Meetings: The Meat & Bones of Your Relationships with Students

Alongside emails, meetings with our students are our bread and butter. However, getting students sitting down across our desk, ready and willing to have an open conversation, is sometimes easier said than done. In particular, we also need to be mindful of how to balance the ever-growing stack of student meetings with our already-busy schedules. Additionally, once we have achieved contact with a student, it is important to identify the audience and specific purpose of the meeting.  By building rapport and giving ourselves a starting point, we can then identify which “hat” we need to put on or what role we need to take for each particular student.

In this section, we will discuss scheduling and time management, establishing rapport in meetings, and constructing healthy boundaries between you and your students in more depth.

Manage Your Time Wisely!

For many of us, we are already juggling the stress of teaching several sections and courses, which often leads to a very saturated schedule. Unfortunately, students commonly cannot attend set office hours, requiring you to squeeze them in at an undesirable time. For your own mental health, it is important to not overburden yourself with student meetings when possible. Additionally, when you can, try to schedule in a break for yourself rather than stacking meetings and classes back-to-back.

If you do not have a built in scheduling app on your chosen department website, using a calendar-scheduling app, such as Calendly or Doodle, may help save the headache of manually scheduling student meetings. These websites allow you to set up a block for your office hours, and students can directly schedule meetings with you on their end. Allowing students to choose their own timeslot within a pre-selected block of time prevents the back-and-forth of scheduling over email. However, it’s important to follow up and remind students of their scheduled meeting 24 hours before it occurs!

Establishing Rapport & Boundaries (When to Say No!)

The position of an academic coach is a unique one – we act as authority figures who can provide a lot of oversight and accountability when it comes to students’ performance, and yet we do not directly control their grades or classroom outcomes. We may ask questions about students’ personal lives and well-being in order to connect the dots to their academic achievement, and yet we are not therapists. These fuzzy, blurred lines can sometimes be confusing for both the coach and the student. How much should be disclosed?

It is important to set the tone and set boundaries on the front end so that both parties can be on the same page. Although you may want to present yourself as a friendly face, or even as someone who is cool, funny, and approachable, we are not friends with our students. That distinction can be difficult! If you take on too friendly of an approach, students may express details of their lives that aren’t appropriate for the setting, or disclose information that may be taxing to your own mental health. If you take on too stern of an approach, students may feel too intimidated to disclose their struggles, and therefore cannot receive help.

Constructing Positive Rapport

Meetings with students often have a specific goal in mind: determining how they are struggling and how we can help them. However, you don’t necessarily need to jump straight to the point. You may be more successful in getting a student to open up if you get to know them as a person first and foremost and build up positive rapport early on. Rapport is a constructive relationship between two individuals that is built on mutual respect and understanding. In this profession, rapport often leads to students trusting us, treating us with respect, and following through with our advice.

The key to building rapport is to remember that students want to be treated like a person, not just a student. You can express interest in getting to know them early on by asking them about their semester overall, what hobbies they like to do for fun, and how they care for themselves outside of the classroom. These questions additionally allow you to paint a broader picture of them as a student and how they fit in on campus. Another huge tip for building rapport is to be yourself. Students often prefer when their instructors and coaches are honest and realistic during meetings. Find ways to relate and insert your own personal interests when appropriate! Finally, be upfront with your goals of the meeting. For example, if you specifically need to discuss a student’s academic probation, don’t hide that until the last minute. Students don’t want to feel surprised halfway through a meeting when a difficult topic is suddenly brought up. Keeping your student in-the-know prevents them from feeling unsure about the meeting, and may even work to build trust.

Tips for Setting Boundaries Early

Here are a few tips and techniques you may want to consider using early on in the relationship with your coached students. One or all of these tips may be applicable.

Be clear about your credentials, or lack thereof. To give therapeutic advice, a person should have a PhD in Clinical Psychology, a PsyD or a degree in Social Work, to list a few. To give advice on medication, a person should have a medical degree. You can be very clear early on that you are not credentialed in these areas, and therefore certain conversations are outside of your expertise.

Be open with students about your mandatory reporter status early on. Students may not know what a mandatory reporter is, so having a quick explanation prepared may be beneficial. Mandatory reporting is explained in more detail later in this chapter.

Be relatable, but follow up with a lesson. During conversations, you will likely have several opportunities to relate with your students. For example, when a student makes a joke about being too busy playing video games instead of studying, it may remind you of when you were an undergrad and behaved similarly. It is not inherently bad to connect with students on this level and be honest about your flaws – it may even demonstrate to your students that, although you made mistakes, you still ended up in a successful position, and they can, too! However, be sure to always remind your student that while messing around and having fun is tempting, we can’t neglect our responsibilities. In this situation, I would suggest relating with a student, but clarifying that neglecting work for play in the long run can hurt progress, and follow up with concrete ways in which you learned how to balance responsibilities and hobbies in your own life. This technique demonstrates that you know what they are going through, while also encouraging productivity.

Change the topic when necessary. When in doubt – change the subject. It is important to not reinforce oversharing by engaging in it and asking questions (unless you are concerned for their well-being). If a student begins to talk about inappropriate topics, such as their drinking habits or sex lives, for example, changing the subject makes it clear that those topics are not appropriate for this context. You may want to verbalize why you are changing the topic, or simply move on to a different conversation.

Remind students of the purpose of your meeting. Though it is sometimes beneficial to have off-topic conversations, you can help to set boundaries by consistently steering the conversation back on topic, and by reminding your student of the meeting’s purpose. At the end of the day, you and the student should come away from the meeting with actionable goals.

The Psychology of Perception & Boundaries

The age-old saying “First impressions are everything” is backed by research. First impressions from short interactions tend to stick in a person’s mind and can color how they interpret your behavior later, as well as impact how a person behaves around you (Klusmann, Knorr, & Hampe, 2023). Additionally, people can come to conclusions about others very quickly and may make assumptions about a person’s intelligence, competence, personality, and likeability in seconds (Willis & Todorov, 2006). That isn’t to say that you can’t prove a first impression wrong, but with this knowledge, we should be motivated to start on the right foot.

So how can coaches use this knowledge, and how may it relate to boundaries? Your tone in how you message students over email, your vocal tone in person, where you meet your students, the topics you bring up or engage in, how you decorate your office, and how you react emotionally to students can all inform their first impression. Early on, try to be cognizant of how you come across, and sprinkle in those boundary-setting techniques when necessary. Generally speaking, you want to be seen as friendly and caring, yet still an authority figure!

References

Klusmann, D., Knorr, M., & Hampe, W. (2023). Exploring the relationships between first impressions and MMI ratings: A pilot study. Advances in Health Sciences Education, 28(2), 519–536. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10459-022-10151-5

Willis, J., & Todorov, A. (2006). First Impressions: Making Up Your Mind After a 100-Ms Exposure to a Face. Psychological Science, 17(7), 592–598. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01750.x