Down Time

         Keeping students engaged is one of the main challenges you face as academic mentors. For one-on-one academic mentors, it can be hard to monitor student engagement while explaining complicated concepts to your students. For Paired or group academic mentoring, keeping two students engaged who work at different paces can be a large challenge. The following excerpt from the book A training Guide for College Tutors and Peer Educators addresses this issue.

    “Down time is a chunk of time in a session during which a student neither working nor thinking and, therefore, can be totally passive. Because students complete work at differing paces, downtime is most prevalent in group sessions. In one-on-one tutorial sessions, down time most often occurs when the tutor talks more than necessary, which causes the student to tune out and lose attention. Needless to say, students should experience as little down time as possible in your sessions.

To reduce down time, give students explicit time limits for an activity, which helps students judge how to pace their work. Also, you need not wait for all students to complete an activity before moving on to another whole-group activity. When the first group completes an activity, begin to review content and check answers as a whole group. Then, call on members of the first group to answer the questions or help solve the problems that others have not begun. Or divide up the questions so that groups are tackling fewer questions or problems.

Eliminating down time requires advanced planning. Be prepared to direct the students who finish first to the next step or another activity. As examples, students who finish early can:

• Help other students who are still working.
• Complete an additional activity or set of problems.
• Do a backup activity, such as an extra worksheet, lab sheet, or end of chapter questions.
• Add to an ongoing bank of potential test questions, which can be used for the pre-exam review session.
• Write answers, steps, or reasons on the board.
• Exchange, critique or check each other’s work.
• Begin homework or work on other requirements for the course.
• Review and highlight class notes, outline a text chapter, make study cards, or apply other recommended study strategies for the course.”

Strategies to try...

Sometimes it can be hard to come up with a creative activity or engaging strategy to use during your session. Here are some ideas to try if you feel like you want to bring something new to your session!

Strategies from a lead academic mentor:

•  I like to create a quiz based off of our prior session. I usually do this the first 1-3 times, to make sure they are internalizing the information weekly, as opposed to learning it all before an exam. I have them self correct using a red pen, to highlight their mistakes/what they need to study more. Once I feel they are ready, I have them design their own quizzes for themselves and have them bring it to our one-on-one session. They complete the quiz within the last 15 minutes of our session, and once again I have them correct.

Some take offs on that idea:

• Instead of having them design their own quizzes at home, you can also have them design some quiz questions as a closing activity and open with the quiz during the next session as a review and to gauge your students progress.
• Similarly, at the end of your session, as closing maybe, have your students write down a practice problem or question based on the material they learned during that day. Do this at the end of multiple sessions, and use these questions as a review before your next exam! Or bring them up at the next session to recap what happened at the previous session.

• An activity I've found to be helpful to students I refer to as "Math Fatal Errors." I put problems and their solutions up on the board and the students:
  
  1) state whether the solution is correct/incorrect
  2) if correct, explain why and show how it was completed
  3) if incorrect, use a red marker to address the errors made
  4) then, solve and explain what was done wrong to begin with.
  
  I find this activity to be helpful because students have to explain in words WHY a question is correct/incorrect. It is also nice because you can address common mistakes made in their algebraic reasoning and address them head on. It is also a nice chance for the students to correct work, which will be helpful on exams and homework when they will need to be able to correct their own work.

Hopefully one of these ideas will be useful in your session! If you have any new ideas to add, let us know!