Meeting students where they are doesn’t mean lowering academic standards

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It’s back-to-everything orientation time. If you’re in any sort of teaching role, you’ve probably been told repeatedly to “meet students where they are.” (Do not take this advice literally; students are most likely at their homes, and meeting them there is creepy.)

It’s one of those platitudes that’s easy to ignore among all of the other introductory advice, like “foster critical thinking” or “don’t park in the space marked ‘Reserved for University President.’” It’s also advice that can be easily misconstrued as a call to lower academic standards, accepting that your students will arrive without the skills necessary to succeed—so make sure the classes you teach don’t require those skills, lest you anger the university president who’s already staring incredulously at your Corolla.

But maybe it’s time to rebrand the recommendation to “meet students where they are.” Instead of a maligned boogeyman or meaningless cliché, maybe it’s actually an important reminder of a teacher’s true role.

A few months ago, I attended a roundtable about student mental health. The speaker, Joe Sparenberg—a physical science instructor and adjunct professor at Howard Community College, Anne Arundel Community College, and the Community College of Baltimore County—described ways professors can help alleviate their students’ anxiety. Some students might come to a class with an official accommodation plan handed down from the university mental health office. But plenty of students with similar challenges have no diagnosis, simply because diagnosis is expensive, inconvenient, and not always broadly available. What can professors do to help all these students get as much as they can from the course—to meet them were they are?

Some might say it isn’t a professor’s job to alleviate their students’ anxiety; students need to toughen up and rise to the level of rigor of the field they’ve chosen to pursue. Maybe it is, Sparenberg would respond, and maybe it isn’t—but that doesn’t mean professors should consider themselves off the hook, especially when some of the techniques they can use are both sensible and simple.

In his experience, when students have opportunities to get support and assistance, they feel calmer and more capable. So, he figured, why not explicitly offer that support and assistance as directly as he can? Throughout the course, he polls his students and asks what they’d find helpful. He can’t satisfy every request, but if they ask for something reasonable, why wouldn’t he try to help?

For example, some students told him they found the pace of the course nerve-wracking. Some professors might tell the student that’s too bad, we have to get through the materials, so you just need to adapt. Sparenberg, on the other hand, asked what he could do to help. And when a student suggested they’d feel less anxious if they could find out what books are required before the semester begins, so they had a little more time to digest everything, that sounded to Sparenberg like a completely fair request.

Students wanted weekend office hours; Sparenberg didn’t mind. Students had questions about the course material but felt embarrassed to ask in class; Sparenberg set up an app called Padlet where students could ask questions anonymously, after class, or even during class. This helped him gauge his own pacing, making sure he hadn’t just skipped past a key concept. More importantly, it removed the stigma of asking the professor to slow down, when you’re sure everyone else in class is keeping up.

Sparenberg recalled his own training as he sought the support that would help him succeed. Some teachers pushed back, he said, insisting, “This is my class.” Sparenberg shrugged. “I’m like, ‘Cool, I’m your student.’”

I know a lot of professors who would bristle at that last sentence. It’s overly accommodating, student-as-consumer, all-about-me-me-me, they would say. But what Sparenberg describes isn’t coddling, it’s just using available tools in a practical way to help students succeed. Offering accommodations isn’t artificially removing the pressures of the real world, it’s giving the students the tools they need to deal with them. Actively seeking out what your students need to be successful is the difference between being a teacher and simply a content deliverer.

At the same time, accommodation has to be a two-way street. It’s sensible to expect students to show up with engagement, positive intention, and willingness to work hard and learn.

So maybe meeting students where they are is just half the solution: Students and professors should meet one another in the middle. You can maintain rigor as an instructor, Sparenberg reminds us, and not be a brick wall.

As we start our classes this semester, let’s remember that we have no idea what’s going on in our students’ lives. We see them for a few hours each week, and outside of that, they all lead complicated existences as humans. It’s their responsibility to meet our expectations, and it’s our responsibility to help them do that.

And if we don’t know what simple adjustments we can make to help our students, what do we do? We treat them the same way we address anything else in science, the same approach that was taught to us and that we hope to teach to them.

Ask.

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