Welcome back to the Dr. Scott Massey LLC newsletter. As you know, Massey Martin LLC assists PA educators with program development by offering personalized, interactive mentoring and consulting services that guide PA Programs to achieve and maintain accreditation. In past newsletters, we have focused on the Student Success Coaching Model as a way to improve PA student outcomes, beginning almost the moment applicants are accepted to your program. 

In doing so, we delineated the three major roles of the participants in such a program, namely: 

• the faculty, who can greatly benefit from the approach’s timeliness and efficiency in helping their students flourish;

• the students themselves, who learn “how to learn” and become their own best resource; and

• the Success Coach, the guide who combines the previous two participants with the proven processes of the Student Success Coaching Model. Of these three participating groups, it is the Success Coach that is the newest key to the approach, a specially appointed and specifically trained member of your PA program staff. 

For students and faculty, a shift in thinking and/or behavior is a requirement. A Success Coach’s role, however, is not the same as an advisor, a remediator, or instructor. Rather, Success Coaches create a custom program of accountability and provide a safe environment for students to address challenges.

In the following series of newsletters I will examine the purpose of the success coach in detail, beginning with training, moving through duties and student interactions, and the methodologies for student success, and finally, looking at results, such as how to measure outcomes.

Let’s start with the problem

Over the past several years, PA educators have noticed the following trends:

• Lower performance standards are becoming endemic.

• PANCE scores are decreasing, and pass rates are dropping to below 80%.

• Students are struggling more with the transition to graduate level.

• The current approach to student remediation follows a problematic pattern without positive results.

What’s more, attrition rates are rising, taking a heavy toll on the bottom line of PA programs. High attrition rates can devastate a program. The effort and investment alone to bring a student into a program is costly. Each student represents approximately $100K of annual revenue. I recently worked with a PA program that lost 8 students in one year; therefore student attrition resulted in nearly a $1M loss for this program. PA programs run a risk of losing resources if they are unprofitable going forward

A major focus of the Student Success Coaching Model is starting at the beginning, that is, improvements in student preparedness during the admissions process itself, where your program can select better applicants and help ensure that they are ready for the rigors of graduate medical education. Once students are part of a cohort at your program, there still may be difficulties. Even the brightest and most motivated students can find themselves struggling for many reasons. The Student Success Coaching Model homes in on problems sooner rather than later, quickly empowering students to become their own coaches and learning mentors, and hopefully stopping educational difficulties before they become overwhelming. 

Coaching doesn’t have to be long process either. Actually, coaching works best when it is high-impact and action oriented. Students do not have weeks upon weeks to catch up with their peers. They need practical problem-solving sooner rather than later; Success Coaching provides this.

Who is a Success Coach?

There may be a member of your faculty who is perfect for this position: excited about the prospect and motivated to make it work. We highly recommend choosing such individuals for the role. Nevertheless, a Success Coach does not have to be an instructor from your PA program. Success Coaches need only to have some sort of background in academic counseling.

When working with students, Success Coaches focus on the following:

• Improving metacognitive skills (Ability, awareness, and control of the process by which they learn). Students are encouraged to “think about their thinking.”

• Taking learning to different process levels (such as adaptation, synthesis). Students that are stuck on the “knowledge level” of Bloom’s Taxonomy will surface learn and no real intellectual growth will occur. 

• Adopting a study skill program that the Success Coach can follow up on throughout the semester.

• Providing faculty with resources and recommendations and ensuring reports of student progress are delivered to advisors, coordinators and the program director, as appropriate.

The number of medical and PA schools implementing a success coach model is growing because this process has been demonstrated to get better results than previous remediation measures.  In our next newsletter, we will look at how the Success Coach develops a relationship with students who come to them for help.