By SHANNON O. WELLS
When Dan Wetzel started his teaching career, the concept of “office hours” designed for out-of-class interaction between him and his students, seemed to him, well, a bit nebulous.
“I had office hours because, of course, you have to have office hours. Your department says so,” he recalled. “And the first student shows up, and I just sat there and stared at them. I had no clue what I was supposed to be doing. And that carried through for a bit, until I finally got my feet under me.”
Talking to and getting feedback from other faculty members, Wetzel, a teaching associate professor and undergraduate advisor in the Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences’ Department of Biological Sciences, started exploring other ways of structuring office hours.
In 2019, Wetzel became aware of a team of faculty from multiple schools that was beginning to study office hours from a pedagogical approach.
“And I just happened to be like, ‘Hey, can I join your team?’ And they took me on,” he said.
Wetzel has since worked with the team, comprising faculty from colleges and universities in the University of California system and in Michigan to put a finer point on the concept of faculty office hours: What is the value? Does the traditional office-hours model still work? What kinds of students take advantage of it? Do students understand its value?
“Maybe eight of us or so have been plugging away at this question of, ‘What are office hours? How can we make them better?’ And perhaps more specifically, ‘How can we make them better for a diverse array of students?’” he said.
Meanwhile, he’d already started exploring other ways of structuring office hours. In 2023, Wetzel received a small grant from Pitt to redesign office hours for his class. Collecting data on the topic, he started approaching office hours in a different way, which he soon found “had big impacts on outcomes.”
“Because students used to not go to my office hours. It’s shocking,” he joked, “but that’s a common theme for most faculty. And now that I’m doing these things, about a third of the class is showing up every single week to office hours.”
New approaches he applied included a name change from office hours to “study sessions.” While he admitted this “sounds stupid,” he found it a “better description of what the heck I want to do in that time.”
Wetzel said he now communicates “purposely and frequently” about office hours. “Every week I tell them where they are, what we will do, and encourage them to come.”
Wetzel chooses a theme related to the course or to students in that course, such as “thinking about where they are in their lives.” Given the dominance of seniors in his class, Wetzel has recently offered “resume week,” “final project week,” or just taking a deeper dive into recent class topics.
“You can come and we’re going to talk,” he explained. “You can ask me any question about the course, but if you don’t have questions, you’re going to get something out of this experience.”
Wetzel also invites more logistical input from students. “I actually had them fill out a scheduling survey. I polled them to figure out what would be the best times for office hours. And then I hit those times every week,” he added. “I designed my schedule around them as best I could.”
On the first day of class, instead of the traditional going over the class syllabus word-for-word, Wetzel focused instead on his office hours and “had them sort of think and talk about it,” he said. “I explicitly asked them, ‘What do you want office hours to be about?’ And then I incorporated their suggestions into our semester office hours. This gives them buy-in in the experience.”
Getting past uncertainty
Adam Lee, Pitt’s new vice provost for undergraduate studies, said office hours provide students opportunities to explore topics that interest them beyond what an instructor covers in class. One-on-one conversations can help identify passions, pursue things they’re curious about, and inform decisions about academic majors, minors and opportunities for research.
“Office hours, I think, are important for a lot of different reasons,” Lee said. “Depending on the class that you happen to be teaching, or the person that happens to stop by, you could have any number of conversations, right?
“It could be, I’m stuck on this specific item in class. I’d like to learn more about this general area of research or this general area of scholarship. What classes should I take if I want to do more than this? I’m interested in doing an internship in this space. How do I get there?’”
Lee, who served as executive associate dean in the School of Computing and Information before becoming vice provost in September, said while teaching a first-year course, students would ask him during office hours about his own career path.
“You had questions like, ‘How’d you end up where you’re sitting? I don’t know what I want to do. I’m interested in computing, but I have no clue what I want to do. How’d you become a professor?’
“It’s your opportunity to go back and say, ‘I had no intention of being a professor,’ and talk about the importance of exploration while you’re in college, and really learning whatever you can from whomever you can,” he said.
Recalling the odd sensation of seeing one of his physics professors in a grocery store and realizing instructors do mundane things — like shopping and eating — outside their academic silos, Lee said office hours present a “good opportunity to get to know students, and for students to get to know faculty.
“And recognizing that your faculty, your instructors, are people — with interests and passions,” he added. “And I think most of us are really passionate about what we teach.”
Lee admitted he has more fun talking to students during office hours than in the classroom, “because you can get real specific with one person and see where the discussion goes,” he said. “And if you’ve got somebody who’s really, really stuck, it’s a trip to see them get it and to help get past any uncertainty that they might have.”
Broadening horizons
Wetzel said that from a pedagogical and research standpoint, relatively little is known about office hours, including what possibly innovative approaches are being practiced at various institutions.
“The problem, I guess, is that we don’t have a standard understanding of how to approach office hours,” he noted, “and we don’t have a standard (set of) best practices.”
Improvements need to include targeting students beyond the obvious high achievers who typically darken instructors’ office doors.
“There are some students on our campus who are going to be these 4.0, very driven, academically strong students,” Wetzel said. “Those are the types of students that show up to most office hours. I would argue that we want to see more diverse students in our office hours.
Missing from the equation are students with under-represented, first-generation and low-income backgrounds. “These are students who traditionally, in our data, tell us they don’t go to office hours as much as their peers,” he explained. “I want to reach them because I think that the 4.0 students are doing just fine, right?
“They’re great. They’re fun to interact with. Not to put them down, but I think that there’s a more diverse set of students that this resource could be very useful for.”
Shannon O. Wells is a writer for the University Times. Reach him at shannonw@pitt.edu.
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