Results of Professor’s Bold No Email Policy

[kcjenkins]

Results of Professor’s Bold No Email Policy Enforcement Will Give You Something to Think About

Spring-Serenity Duvall, an assistant professor at Salem College, was tired of spending hours and hours sifting through student emails that could be answered by what she had already covered in class, had been asked in class, or had simply already been written into the syllabus.

 

So Duvall came up with a bold policy, one that she was a little nervous to enforce: No emails unless you are scheduling an in-person appointment.

 

Duvall told the InsideHigherEd she experienced “unqualified success.” Students came to class better prepared and were turning in papers that were much higher quality. Her email inbox was less full, and her office hours and one-on-one time spent talking and bonding with students was the highest it had ever been in her academic career.

 

She was, however, “afraid that maybe they were keeping their thoughts to themselves, and they would slam me on the evaluations on how much they hated the policy.”

 

But not the case at all. On the contrary, students rated her availability as “excellent” and overall evaluations were higher than ever before, with many students citing that they felt Duvall genuinely cared for their education.

 

Email is very convenient and fast, but for many situations, there really is nothing like talking things out face-to-face.

[JohnH]

Sounds to me as though Prof Duvall had a faulty email policy at the outset, so she had to revise it to deal with reality. Her failure to set an appropriate policy on the front side caused her to overreact on the back side.

 

The problem isn't her students, and the problem isn't email - the problem is her failure to properly utilize a valuable resource for effective communication.

[Catherine]

My friend Sandy is an instructor at a nursing college.  Very fair, very helpful, VERY tough.  We were visiting her (and her husband) this weekend and she told us that in the early part of each semester, new students come to her on a regular basis, griping about how "they always got A's on their papers before!" -- by which they mean that SHE is scoring them too harshly.

 

Her response to these kids is, "I see.  So what do you think your problem is now?"  And she manages to do this with not only a straight face, but also one indicating concern for the student.

 

I just about fell off my chair laughing.  She is SUCH a good teacher.  

[SaraEA]

After spending much of my professional career in academia, I too realized that the ease of email (and today, texting) made students too lazy to find their own answers.  Why look up a reference or address or review your own notes when you can ask someone else in seconds?  I would get emails from students at my own and other universities saying "I'm doing a paper on XXX" and hope you can point me in the right direction for sources.  I learned the names of libraries at every major university and told them to go there!

 

When I opened my email when I got to work in the morning I'd often find some sent at midnight with some question, and then I'd have another at 2AM wondering why I hadn't responded.  Technology is an amazing tool that can give students access to a universe of information that was unheard of in my undergraduate and graduate days.  But has it made them less reliant on their own abilities to figure things out?

[Catherine]

This is an endemic problem, and one that is highlighted (but not caused; correlation is NOT causation) by the technologies of email and texting.  

 

One of the things we worked on really hard when home-schooling Gwen for the last couple of years of high school was getting her to learn how to learn on her own.  I discovered that kids are not "merely" not taught how to look things up on their own -- but in our schools, at least (supposedly some of the best in the state if not the country) -- they are actively DIScouraged from doing anything except taking what the teacher said, on faith, and looking nowhere else.

 

We found the Gwen was asking us for help in various areas for problems that were explained IN HER TEXTBOOK.  She had NO idea how to use a textbook as a resource, or to learn from.  We were appalled.

 

That got fixed.  I researched and purchased texts for her that were designed to be learned from (high school, yes - but I chose college-level books in the appropriate subjects).  The first thing she learned was how to learn from a book.  Second was how to look for information herself. She is in her senior year of college now and top of every class she takes.

[kcjenkins]

Gee, that seems like it should be the FIRST thing they are taught in school, doesn't it?