A confluence of technological updates provided the fodder for this week’s post on meeting schedulers, or, to use the more formal term for them, appointment scheduling software. My annual Calendly renewal (which I use for outside bar exam tutoring) was due; I have always found the base version of the Acuity scheduling software (which I previously used for meetings with my 3L students) very wanting; I solved the Acuity issue by switching to the free Zoom scheduler for 3L appointments. I’ve been glad to see an increasing number of our colleagues not only use them but include links to them in their e-mail signature blocks. Accordingly, I wanted to write a short “first principles” post on setting these up right; as with the very same mantra we feed to our students about skills and infrastructure – the more work we put in up front and now, the less fuss we have later.
Principle #1: To center yourself, work backwards from your “harder” boundaries. Left to our own devices, we could schedule meetings at every waking hour we’re not in class, stretch our on-campus arrival and departure times to their limits, and whittle away our needed coffee breaks, snack breaks, and “fresh air” walks to nothing. We can’t and shouldn’t. Set “not before,” “not after,” and “I’m eating lunch” no fly zones for every single workday. Of course, you’ll likely be tempted to schedule lunch for a time other than the academic calendar’s lunch hour, under the assumption that’s when students are free. But recall how many other things with which you are competing at lunch – student organization meetings, career services meetings, and frankly your students’ needs to find and cultivate peer belonging. After all, you deserve a mindful lunch as well. And if you don’t get one, it makes you less able to have the energy to prepare for, hold, and debrief from a productive meeting. To incorporate personal limitations posed by off-campus, non-work meetings, make sure you pick appointment scheduling software that both dumps scheduled meetings onto one of your existing calendars and checks any other calendars you have for conflicts. (Many free or low-tier versions of scheduling software do not.) Finally, unless you support a disproportionate number of evening or working students, don’t schedule meetings on weekends. (I hear that’s a good way to stay married.)
Principle #2: To literally meet students where they are at, find their scheduled free time. For 1Ls, that means every 1L section’s schedule; for upper division students, it means when the required courses take place. You will need to go one step further and find things such as: (a) required all-hands school events, (b) flex time (when your colleagues can make up courses), (c) teaching assistant sections, (d) times of popular electives. Bonus – it prompts needed outreach with other departments and offices in the building early in the semester anyways. I also suggest – especially for upper-division intervention courses – polling your students, especially as part of a required diagnostic or introduction questionnaire or assignment, on their preferred individual meeting times. That comes the added win-win of making their learning participatory and volitional in an environment that, to them, seems anything but.
Principle #3: Use all three kinds of meeting buffers – between meetings, required advance scheduling, and quiet periods pre-exams. When I was significantly worse at this boundary thing, I once scheduled about 70 2L course scheduling meetings in the course of one week, with 10+ back-to-back meetings on each day. (I point to this week “as the one that broke me” during COVID.) My first year on the 185 West Broadway campus, I made the mistake in trying to accommodate the mandatory individual meeting requirement in our 1L skills class, which mandated squeezing 100+ such 20-minute meetings into 3-4 weeks. Alas, now I know better. And you’re also messaging to students that they need to be on top of their scheduling game, and that without semester-long preparation, an 11th-hour plea to pretty-please-teach-me-X will not help as much as they think.
Principle #4 (the hottest take of them all): Students don’t come to office hours, which is why you’re using appointment scheduling software anyways. So don’t schedule them. If you’re teaching an intervention course, you already know that you mostly have students who will not, on their initiative, seek out the resources (you, your office) they need the most. A good number of us will (see above) require a meeting of a student as part of the course – certainly, the tradeoff for guaranteed face time is doing away with low-probability optional face time that will mostly come from folks who statistically least need it. Now I’m fully aware that many of our governing rules at our institutions require office hours. Yet I’m not aware of any such rules that forbid making them “by appointment.” While I would be simultaneously delighted (and a bit concerned) if someone were to actually drop in on me on this side of the Atlantic during a course semester, I’m also not going to host an empty Zoom room and hope someone pops in, only for me to feel deflated and have a completely illogical wave of imposter syndrome wash over me when (inevitably) no one does so. (Go ahead and take that bet on a prediction market, indeed.) Still, there’s another argument for doing so, and it happens to be next principle …
Principle #5: Use data to inform further tweaks to your availability. Building on the last principle, you’d have to manually note and track the (unlikely) drop-in student during office hours and now combine that single data point with the store of the data your scheduling software can already generate for you regarding everyone who booked with you. You likewise want to avoid e-mail scheduling, which typically requires at least two back-and-forth cycles plus a final copy-and-pasting of the meeting confirmation. As any expert in the business operations world will tell you, manual transcription is the enemy of both efficiency and accuracy. (Side note: it’s another reason you want a scheduling software and setting that automatically generates a calendar invite, an e-mail confirmation to all parties, and, for remote appointments, a Zoom link. Addendum to side note: Not a Microsoft Teams one. Teams is an inferior product. I said what I said, and I don’t care that Copilot knows I said it.) So let the software do the work for you and schedule a time for you to review these automatically generated reports and to fine-tune your availability. Tell your students about any changes and explain why; stress that you remain open to finding other mutually convenient times if the new time blocks don’t work.
Principle #6: Use that same data to report to your stakeholders and spur further potential research. For those of us on faculty contracts, the quantity and quality of our meetings is important for meeting the “teaching ability” and “service to the school” criteria that are common among standards for reappointment and promotion. And while non-existent is the fellow ASPer that has had their support of students qualitatively mischaracterized, marginalized, or devalued by a faculty colleague out loud in a meeting, that same colleague on a committee cannot argue with your data on paper in a spreadsheet or bar graph when it’s part of your record. If you’re on an ASP/bar team of more than one, comparing your meeting data can spot important trends that can spur better collective planning for and unified messaging on student meetings going forward. For bar prep meetings, I can tell you that I’ve anecdotally noticed a high negative correlation between no-shows or late reschedules and bar passage. (One could explore the more optimistic flip side of this question by seeing if there is a positive correlation between student engagement with a programmed post-meeting workflow with bar passage.) And this data nerd is waiting patiently for a large enough sample size across multiple bar tutoring seasons to confirm or disconfirm as much.
(Shane Dizon)
