If you have been asked to start a coaching program, you will find that campuses run coaching in very different ways. Some hire full-time staff coaches and others train graduate students or undergraduate peers, and the service can sit in the advising office, the learning center or a student success center. What you build comes down to five choices: which students you coach, who coaches them, how often they meet, how referrals reach a coach, and what each meeting records.
It helps to settle those choices before the first meeting, because each one shapes the next. The coaches you can staff, for example, limit how many students you can take and how often each one can meet a coach.
Key takeaways
- Student success coaching pairs a student with a trained coach who helps them set goals, build study habits and reach campus support before problems grow.
- Coaching works on a student’s habits, time and use of campus help, while advising plans courses and degree requirements and tutoring teaches course content.
- A new program is easiest to run with one group of students, such as first-year students or students referred by faculty, who meet their coach on a set schedule.
- You can tell whether coaching works from coached students’ re-enrollment and course results, but only if each meeting leaves a note from the start.
What is student success coaching?
Student success coaching is a one-to-one, goal-centered relationship in which a trained coach helps a student build the habits, skills and connections they need to stay enrolled. Campuses also call it academic coaching or success coaching, and the staff who do it are often called academic success coaches. The coach works on what sits around the coursework, such as time, study habits and knowing where to get help.
Coaching vs. advising and tutoring
Coaching sits between two services your campus already runs, which is why the lines blur. The three usually divide the work like this:
| Role | What it works on | The question a student brings | Who usually does it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Advising | Course plans, degree requirements and registration | Which courses do I need next term? | Professional or faculty advisors |
| Tutoring | The content of a specific course | How do I solve this kind of problem? | Peer or professional tutors |
| Coaching | Study habits, time, goals and getting to the right office | How do I keep up with everything? | Staff coaches, graduate students or trained peers |
Advisors usually carry large caseloads and spend their time on degree plans, while coaches carry smaller ones, which leaves time for the habits and the problems outside class that get in a student’s way. If your coaching will sit inside the advising office, our guide to academic advising software covers what advisors look for in a system.
Counseling is a separate service that supports mental health, so a coach sends a student in crisis to a counselor.
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What does a student success coach do?
Most coaching meetings mix three kinds of work, and the balance shifts as the term goes on, from planning in the first weeks to follow-up near exams.
Goals and a plan for the term
Early meetings usually turn a general goal, such as passing every course, into a plan for the term. The coach and student go through the courses, the deadlines and how many hours are left after a job, family care or a long commute. Later meetings then have something concrete to check against.
Time management and study habits
Here a coach helps the student change what they do each week. The coach might help them block study hours around a work schedule, break a research paper into weekly pieces, or try a different way of preparing for exams. The aim is to make better use of the hours and the campus help the student already has.
Getting to the right campus office
A coach is often the person who connects a student with the rest of the campus. That might mean tutoring for a difficult course, counseling, financial aid or career services. The connection only counts if the student goes, so the coach asks at the next meeting whether they did and notes the answer.
How to set up a coaching program
A coaching program is easiest to start small, with one group of students, one meeting schedule and one meeting note that every coach uses.
Choose who you coach first
Pick one group whose needs you can describe, such as first-year students, students returning from academic probation, or students referred by faculty with a concern. Also decide whether meetings are required or optional for the group. Required meetings reach students who would not come on their own, which suits a group such as students on probation. Then size the group to the coaches you have, because follow-up is the first thing to slip when a caseload grows too large.
There is no standard caseload for coaches, so work it out from the meetings you want. Multiply the number of students by the meetings each should have in the term, then by the hours one meeting and its note take, and compare the result with the hours your coaches can give.
Decide who coaches and how you prepare them
Coaches can be full-time staff, graduate students working part-time, or trained undergraduate peers, and many programs mix them. We recommend staff coaches for students whom faculty refer for absences or failing grades, since those cases need experience. Trained peers suit a broad group such as first-year students, where reaching everyone matters more.
Name your coaches before the term starts, and train them before their first meeting on at least these points:
- The goals of the program and the students it serves.
- How to run a first meeting and build a plan with the student.
- When to send a student to counseling or another office.
- What coaches may share with faculty under FERPA, the federal law that protects student records.
- How to write the meeting note.
If your coaches are students, CRLA (the College Reading and Learning Association) certifies peer training programs, including those for peer coaches and peer mentors, through its International Peer Educator Training Program Certification (IPTPC). The first level of that certification asks for at least 10 hours of training.
Set a meeting schedule
Decide how many meetings each student should have in the term, and book each student’s first meeting for the first two weeks, before the term gets busy. Regular meetings hold a student to the plan, because a goal that nobody asks about again tends to fade. Offer meetings in person and online, leave room for a drop-in between appointments, and agree how soon a coach reaches out after a missed meeting.
Connect coaching to referrals
Faculty, advisors and tutors notice problems that a coach does not see, so agree in advance how their concerns reach a coach. Each referral should go to one named coach who contacts the student. Decide what the person who sent it hears back. That can be whether the coach reached the student, what the student agreed to do and how the referral closed, while personal details stay in the coach’s notes. Our guide to spotting at-risk students and routing faculty referrals covers how to build a referral route that faculty keep using.
Decide what each meeting records
Before the first meeting, decide what a coach writes down afterward. A short meeting note is enough, as long as it records these four things:
- What the coach and student discussed.
- What the student agreed to do.
- Any office the student was referred to.
- The date of the next meeting.
Keep the note’s questions the same for the whole term, because a note that changes halfway through splits your records into two halves that will not compare. Decide at the same time who can read the notes, since a student may tell a coach things they would not want passed to an instructor.
What your coaching system needs to do
For a pilot with one or two coaches, a shared spreadsheet and a simple form can carry the meeting notes. Once several coaches are meeting students, separate calendars and documents stop showing you who has been seen, who has not, and what was agreed. At that point you need one system for appointments, notes and referrals.
Accudemia, the academic center management software we make, was built for tutoring and academic support centers, and coaching runs on the same appointments, notes and referrals. East Carolina University’s Pirate Academic Success Center runs two Accudemia centers, one for academic coaching and one for tutoring, so each service keeps its own policies while students reach both in one system. We describe that setup in how East Carolina brought coaching and tutoring together. Slippery Rock University runs its tutoring and peer academic coaching teams as separate centers too. In an Accudemia user spotlight, the head of its tutorial center explains that this keeps each team’s data apart.
Booking with the student’s own coach
Students should be able to book the coach assigned to them, and coaches should see their week in one calendar. In Accudemia, a center can limit each student to their assigned staff, and those assignments can be imported from a file rather than entered one by one. A single service can offer in-person and online appointments alongside drop-ins. Each center can also rename its Tutor and Tutoring labels, so your students see Coach and Coaching instead.
A record of every contact the next coach can read
Every meeting should leave a note that another coach could pick up, and that only the right people can read. Accudemia logs each visit with the student, the staff member, the service and the time, and coaches can add comments that students do not see unless you share them in a report.
A center can also build a one-page meeting note form, which Accudemia calls a Session Assessment. Its questions can cover the goal, the agreed actions, any office the student was sent to and the next date. Instructors can read those forms only if you let them run the assessment reports, and then only for their own students. Southern University at Shreveport’s success coaches complete that form after every meeting, as the center explains in a video on how its coaches track each contact.
Referrals that reach a coach and report back
In Accudemia, each referral sends an email to the person named as its follow-up owner. Each one is also marked unassigned, assigned or past its due date, so the ones that need attention stand out. Referral updates are kept apart from the coach’s meeting notes, so the coach decides what goes into an update the instructor sees. At Shreveport, referrals on at-risk students go to a Success Coach, and the center chose to keep faculty closely informed. The faculty member who made the referral is alerted at every contact and agreed action until the referral closes with the student back on track.
Limits to know before a demo
Accudemia does not replace your student information system. It imports students, classes and enrollment from it on a schedule, including the single-file extracts that Banner and PeopleSoft produce, so degree plans and registration stay where your advisors already keep them. Referrals and multiple centers need the main edition, called the Accudemia License, rather than the single-center Accudemia Light.
To see coaching appointments, meeting notes and faculty referrals working in one record before your first term, request an Accudemia demo for the group you plan to coach first.
How to tell whether coaching is working
Coaching is working when the students you coach stay enrolled, pass their courses and act on their plans more often than similar students who were not coached. A randomized study at eight public, private and for-profit universities, published in 2014 in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, tested whether assigning students to a coach kept more of them enrolled. In the U.S. Department of Education’s What Works Clearinghouse review of the study, 66 percent of students assigned to a coach were still enrolled after 12 months, against 61 percent of students in the comparison group. The 5-point gap is statistically significant, and the review gives the study its top rating for research quality.
That coaching came from an outside service by phone, email and text rather than from campus staff in person. Most participants were nontraditional students, who are often older or working, so a campus program may see different results. The review also found no statistically significant difference in degree completion, which was measured two years after coaching began, a short window for finishing a degree. The study shows that coaching kept more students enrolled, then, but not that it raised graduation.
Track these measures for the students you coach:
- How many enrolled for the next term.
- How many passed the courses they were taking.
- How many reached the office their coach sent them to, and how many referrals were closed.
- How many met their coach as often as the plan said, which shows whether the program ran as designed.
- What students say in a short survey at the end of the term.
Compare the results with a similar group, such as last year’s students with the same profile, because coached students are often chosen for being at risk. Their raw numbers can look worse than the campus average even when coaching helps them.
Where to start
A first term of coaching needs one group of students, enough trained coaches to serve it and a meeting note, and you can set all three up before the term begins. Then follow these steps, from before the term to midterm:
- Pick one group of students and invite them before the term starts.
- Name your coaches and train them on the plan, the meeting note and what they may share.
- Book every student’s first meeting in the first two weeks of the term.
- Agree with faculty how a referral reaches a coach and how they will hear back.
- Review the meeting notes at midterm and adjust the schedule if students are slipping.
