Office hours can provide students many kinds of meaningful support by bringing them into direct conversation with their instructors. Students who attend office hours benefit from individualized feedback, clarification of the instructor’s expectations, academic and professional mentoring, and the relationship-building that contributes to strong letters of recommendation (see Guerrero and Rod 2013; Jack 2016).

Yet, research by Dr. Anthony Abraham Jack (2016) shows that students from more privileged backgrounds are more likely to make use of office hours. Jack finds that middle-class students, who tend to feel more comfortable engaging with professors, actively seek out office hours, while low-income students (except for those who attended preparatory, day, or boarding high schools) are more hesitant to attend. The informal nature of office hours allows these patterns to go unchecked, exacerbating inequality.

Rather than allowing office hours to operate as part of the “hidden curriculum,” which rewards students who already know how to follow a set of unspoken rules for achieving academic success, GSIs can proactively explain how office hours work and intentionally use their office hours as a mechanism for inclusion at the individual level. We suggest the following approaches:

• Explain the benefits of office hours on the first day of your section/studio/lab. If you were initially hesitant to attend office hours as a student, but ultimately benefited from going, include some storytelling.
• If you are comfortable doing so, tell students about the class differences in engagement with office hours described above. This may be especially compelling if you come from a working-class background.
• Share resources like this blog post to demystify office hours and help students prepare to attend.
• Allow students to sign up for your office hours individually or in groups. Attending with a friend can make the experience less nerve-wracking.
• Consider requiring students to attend an office hour with you and explain why. See Anna Mikkelborg’s Teaching Effectiveness Award essay on required office hours; see also Joshua Freed’s Teaching Effectiveness Award essay on another creative approach for connecting individually with students.
• Use some or all of your office hours time to proactively mentor students:
  • Ask if any assigned content or classroom discussions have stood out to them, and why.
  • Ask if there is any course content they feel unclear about.
  • Review the feedback you have given them on assignments and help them identify 2-3 areas for improvement on their next assignment.
  • Reference their pre-course survey responses and, without requiring them to share any personal information, follow up about any areas where they may need support.
  • Ask about their intended major and possible career paths.
  • Explain that letters of recommendation are more compelling when the writer has a personal connection with the student, and that letters from professors carry more weight than those from GSIs. Help them prepare questions and comments for an optional office hours meeting with the instructor of record and invite them to let you know how it goes.
  • Encourage them to come back to your office hours again before the semester ends.