As a lecturer and supervisor, it’s important to focus on your students’ well-being. Both because there is a strong correlation between well-being and learning, and because it reduces drop-out risk. For this reason, it’s important that degree programmes integrate the social and intellectual elements of student life.
It’s not possible to set out clear-cut guidelines for what your role as lecturer and supervisor includes and does not include. You may be in doubt as to whether and how you should help students who confide their problems to you. Problems may range from practical challenges related to structure and study habits in their everyday lives to personal issues related to romantic troubles, illness or death in their immediate family.
It’s up to you as a lecturer or supervisor to reflect on and respond to the specific situation to the best of your ability.
In order to respond most appropriately, it’s a good idea to set some boundaries: both in relation to when you as a lecturer and supervisor are available to students and to how much you are willing and able to help them with practical or personal problems. This will make it easier for you to decide when to refer students to other sources of support.
Some lecturers and supervisors feel that they are unable to help even when they would like to help. This may be the case if a student is dealing with grief, depression or stress. In these situations, you can refer the student to the appropriate sources of support, either internally at the university or outside AU.
Distress can be expressed in a variety of ways and experienced in a variety of ways, and there is no single universally appropriate response. Distress has both a personal and a contextual dimension. And distress is a natural feeling that can strike all of us, for example in response to illness, death, upheaval and betrayal. How we experience and respond to distress when it strikes us is individual. Some people are strongly affected for a longer period, while others quickly recover.
Distress has many faces, and it can be easy or difficult to tell whether a student is struggling. This means that there are both obvious and subtle signs that you should look for that will indicate whether your students are thriving.
Obvious signs: Some examples include not coming to class, not turning in assignments on time, not participating in class. There may also be students who explicitly demonstrate that they are in distress, for example by crying, getting angry and acting out or telling you that they are stressed out, grieving, anxious, etc.
Subtle signs: These signs are harder to spot, and include gradual changes in behaviour, maintaining a facade, ‘hiding’ during class or looking sad.
Students who aren’t thriving react very differently in different situations, because both individual and context-related factors contribute to the specific form of distress they experience. Below, we outline some examples of how you as a lecturer and supervisor might perceive and respond to students who are struggling in class, supervision, exam and group work contexts. The examples come from group interviews with lecturers and supervisors across AU in which they shared their experiences with struggling students.
You won’t get an exact recipe you can follow that will guarantee you success. There’s no ‘one size fits all’ when it comes to helping students who aren’t thriving. But hopefully you will be able to relate to these examples as a lecturer and supervisor and get inspiration on how to respond when your students are struggling.
When it comes to signs of distress in students in a classroom context, there is a lot of variation, and students can behave in ways that surprise both lecturers and students – particularly if the student in question acts out. Examples of situations lecturers have experienced:
Students who were under the influence, who disrupted class, who left class in protest or who were emotionally affected by the teaching materials.
Students who feel pressurised in class, for example because they are perfectionists and don’t feel that they are performing well enough, are ‘slow’ or come to class and turn in assignments late.
Provide a clear framework
Providing a clear framework and making your expectations clear helps students thrive in learning processes. Be as explicit as possible about the framework for your class and make your expectations of your students clear. We recommend that you metacommunicate about these issues at the beginning and end of class and that you present the content that will be covered, as well as explaining the reason for learning it and how they can work with it. This will make it easier for students to grasp what is expected of them.
For example, you might ask yourself:
How can I provide students with a clear framework for class participation, and how can I make my expectations of them clear?
Do my students know what is expected of them?
Prepare strategies
It can be a good idea to consider different possible strategies for responding to a student in distress. For example, you might ask yourself:
How can I show concern for a student who is not thriving in connection with my classes?
Have a conversation with the student right after class? Or agree on time for later on? Get more advice how to handle conversation about well-being.
If a student starts acting out in class, how will I deal with it? For example, you can:
Ask the student to leave the room if they don’t settle down.
Ask the student to leave the room if they don’t settle down.
Offer them a seat close to you, the lecturer, to make it easier for them to stay focused on class.
Offer them a seat close to the door so that they can take an extra break without feeling conspicuous. This seating arrangement also allows students to leave the classroom before the end of class, for example if they suffer from social anxiety.
Take steps to encourage social cohesion in the class by asking the group to find a new seatmate at each class or introducing a rota for group work.
Place conference tables in a square, which encourages discussion across tables. This is an inclusive setup that encourages everyone to participate in discussion.
Supervision often involves a closer relationship between supervisor and student; communication can easily shift from the purely academic to a more personal plane. This can encourage some students to confide in their supervisor, while others may feel uncomfortable with the closeness of the student-supervisor relationship. Here are some examples of supervisors’ experiences:
That students encounter hurdles in relation to study technique. For example, that they develop a bad case of writer’s block, that they are not ready to begin their Master’s thesis, can’t meet deadlines and honour agreements or have trouble prioritising and structuring their own work process. Some supervisors have also suspected that some students have the kinds of difficulties with reading and/or writing that SPS can help with.
That students have personal issues. For example, that they confide about their personal problems or diagnoses, or that they develop symptoms during the writing process, for example of depression or loneliness.
That students are under so much pressure that their supervisor is unsure whether they will be able to complete their project, or that students fail to show up for appointments and stop answering mails.
The content is written by Hanne Balsby Thingholm at Rådgivnings- og støttecentret in collaboration with Centre for Educational Development and student guidance counsellors (VEST).
Please contact the editors at AU Educate if you have any questions about the content of the platform or if you need consultation on your teaching from one of the many skilled professionals at the Centre for Educational Development.
