Guidance for Instructor and TA Absences

There may be situations when you or your teaching team are unable to teach in person or teach at all. Consider these recommendations for maintaining instruction for your students and caring for everyone’s well-being.

Built-in, pre-planned flexibility can help everyone handle unexpected teaching team absences. Flexible days built into the schedule, plans for out-of-class interaction, supplemental resources, and asynchronous activities prepared in advance can all be helpful.

Check with your department in advance

Before the need arises, talk to your department leadership about what policies, guidelines, and support are available in case you or any teaching team members:

miss one or more class, section, lab, or office hours sessions
become unavailable for other teaching responsibilities, such as preparing course materials, grading, and feedback
or have longer absences that impact the teaching team.

This guidance can vary between departments and schools.

If a teaching team member must miss any teaching duties, please notify any other instructor(s) and TA(s) in the course, along with staff and appropriate persons in your program, such as student services staff and faculty program leaders. If more than one class will be missed or for other extended absences, faculty and instructors should consult with their department chair or program director, and TAs should consult with their dean’s office graduate contact as soon as possible.

Seek and offer support

Changes and absences within a teaching team can cause stress for students and team members. This guide encourages a balanced focus on well-being alongside strategies for academic continuity. These Ten Strategies to Promote Student Flourishing offers holistic principles and approaches relevant to everyone involved in teaching and learning. In addition, there are several resources for support that teaching team members can draw from and share with students.

Resources for students:

Resources for instructors:

Stanford BeWell
Personalized menu of self-care strategies: Well-Being Toolkit from Vaden Health Services
Schedule support from professionals at the Faculty Staff Help Center

Make a plan for brief absences

In the case of short periods when an instructor or TA becomes unavailable, several strategies can be helpful to consider.

Use Zoom for remote instruction

Remote instruction should be avoided unless it is already a pre-planned part of your syllabus. However, when an instructor or TA feels able to teach but is unable to do so in person, consider temporarily teaching that session remotely with Zoom. Work with your department or unit leaders for extended absences or long-term changes to the course.

Continue to let students use the classroom

Any class with significant undergraduate enrollment should, if possible, still allow students to participate from the classroom. Many Stanford undergraduates share rooms, so they are not guaranteed to be able to find a suitable place from which to join a Zoom session.

Leverage help from your teaching team

Large classes should have another teaching team member in the classroom to set up a Zoom session and help facilitate classroom participation.

Identify strategies for extended absences

There are many situations where instructors or TAs might be absent for extended periods for personal reasons, health reasons, or reasons connected to broader events that affect individuals and communities. These pages on Addressing Disruptive Social and Political Events and Responding to Student Deaths may be helpful, if applicable.

When instructor(s) or TA(s) are absent for multiple class, section, lab, or office hours meetings, or cannot perform routine teaching activities, such as preparation, grading, and feedback, more extensive changes may be necessary. In all such cases, revisit the course goals and learning outcomes, and focus as much as possible on changes that continue to prioritize student learning. Often, the course goals can still be achieved with adjusted strategies. Here are several approaches you might consider.

Streamline communications

If instructional team members who typically respond to student emails become unavailable, it may be helpful to redirect course-related communications to a central location.

In Canvas, discussions and messaging can help you centrally manage course communications. Learn more on the Stanford GoCanvas site.

Ed Discussion and Piazza are communication tools available within Canvas that can help consolidate communications and provide spaces for students and teaching team members to answer one another’s questions, and for all students to access responses to other students' questions.

Seek efficiencies in grading and feedback

Individualized feedback is crucial to learning. At the same time, some approaches can help make the process both efficient and effective.

Formative assessment and feedback (typically lower stakes, a smaller fraction of the course grade, and focused on helping students learn and improve) can be efficient and effective with digital tools and strategies such as peer feedback or peer review.

Summative assessment and feedback (typically higher stakes, a larger portion of the course grade, and focused on ongoing learning and the evaluation of achievement relative to established criteria) can benefit from the thoughtful use of rubrics.

Most grading tools, such as Canvas Assignments and Gradescope, have built-in capabilities for rubrics. Rubrics also make assignment objectives clear and can include frequent achievements and errors, which can help instructors and TAs respond with tailored input while communicating feedback efficiently. This article on Strategies for Grading Problem Sets, Labs, and Exams for TAs offers additional ideas for using rubrics and scoring tools.

Automatically grading certain assignments and assessments is possible using various grading tools. However, automated feedback typically works best for multiple-choice and short-answer responses, which are unlikely to address all course learning outcomes.

Consult with your school dean’s office if you are considering:

Bringing in additional people to support grading and feedback
Making use of temporary grades within the General University Grading System (e.g., “L”, indicating pass with grade to follow before the start of the next quarter)
Changes to the planned assignments and assessments in the syllabus.

Adjust course meeting structures

Consult with your department, program, or school office if you are considering combining sections or lab groups, or making other changes in course meetings or office hours due to extended absences among the teaching team. Student services officers and deans may have additional and more specific guidance as they coordinate schedules, classrooms, and resources within your local academic office.

Empower students to form study groups

It may also be useful to empower students to self-organize into peer study groups. The Center for Teaching and Learning hosts study halls that students can attend, and the Lathrop Learning Hub offers study spaces.

Creating a digital discussion thread or shared document where students may opt-in to share their contact information, scheduling preferences, and availability can go a long way toward facilitating student-to-student peer connections. Consider providing discussion prompts, study guides, supplemental questions or problems, or other peer study resources, to aid students studying together.

The Preparing for Student Absences page includes suggestions to help students coordinate and support each other.

Bolster student engagement

Learning activities that increase student engagement and make courses feel more personal and connected may help a temporarily reduced teaching staff continue to connect during extended absences. Strategies that leverage writing to engage can support learning in scalable ways with a small teaching team.

Where applicable, consider connecting social conditions to course learning outcomes and encouraging students to reflect on the historical significance of their current circumstances. The ACT to Sustain Learning Through Current Events page offers guidance and instructional practices for supporting students and their course learning.

Prepare supplemental materials

Supplemental resources and asynchronous activities that are prepared ahead of time can also be helpful in case of an extended teaching team member’s absence. You can find additional ideas on the Cancellation of Class Meetings and Preparing for Student Absences pages.

Seek guidance for disability-related support

If you or your teaching team are unable to teach or have difficulty teaching due to a disability, seek additional guidance from your department or unit leaders. You may also contact the Disability Access Office for assistance with workplace accommodations.

Leverage Canvas to maintain continuity

Many useful tools are available within Canvas to help maintain continuity in your teaching during an absence. Consider some of the following ideas:

Use Zoom for remote instruction: Creating a Zoom meeting from within Canvas can make it easier for instructors and students to keep track of Zoom links and recordings.
Pre-record short instructional videos: Instructional videos can range from informal video messages to supplemental lecture presentations. Consider these strategies for pre-recording instructional videos.
Curate supplemental resources: Post additional readings and online videos on your Canvas course site.
Prepare asynchronous activities: Set up discussion forums, practice quizzes, or supplemental writing assignments for students to use during your absence.
- The Discussion tool within Canvas facilitates communication and engagement outside of scheduled class time.
- In addition to Canvas Discussions, EdDiscussion is a separate tool that can be used to facilitate online discussions for Q&A, small group discussions, and more.

Find more information on designing and developing your Canvas course at GoCanvas.