Promising Practices: A Student Success Coach on Outreach Efforts and Coaching Techniques

Submitted by Dani McCauley, Clarion University

Background

Clarion University is one of the fourteen institutions that make up the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education.  In early 2016, Success Coaches were hired with the intent of increasing retention.  In that time, the staff of Success Coaches at the institution were charged with developing promising practices in order to achieve the goal of increasing retention.  In reflecting on the last five years of success coaching at the institution, I can offer the following promising practices that have allowed our office to see success in serving students.

The first important task was to establish who the success coaches should serve.  In looking at retention data, we found that first-year students had the lowest retention rate.  As a result, the institution realized that it needed to better support first-year students.   In addition to the data on retention pointing to this population being at-risk, the success coaches thought that these new students were also the most at-risk due to being new to the college environment.  We knew that if we could provide early, intrusive support to the first-year students, we could increase their chances of finishing their degree.  We also knew that one of the high impact practices at other institutions was to have a first-year program to help create a unifying experience.  For all of these reasons, we established ourselves as first-year success coaches.

Another benefit of connecting with first-year students as a target population was because of the establishment of these early connections that then would lead to relationships continuing beyond the first year.  At our institution, we intentionally target the first-year students while serving any upperclassmen who continue to seek our services.

After we established our focus on first-year students, we used data to determine additional high-risk groups to target.  This led to increased outreach to sophomores who may be at-risk in their major.  By looking at sophomore GPAs, we determined an at-risk range of 2.3 to 2.9.  In addition to the GPA data, we leveraged our campus relationships to provide focus on other high-risk groups, like specific athletic teams and academic departments.

In thinking of targeting key populations, we focus on where we can make the most impact on retention.  We continue to take all referrals of students, but our core has remained the same.  We intentionally target first-year students with outreach and programming while continuing to serve all students of the institution who may seek out our services.

Promising Practices in Outreach

We are active in the Admissions and Orientation events, starting with students at the beginning of their student life cycle.  Our goal during these events is to ensure each student and their families know of the additional support provided by a success coach. 

During the semester, we primarily communicate through individual appointments and email in order to serve our students.  Each success coach on staff has a specific caseload of students.  We use proactive communication campaigns in our outreach efforts.  We coordinate our communications so that they are similar, but each success coach sends their own communications to their caseload so as to help build the relationship between student and coach.  Our emails come from the individual success coach, rather than a general office email account.

Using Existing Key Flags

In practicing our intrusive coaching, we needed to identify key flags that were available to us that indicate a student may need additional support and coaching.  Our institution lacks a comprehensive early alert or intervention system (like Navigate or StarFish), so we had to make use of other reports that were available to us.  We currently use the attendance reports and progress reports submitted by faculty to create high-alert lists in weeks three, five, six, and eight of the semester (based on when these reports are generated).  We conduct additional outreach to these students specifically to offer support.  If a student is on these lists several times but we have not heard from them, we make targeted phone calls to attempt to connect with them.

In thinking about promising practices in intervention with students, we had to be creative in using the resources available to us at our institution without incurring additional costs or creating a culture shift in the use of a new platform.  While the early alert systems are convenient, we had to find other ways to see red flags that would alert us that students needed assistance and possible coaching.

Employing Coaching Techniques

One of the success coaches of the institution attended the Lifebound Success Coaching training and all of the success coaches have been members of NACADA for several years, following the Special Interest Group of Academic Coaching.  It is from these professional development resources that we have been able to use specific coaching techniques to ensure that we are having coaching conversations with students, rather than relying on more transactional interactions.

Personally, there are two key promising practices of facilitating a coaching conversation that I try to follow.  The first is Lifebound’s W.A.I.T., which stands for Why am I talking?  When I am in a meeting with a student, I constantly gauge who is doing most of the talking.  If I feel that I am talking too much, I think, “WAIT!?”  I then intentionally use a powerful question directed to the student to get them talking.  This is critical to the success of a coaching conversation because, after all, the student is the expert in their own life.  They need to be the one driving the conversation.  My goal as the facilitator of the coaching conversation is to be a close listener who guides the student in their thinking.

My second promising practice in facilitating a coaching conversation involves using powerful questions.  Lifebound’s Success Coaching training emphasizes the use of questioning in order to guide the student toward a solution.  It can be easy to assume I am the expert and list three or four solutions to the issue in discussion, but that is not effective coaching.  That is a monologue on my part and not beneficial to the student.  

In thinking about powerful questions, I highly recommend reviewing Fairfield, Johnson, Smith, and White’s (2018) “Incorporating Coaching Conversations in Advising Practice.”  After attending the Lifebound training and this webinar from NACADA, I started keeping a few example powerful questions written down nearby during each of my student appointments so that I could quickly insert them into my conversations with students.  Basically, I made myself a quick reference guide until I felt more comfortable using the powerful questions.  Now that I have established a good habit of using powerful questions, I pull this NACADA resource out every few months to review the powerful questions and to see if I can begin incorporating a few new powerful questions into my coaching conversations.

Developing coaching skills has been crucial to my work with students.  My goal is to help promote their critical thinking skills and become more self-reliant.  If I were to constantly offer only transactional conversations, not only would I not have had the opportunity to build meaningful relationships with students but the students themselves would not have been able to develop independence.  Coaching conversations requires a slight shift in mentality and approach.  This shift can have exponential positive impact so it is worth the time in developing the skill. 

Practical Considerations

The promising practices we are using has led to the highest retention rate of first-year students in the last several years.  We found key populations (first-year students) to target in order to provide intentional support.  I would encourage other institutions to consider which populations may be of high risk and could benefit from additional support. 
We used existing systems as red flags that may indicate a student is struggling, which for us is attendance reports and progress reports.  We use these reports to be intrusive in offering our services.  Many of these reports are also generated on other campuses, but I encourage other campuses to ask: Is anyone following up with the student to help them act and reflect?  If a campus has mid-term grades, does anyone facilitate a conversation with students who may be at-risk to talk about their grades comprehensively? 
Last but not least, we have refined our approach to our conversations with students.  We try to be purposeful in using coaching conversations and powerful questions.  The first step is to gauge what the majority of your own conversations with students look like.  Are these conversations largely transactional?  In what ways can you encourage students to think critically, rather than relying on you to be a problem solver for them?
While we acknowledge that it takes a village to raise the retention rates, we think our own promising practices as well as these practices beginning to be adopted by others at the institution is helping to move retention in a positive way.  I hope these promising practices may also have practical implications for success at your institutions.

Bio:

Dani has been a lifelong educator, having worked as a middle school teacher and now as a college Success Coach.  She is passionate about increasing student success at institutions of higher education and has found this work to be very rewarding, especially in her current role as a Success Coach at Clarion University.  She is currently pursuing her Doctorate at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She can be reached at demings@clarion.edu.