Are you struggling with time management, motivation, and organization?
No matter how motivated you may be to pursue a line of study, there’s no telling how hard the going can get. It’s easy to feel discouraged once you find yourself falling behind despite what’s at stake.
Fortunately, academic coaching can help. It’s a personalized, one-on-one service from professional academic coaches who help students looking to improve their academic performance.
Your academic coach will sit down with you, listen to your concerns and challenges, and support you in developing an action plan to help you reach your educational goals. They will also share tips, strategies, and tools to help you navigate coursework easily.
Academic coaching may be crucial in helping you learn new skills and techniques. With its personalized, actionable feedback and your coach’s encouragement, chances are high that you’ll improve.
But how does that work? If you’re considering it for the first time, here’s a step-by-step guide to getting academic coaching.
- Schedule An Appointment
With modern videoconferencing technology, most tutors, like those from Emergent Education Portland Tutoring & Test Prep, can easily offer academic coaching online. However, in-person tutoring is still an option. The point is that students can choose which method best meets their needs.
Making an appointment with the academic coach from your preferred institution is an easy thing to do. But it’s essential to know that different institutions have different ways of requesting and scheduling them.
Thus, you must learn about their specific appointment process first to easily schedule a session. Some of the common steps you’ll take may include:
- Visiting the website of your preferred institution
- Locating an academic coaching tab which will take you to the academic coaching page
- Following the necessary steps to schedule an appointment on the page, like calling the phone number given or filing an academic coaching request form
When scheduling the appointment, you will be asked for your contact information and availability. So, it’s critical to have a couple of days and times of the week in mind that work for your schedule.
Once you’ve done that, the coach will contact you to confirm their appointment. Depending on the institution’s policies, this can be through a call, text, or email.
- Attend Your First Session
Once you’ve scheduled an appointment and settled with a coach, the next step is attending your first session.
Typically, most first sessions are conversational as the coach tries to know the student and vice versa. The goal is to create a positive environment where you’ll feel comfortable sharing your strengths, weaknesses, problems, and goals.
Some of the things the tutor may ask about include the following:
- Why you chose your major
- What classes you’re taking
- The subjects you love the most
- The hobbies you have
- How often you attend or miss class
- If you take lots of naps
- What your challenges in school are
- How much time you spend on schoolwork
- What you like to do in your free time
- How you prepare for your tests
- How soon you turn in assignments
These and other questions let the coach know you as a person and a student to make recommendations most suitable for your needs. Also, from how you answer, they can gauge your temperament to help them know how to work with you.
That being said, you can share as much or as little as you want. When dealing with a professional coach, understand that they’ve been trained to be prejudice-free and keep information about their students confidential.
Also, anything you say is protected under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA), which governs public access to records and educational information. You, therefore, don’t need to worry about your information leaking.
The most impressive thing about most institutions is that some of their academic coaches are students. They may recognize your particular struggles because they have a college experience like yours. It makes it easy to relate to your academic problems and find effective solutions to them.
- Discuss And Implement A Custom Coaching Plan
Upon establishing a schedule, you’ve already started building a foundation of getting to know each other with your coach.
The next step is to develop a coaching plan according to your needs. This plan should take into consideration the following:
- Your strengths
- Areas of improvement
- Obstacles
- Opportunities
When developing the coaching plan, your and your coach’s goal should be to help you improve your weak points. You can start by creating short-term and long-term milestones and discussing potential solutions to achieve them. Use that as the basis for your action plan.
For example, suppose you struggle with attending morning classes because you use your phone until late at night. In that case, your academic coach can pinpoint how much time you waste on that activity and give tips to help you limit screen time at night. These may include:
- Using an internet blocker
- Putting your phone out of reach
- Listening to music or podcasts instead of watching a video
Over time, you’ll find that you’ve stopped spending much time using your phone and no longer struggle to wake up to go to class. It will help you avoid missing essential sessions and participate in learning better.
Other academic strategies that your coach can train you on as part of the action plan include:
- Smarter studying habits
- Faster, more effective memorization
- Mindset and study motivation
- Better essay-writing
- Test-taking tips
By going through coaching and implementing all the strategies you learn, you get a more precise grasp of your performance and how to improve it. They’re crucial for getting closer to your academic goals.
- Schedule Follow Up And Feedback Sessions
After getting training and feedback on your performance, it’s your prerogative as the student to implement everything you’ve learned.
Besides that, the academic coach can help you schedule specific dates for one-on-one meetings to follow up on your progress.
These follow-up sessions aim to check:
- If the strategies are working
- How you feel so far
- How much you have improved from your baseline performance
- If there’s a need to make any readjustments
- What obstacles you’re currently encountering
In other words, they help the coach to know whether you’ve grown and if the coaching sessions have helped. This also gives them an opportunity to share observations based on your progress.
When receiving feedback from your coach, it’s essential to have a positive attitude regardless of whether the comments will be positive or negative. If you don’t handle the feedback well, you might not use it to continue building on your performance.
On the flip side, the coach should also be careful about how they present their feedback, especially if they aim to point out something negative. Here are some of the steps they can take to keep their tone constructive:
- Starting with precise praise
- Giving the student a chance to celebrate their success
- Asking a question on the weak area they want to focus on
- Using evidence to point out the area of weakness (for example, low performance on a particular test)
- Stating concrete actions that the student should work on given that they’ve already noted the rationale for the problem
- Giving the student the opportunity to practice right there (for example, if they failed a test due to poor sentence construction, you could show them the specific mistakes they’ve made and teach them how to fix them)
- Discussing the updated action plan and suggestions, plus the way forward
Getting feedback and suggestions based on observations from your coach can be a great way of boosting your self-awareness. It can also improve your perception of handling different aspects of your education.
Above all, good feedback helps you feel more motivated to work towards reaching your goal of academic excellence.
- Work On Implementing The Feedback
Whenever your coach points out where your action plan is failing, you must go back to the drawing board and fix your working strategy. Use what you’ve recently learned to know where to start addressing the gaps.
At this step, avoiding repeating the mistakes your coach pointed out earlier is critical. You can also consult them if you get stuck or need help understanding something.
Since you will be working on your most apparent weaknesses, you’re most likely to achieve the following:
- Develop a better study plan
- Implement better planning and organization of study tasks and assignments
- Maintain consistent class attendance
- Experience little to no test anxiety
After reworking your action plan, give it a go in your next batch of performances. You should see your data retention, class participation, and work ethic growing as you go along. These are the keys to a better academic track record and overall empowerment.
Find A Partner For Academic Growth
Like any journey, succeeding in academia is much easier when you have a guide.
By working with an academic coach through the above steps, you’ll develop study skills, discover work strategies, and build the confidence needed to bring you closer to your goals. The best part is that the skills you build through academic coaching will stay with you for a long time, even after you’ve graduated. It can help you if you wish to advance your studies further.
