But I loved seeing confirmed what I thought was one of my important roles as an academic adviser to a struggling student–story editing. I reinforce to transfer students how well they have done in their first semester as a transfer even though they may received lower grades than ever before in their life. I tell them that the only mistake they made was not taking a reduced course load in their first semester. I tell more or less true stories of students who struggled until they found a path for themselves and went on to do great things. I validate their alienation from scholarly pursuits, underlining that university learning is indeed only one way of learning about the world and only one way of achieving distinction; but that there is still great value within these limits. If I sense the student’s alienation may have class determinants, I share with them Annette Lareau’s findings about why students from the middle class already having had many encounters with tutors are much more comfortable with professors than working class students who were not whisked to one private lesson after another as kids. There is no set list here; the challenge is getting to know students well enough to motivate them…when you are teaching seven courses a year, writing countless letters of recommendation, developing new courses, trying to write down new ideas, raising kids, and writing comments at CT.

I’m in agreement with harry b @34 that hand-holding is less concerning than depression or low self-esteem. I remember plenty of people (myself included) who suffered from feelings of isolation and of futility during undergrad. Just knowing that someone cares about your progress and wants you to succeed can make an enormous difference.

Bloix takes the position that (a) students do not appreciate the consequences of failing and (b) professors who do not threaten the students with these consequences do not care about the students.

I wonder whether Bloix has teaching experience, and if so, whether these methods were successful.

I’d also like Bloix’s input into a teaching experience of mine: Student comes to me during the first week of class to say that they need this class to graduate, have already failed it twice, and have a job which is contingent on graduating (and therefore, on passing this class). I say, “okay then, come to class, do your homework, come to my office hours, work hard.”

The student does not do homework, come to office hours, or work hard. After the second exam, they come to me to say they are concerned about their grade. I say, “well, you failed both exams, but I’m still willing to give you a passing grade if you work hard and do better on the final.” Their grade on the final is the same as on the previous exams.

My question for Bloix is, did this student fail because they were unaware about the consequences of failure, or because I did not care enough about the student to make the consequences clear?

As for what works, I don’t have a lot of experience, but all I can offer is compassion. My sense is that students who are doing poorly are usually some combination of terrified and in denial. What they need is reassurance that they can in fact do this stuff, and that you are willing to help them if they ask for it.

I was a wildly inconsistent student and now I’m on the other side. My belief is that we need to help students to build good work habits, including an ability to recover from mistakes. This means grading their homework, factoring attendance into their grade, and giving in class quizzes. You can’t let them think that because homework or attendance doesn’t directly affect their grade, they don’t have to do it.

To help them recover from mistakes, you have to be open and flexible. Didn’t do your homework? No problem, make sure you do the homework for next week. Skipped a week of class? Make some effort, get the lecture notes from another student, read the sections in the textbook, and come to my office hours to go over it with me. Have a really dumb question in class? Ask it. It may be less dumb than you think. Other students probably have the same dumb question. I may not have taught a concept clearly, and I may not know that unless people start asking dumb questions about it. Failed an exam? It’s just one exam, you can compute its effect on your course grade. If it’s still early, maybe you should drop the course and try again next time. Or if you can do well enough for the rest of the course, you can convince me it was a fluke and I might discount it when computing your final grade. Either way, the standards for this course are now clear, and you can judge how hard you have to work to get the grade you want.

For the course I’m teaching this semester, the discussion sections are to go over homework problems they should have already done. The standard I’m trying to set is that they don’t have to walk in with the right answers, as long as they’ve walked in having worked on the problems. I want them to be comfortable saying that they don’t know, or even that they didn’t try, if I call on them about a particular problem. They’re not the only student in the room who doesn’t understand the problem. If they are willing to talk about what they don’t understand, then we can discuss it collectively and hopefully elevate everyone’s understanding.

One line I’ve been using a lot this semester is, “you probably saw this in a previous class. If you’re like me, you saw it and have since forgotten about it. Let’s review it.” The goal is to say that it’s okay to forget things or to not understand things the first time. Relearning and trying things again is a necessary part of the learning process.

So far I’ve had mixed results. Some people are clearly extremely uncomfortable admitting that they don’t understand. They don’t come to the discussions, or if they do come, they refuse to answer or just shut down if I try to get them to talk through the problems.

Others have jumped at the opportunity, and will volunteer to answer problems and then lead off by saying they didn’t get all of it but this is what they started with. Some students will also cut in to help other students, even if it’s just to say that they think they know the next step, but they don’t know where to go from there.

I have been trying to encourage the students for any response at all, even just saying that they don’t know, in hopes that more students will become more comfortable speaking up as the semester goes on. I also remind them in the lectures that attending the discussions is mandatory. (This doesn’t help for students who also don’t come to the lectures.)

I’m trying for a carrot and stick approach. Sticks: Discussion attendance is mandatory. If you don’t do the homework, you will be embarrassed in discussion when I ask you how to do the problem. Carrots: Any response at all in discussion is acceptable. If you say you haven’t done the problem, I will thank you for any contribution you can make and then move on. You may feel bad for not knowing the answer, but I will do my best to not focus on the fact that you don’t know. I want to keep the focus on the problems and answers, not on whether particular students know the answers.

Another carrot is that the problems we go over in discussion tend to be closely tied to the exam problems. Coming to the discussions and studying the solutions to the problems covered there goes hand in hand with doing well on the exams.

Not every student is going to do well. But I believe that more students will try to do well if you communicate to them that you do not expect them to be perfect and that you are committed to helping them to learn, even after they make mistakes.

@34 – “I have some sort of duty to intervene in ways that will help make them both more productive contributors to society and more successful people”

Yes. Thank you. As I’ve said in response to other posts (forgive me for not saying it earlier on this thread) I have nothing but admiration for your efforts to do so.

BTW OSweetMrMath–terrific comments.

Thanks Harry for this, I appreciate it. Unfortunately I don’t have suggestions, just a problem, but I’d like to mention it in case anyone has ideas or similar experiences. I have to be a bit discreet but it’s difficult – anyway in the undergraduate courses I teach in, it’s normal for teaching staff to contact students if they are not meeting attendance requirements or handing in assignments, and I think we would usually do it pretty supportively. However once a student gets behind, they usually need ‘special consideration’ in order to overcome the regulations around missing due dates etc, and to get that they have to go through an administrative process. This seems to be where they fall out.

It’s frustrating, because you can, for example, have a student who has completed quite a bit of the work, then misses an assignment. You contact them, find out what the problem is, tell them that with special consideration they can still lodge the assignment, and that even if they don’t get a very good mark they can still pass the unit, tell them how to complete the form and where to lodge it, etc – and then you don’t hear any more, a couple of weeks pass, it’s end of semester and you get caught up in assessment, and next thing is results are closing and you have to fail that student.

I think that in some cases it’s the administrative process, or the administrator, that is the block for some students, rather than the teachers. It seems there may at that point be a concern for the letter of the law rather than the spirit, if I can put it that way. It’s hard to know what to do about it though without getting drawn into some major conflict.

All students in classes where attendance is monitored are required to take the cell phone numbers and email addresses of at least two other students. This exchange occurs in-class under my supervision during the first two weeks of class. We repeat this activity for the first four classes to ensure that all students have the contact information. It is then the students’ responsibility to come to class. If students choose to absent themselves from class for any reason, they alone are responsible for learning from other students what they missed and ensuring that they come to class prepared with the missing assignments completed and in-hand.

Like others (many, perhaps), I have been confronted by students who are burdened by health issues (physical or mental). My responsibility is to ensure that the administration is made aware of this fact, so that the students receive professional care/counseling. Once I have done that, I concentrate on ensuring that the students who are trying to improve receive all the support I can provide. Teaching practices and class activities are designed to re-enforce through peer-review, peer-teaching, and task activities designed to reveal concept error. Some students self-select for failure. That’s their decision to make and I respect their right to make that choice.

@44 – I’m not apologizing to Harry. I liked the OP and it’s not my problem if you’ve read me so carelessly that you don’t understand that. What I do not like – what fills me with rage, in point of fact – is universities that fleece their students and professors who don’t much care. Harry is not one of them. And yes, I understand that you’ve got no choice but to deal with a student who has announced to you that s/he’s going to kill him or herself. You’d be sued if you didn’t. But how many of your students simply disappear?

@50 – in one three-month period an uncle, a grandparent, and a very close friend died. Three funerals and one four-day bedside vigil. I didn’t flunk any classes but it wasn’t my best semester.

> @44 – I’m not apologizing to Harry.

You really, really ought to. Harry told you that he had no way to contact students; you rather flippantly proposed a method. Which is to say, you rejected his direct claim, denied the reality of what he says he experienced. “I can’t do this”. “Yes you can”, when you don’t have the knowledge or experience to override what harry was saying to you.

In context this meant that you were calling Harry a liar. This is, fundamentally, disrespectful; if you had reason to believe that harry were a fantasist or liable to miss obvious things, then you could do this without needing to apologise then your disrespect would be justified, but I can’t see anything like that and you haven’t mentioned anything either.

[which is to say: people think less of you precisely because you won’t apologise; it shows that you’re bad at spotting when you’ve made mistakes and dogmatic about your own correctness. This will severely impact the interactions you have with others… except I, and probably others, worked this out about you years ago, so this particular incident won’t have any huge effect.]

Harry, yeah I think the comment was about undergrads trying to blag an extension and not serious students like us but it still stuck. From my ESOL experience classes had people of all ages from 16 to older adults. One tutor planned a lesson on the topic of families and a student, I think she was 17, left the class upset because her parents in Germany were getting divorced, so it can happen with something totally innocuous. Also there would be asylum seekers and refugees in the class where you wouldn’t know their history, so you would try and be careful around some subjects but might not know if something hit a nerve. Another one I read on a blog was a teacher playing hangman at the end of a lesson, a common EFL activity, and one of the pupil’s parents had been hung.

Just to say Bloix doesn’t need to apologize to me — Bloix has been very complimentary about my pedagogical threads, so I take his good will (toward me at least) as read, and I know where he is coming from. We both know this, and his “I am not apologizing” is not a refusal to apologize (as it might look to other people) but a signal that he knows I know where he’s coming from due to other interactions.

The hangman thing is so awful.

Thanks harry–I’ll borrow your forgiving attitude since I certainly cannot know the ins and outs of others’ lives and should model my own pleas for epistemic/judgmental humility. I’ve been reading for our get-together and still have a way to go!

There is one big issue that hasn’t been addressed yet: people of color and people from poorer backgrounds are much less likely to privately engage the professor when they are having moments of difficulty. Growing up in a social setting where you have no entitlements, plus a racial order that moves against you–many don’t even think/know special arrangements are an option. White students from middle class and higher backgrounds are much more assertive, by contrast.

Magari’s right — and that’s a reason for professors to be proactive and purposeful about interactions with students. Such students are also, in my experience, less likely to feel comfortable going to a mental health professional, and once they exhaust student health services they are more likely not to want their parents to see on their medical insurance bills that they visited a counselor. And, of course, much more inhibited about it, because it typically costs their parents (who have worse insurance, or no insurance) more money, which they can less well afford.

One student, about Unequal Childhoods, which we read when she had been a freshman for 6 weeks, said, 2 years later: “I have thought about that book every day since we read it”. That’s only the most vociferous of many endorsements from students I’ve read it with.

I wonder if we overdo the class/gender (and I guess in theUS race) stuff. I went to college from a relatively privileged (middle class) background, and a lot of these things (asking for help, approaching lecturers for non academic advice etc) would never have occurred to me. I would also have found class participation or presenting relatively discomforting (although I’m not overly shy, it just took a long time to develop any sort of comfort in them.) I understand badly remembered anecdotes really only go so far, but I can certainly recall a number of people I Knew from what you might call working class backgrounds who hit the ground running (joining everything , getting involved , speechifying in college politics etc)
Also related to other parts of this conversation. My brother died when I was in second year, and approaching student services (or anyone) would have been the last thing I would have wanted to do. That worked okay for me, and retrospectively I still think it was the option that best suited my personality. I think at times we try to hard to cram square pegs into round holes by adopting general principles about how a person should cope with such a thing , and instead should adopt something more skin to a horses for courses approach . Though, one lecturer did put me up to a passing grade so I wouldn’t have to repeat the exam over the summer (the death happened a few weeks before exams, though I probably would have failed anyway )
I’m Obviousky not trying to contradict Harry or anyone who works in this area, my memory and skewed perspective on myself doesn’t really match up toa professionals experience and research. It just always struck me a little that a lot of the stronger claims in this area (about class, or gender , or I guess race) suffered a little from selection Bias and taking these categories as too homogenous