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This article is the first in a series The Chronicle is publishing this fall highlighting various ways professors are encouraging their students to buy into the project of learning. See the second entry in the series here.
Gurung, a professor of psychologyat Oregon State University, has made perceived social support central to his teaching. It’s especially important in the kinds of large-enrollment courses — as many as 400 students — that Gurung specializes in, where students are often physically, and relationally, distant from the professor.
“You’ve got to figure out what you most care about,” Gurung says. “And based on my research, and who I am, I was like, feeling supported and feeling real is my key.”
Gurung has tried lots of different things over the years, but they can all be seen as different ways of treating students like people.
That might sound ridiculous: How else would a professor treat students? But research has shown that even small moves, like calling students by their names or sending batch emails to those who have performed well, or poorly, or stood out in some other way, can feel very meaningful to students — even if they know the professor had to look at their name tag, or sent the same email to a bunch of other students.
It all suggests that in most of their courses, many students feel unseen.
Megin Turi, a rising senior majoring in biohealth sciences and minoring in psychology, who took introduction to psychology with Gurung, put it this way: This past spring, she took an honors upper-division microbiology course that had just 15 students. This course, she says, provided “the same kind of feeling I felt with Dr. G., even though his class size is probably 200. Which is kind of crazy to think about. But that was like the only other time when I felt like I was able to talk to the teacher.”
Gurung tries to demonstrate that students can talk to him from the very beginning. He reaches out to them before a course begins, introducing himself and inviting them to stop by office hours to say hello. He has recently started attending convocation, the special ceremony for new students, and tells his incoming introductory-psychology students to keep an eye out for him in his purple University of Washington regalia. He’ll take a group photo with the students who come up to him, and put it up on the screen in the lecture hall on the first day of class.
Zoe Sherman-Bundy took the introductory course with Gurung at the start of her sophomore year, having just transferred from Portland State University. The first day of class, she recalls, “I walked into the biggest lecture hall I had ever been in at that point.” It was overwhelming. But Gurung made the course sound interesting, and she found the syllabus easy to read — “some of them are 17 pages long and most of it is just stuff that they have to say.”
While Gurung strives to make the syllabus student-friendly, he doesn’t even hand it out in class. Instead, he shares a one-page infographic called a “thrival guide” that maps out the actions students can take to be successful in the course, which includes research-based study strategies and a reminder that he’s there to help. The full syllabus is available in the learning-management system.
It’s important, Gurung has found, to make help available in a variety of ways, because not every student is the same, and because the communication habits of young adults keep evolving as the years go by. During class, Gurung circulates through the lecture-hall aisles and calls on students from around the room. During breaks and after class, he’ll talk with students who line up to meet with him. Outside of class, his students are encouraged to attend office hours, which he runs both in person and virtually. He’s created a professional Instagram account as another way students can connect with him.
During class, Sherman-Bundy says, “I did feel seen.” Gurung “wasn’t just up there talking at us the whole time,” she says. “He would walk around, and then he would tell a story, and then he would show us the slides, and then he would give us a chance to practice it.” The course made Sherman-Bundy decide to major in psychology.
At the time, she says, she was too anxious to approach Gurung in class. But she emailed him to comment on how a topic he mentioned in class reminded her of something else she had learned, and he wrote back saying she’d made a good connection.
In addition to responding to students who write to him, Gurung has several pre-written emails that are automatically sent to students based on their quiz performance. Three different messages tell students who performed well that they did a good job, and three others offer suggestions to those who did not, to encourage them to do better next time. Even students who figure out that these emails are automated have told Gurung they appreciate the effort he put into them.
Gurung has strategies for learning student names. Before the pandemic, in courses of up to about 200 students, he would have them write their names on placards and hold them up in group photos of sections of the room. Then he’d spend a couple of hours studying them. By the second day of class, he could call on 15 to 20 students by name. He might know 15 more by the third day. That, he knew, was enough for students to feel like he knew all of their names.
He still does this activity in smaller classes, but no longer in the large-enrollment ones. When students email or reach out on his Instagram, he will put a face to a name, and greet them by name in person. He does the same with the students who line up to introduce themselves.
“Sometimes, we see the barriers to doing certain things pedagogically that we are convinced would be a good idea but just feel impossible,” she says, because someone might have 300 students in a classroom. But it can pay dividends, she says, when you “take that inroad and do what you can, learn the names of the students who are really interacting with you a lot, or come to your office hours, and then use their names in class.”
Cavanagh recalls conducting student interviews for a research project, and hearing a student describe being in a huge class where the professor would come in a little bit early each class session and bring chocolates. Before class started, “he would wander with this jar of chocolates and just ask their name, ask what they did that weekend. And he might have three conversations each class period, and not ever talk to the majority of the students in the class.” But even the students who never participate, she says, get the message that the professor cares about them, and that can be motivating.
There will always be some faculty members who bristle at suggestions like this. College students are adults. Are professors really expected to bring them candy? Should it be part of the job to entertain students or to make them feel comfortable? Isn’t college supposed to be challenging?
Cavanagh’s response: “Having the information accessible and transparent, and feeling connected to the instructor are all going to motivate learning,” she says. “Students are going to be willing to work harder. They’re going to be willing to do more of the reading, do more of the prep work. I think they’re going to be less likely to use AI. They’re going to do all these things that will opt them into the learning experience.
“And then, yes, we do need to challenge them. We shouldn’t infantilize them.” But students are more likely to rise to that challenge, she says, when professors are less adversarial, and more inviting.
