II. Interacting With Students

Professionalism

Professional conduct involves many qualities that we assume you already practice: honesty, fairness, respect for students, dependability, maturity, and so on. But it also requires certain actions specific to the academic setting.

Discretion

Discretion and good judgment must come into play in your relationship with your department, colleagues, and supervisor or chairperson. Be circumspect in your public comments about your department and colleagues. Students frequently ask which TA is the best in the next course in the sequence or which faculty member is the most interesting or sympathetic. Fight the urge to confide in your students, but tell them the facts: for instance, the instructor's area of specialization or amount of experience. Of course, honest and positive comments are always welcome.
You may not always agree with departmental or course policies or the textbook chosen in a multi-section course; when you have strong feelings, work to change matters rather than complaining to your students. If, as a TA, you believe you should have more input in decisions that affect you, work through your departmental graduate student representatives to make improvements. If, as a faculty member, you believe a departmental committee has set an inappropriate requirement, talk with the chair of the committee rather than complaining to the students or to colleagues.

Confidentiality

In a similar manner, information about your students' work and your evaluation of it should be kept between you, the student, and, when appropriate, the student's academic dean or advisor. Since students can now gain access to their final grades electronically, do not post them publicly. And, although it can be immensely helpful to discuss individual students' situations with colleagues, keep the student's name in confidence and discuss only the events, your reactions to them, or questions about them. This also applies to information that may come to you regarding a student who is experiencing personal difficulties. In all cases, maintain confidentiality while steering students toward finding the help they need. The following sections offer advice on negotiating this delicate balance.

Besides the first degree of eminence in science, a professor with us must be
of sober and correct morals and habits, having the talent of communicating
and peaceable temper. The latter is all important for the harmony of the
institution.

—Thomas Jefferson, letter to
   Dugald Stewart, April 26, 1824

Defining Your Role as a Teacher

Along with confidentiality and discretion, professionalism means the ability to juggle several roles: instructor, scholar/student, administrator, advisor, colleague, supervisor, mentor, protégé. Combining roles can be especially difficult for TAs, who add the responsibilities of instructor or grader to their graduate student status, and for beginning assistant professors, who teach graduate students shortly after having been one.
If you find yourself in either position (or if you have the benefit of looking younger than you are), avoid inadvertently setting yourself up for difficulties by dressing like, behaving like, or socializing with your students. Sometimes such behavior stems from an effort to be non-hypocritical (if you are a student, after all, why not act like one?) or from a certain insecurity about this new role ("What, me teach? What do I know?"). In any case, acting like your students or trying to be too familiar with them may well undermine your authority for the entire semester. The closer in age to your students you are or appear to be, the more you should avoid students' habits and dress. Dressing even more professionally than older faculty will go a long way toward making you feel professional, and students will accept the University's inherent endorsement of you as an authority figure.
The question of teacher-student relationships becomes even more troublesome when it involves the possibilities of friendship or dating. Sometimes TAs or faculty members wish to develop personal relationships that can create various conflicts of interest. If an instructor were to develop a friendship or romantic involvement with a student outside of class, not only would the instructor's role as teacher and evaluator be jeopardized, but the other students might feel that the instructor could no longer be impartial. Depending on the specific circumstances, the student could assume sexual harassment despite the instructor's best intentions. Thus such relationships fall under the University's Conflict of Interest policy and are to be avoided. (See Appendix II for policy web sites.) If you find yourself desiring to know one of your students more personally, wait until the semester ends and grades have been submitted.
Similarly, you may find that you have potentially problematic ties with a student in your class: for instance, someone from your home town or a student who contested a grade in a former course. Most likely you are the best person to judge whether a problem awaits you. If it does, and if the course has multiple sections, arrange for the student to transfer. If impossible, be sure your students know that you grade work blindly, without names, as suggested in the section on evaluating students' work. You might also ask a colleague to confirm your assessment of the work of that student and of several others.

I want my students to know that biology is not about committing facts to memory- it is an active, ever changing field. In short, I view my teaching as an extension of my research and graduate training, rather than as a task conflicting with the pursuit of my dissertation research.
              
—Jennifer Secki-Shields, Biology