Teaching the “Moves” of an Office Hour to Teaching Assistants

Robyn Brinks Lockwood, Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA

I teach several speaking courses to international graduate students at Stanford University. As part of each course, I require students to choose a personal goal that they would like to develop during the term. Over the years, my students’ goals have ranged from social (talking about football with my American roommate) to professional (learning the best things to say during a job talk or job interview). However, there is one goal that has been a consistent presence year after year: handling my TA office hours.

Reflecting on my own experience as a TA, and even before that, as a student who attended TA office hours, I realized that this office hour interaction is new to students, and even native speakers. The university office hour interaction is new to everyone who attends a university. Yet, my international students not only needed to attend office hours with their professors but also needed to hold their own office hours as ITAs.

When I looked at my bookshelf, I saw a myriad of books with strategies to help my international students with academic listening, speaking, reading, writing, grammar, and vocabulary. As a materials writer, I wrote some of those books, but even my speaking books didn’t cover this specific, yet common interaction that international students find themselves in—the office hour—and none of the speaking books I found covered what international students who would be TAs would need to know.

My international students and ITAs would tell me they didn’t know these conversational moves:

• How to greet professors when they went to office hours/How to greet students coming into their office hours
• What words to use when they had to give advice, offer help, respond to absences, respond to requests for meetings
• The cultural norms of entering (Do I offer the person a seat?/Do I sit?) or exiting (When is the office hour over?/How do I let the student know the office hour is over?)

The types of office hours my students discussed with me ranged from one-on-one meetings with professors or TAs to managing office hours with groups of students. They also asked about online office hours that became much more prevalent during the Covid-19 pandemic.

I also recognized that students were struggling during their office hours with me. My students weren’t afraid to talk to me, but they were not doing some conversational moves the “right” way. I wondered, if they were struggling during an office hour with me, then what was happening when they met with professors in other departments or with students they met while serving as TAs? My goal was to help ITAs feel more comfortable and be better at their jobs while also better navigating their own office hours with professors they work for or professors they meet with.

I decided to start teaching office hours as part of my speaking courses—the language and structure—yes, structure—of an office hour. I realized that if students grasped that spoken language interactions, including office hours, follow a structure, just as writing genres do, then they could learn the associated language needed for each part along with pronunciation tips, nonverbal cues, and cultural norms.

Many international students are familiar with the concepts of “moves” if they have studied writing, most notably from Academic Writing for Graduate Students by John Swales and Christine Feak (example: research paper introductions have three moves). With that, I researched the “moves” that our speech events go through, such as presentations, leading discussions, and the office hour. I created some lessons and videos for my TAs that eventually became a whole module or course to prepare my ITAs for the purposes and goals of office hours, planning for these meetings, the dos and don’ts, and the five “moves.”

Move 1: Prefacing Sequence (Summons and Answer)

Move 2: Opening

Move 3: Outlining Academic Business

Move 4: Negotiating and Resolving Academic Business

Move 5: Closing Options

As I work with my ITAs, I offer reflection activities that pose questions designed to help my students manage their TA duties and better serve the students they teach and the professors they work for. Though many of my ITAs hope to stay in academia and be professors who will eventually hold their own office hours, some aspire to work in industry. I encourage students to take this structure and the language and apply it to other office-type meetings, such as those with bosses or colleagues in other contexts, for example appointments, seminars, conferences, and business.

Sometimes I wish I had this information back when I was a graduate student and TA. We all know that being a TA is tough. The best I can do is offer this content to my current students to try to make their paths a little smoother.

References

Feak, Christine B. (2013). ESP and speaking. In Paltridge, B., & Starfield, S. (Eds.), The handbook of English for specific purposes (pp. 35-53). New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Lockwood, R. B. (2019). Office Hours: What Every University Student Needs to Know. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Swales, J.M. & Feak, C.B. (2012). Academic writing for graduate students: Essential tasks and skills, 3e. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Robyn Brinks Lockwood is a lecturer at Stanford University and author of several speaking textbooks on social interaction, academic discussion, and oral presentations. The materials from her office hours lessons are now published in Office Hours: What Every University Student Needs to Know by University of Michigan Press.