Setting expectations with your students

Somewhere in your contract, you are obliged to deliver pastoral care to your students.  It’s likely that in your job you’ll be obliged to interact with studies as part of your duties.  But what does that mean for you in terms of boundaries with those students and boundaries with the other things that occupy your time?

If you are attached to your students, it can be very easy to slip into a way of thinking that gets you answering emails and trying to sort out problems at weekends and evenings, which might get you involved in student challenges that we feel ill-equipped to help them with.  Let’s examine the thought process first.  Your thoughts might be something like:

But where are the boundaries here?  And if the boundaries between you and the students, your work, and everything else are not there, what happens to you?  In the long term, operating without boundaries might result in:

So there is an argument here that boundaries need to be in place for you.  Boundaries can help you ensure you have time and headspace away from teaching.  Additionally, in order to be in a good position to support others, you first need to care for yourself.  There’s also an argument that boundaries will help your students to:

• Know how to interact with you in terms of your available time.
• Know what they can ask you and what needs to be asked of someone else.
• Develop the skills and confidence they need to solve their own questions and support their own independent learning.

So to support the building of healthy boundaries and managing expectations, a key question here is: What do I need my students to know?  A non-exhaustive list of things to consider might be:

• How will I work best with them? PhD students and MRes students might need you differently than undergraduates.
• What information do I need to communicate with them?
• How do I best communicate that information? Do I talk to them face-to-face? Do I put office hours on an email?
• What does being ‘available’ mean to me? What is reasonable?  What is feasible?
• Who can help me support the students?
• What am I qualified to help the students with, and what am I not qualified for? If I am not qualified, what do I need to tell them?
• Where and how can I encourage students to build communities and support with their peers?

In this consideration of managing boundaries and expectations, it’s also important to consider that student support is not solely the responsibility of individual teachers. It’s important to remember that universities have a responsibility to ensure that conditions are in place for students to have equitable learning experiences.  More than 40 UK universities are currently working towards the Student Minds’ Mental Health Charter, which takes a holistic ‘whole university’ approach to supporting students’ mental health.  This is a shift in the right direction, away from lecturers taking individual responsibility for mopping up the challenges that emerge from structural deficiencies within universities.  Of course, this is not without challenges, but key here is the shift from student welfare as an individual responsibility of teachers and lecturers (as the face of the university to students) to being embedded within university thinking at multiple levels.

• Is there more that my university can do to clarify what my role is in supporting students?
• Is there more that my university can do to aid in supporting students through good pedagogic practice?
• Are the students entitled to support, but they aren’t getting it?
• Where can we work well with other student support services?

There isn’t enough space in this blog to do more than acknowledge the brilliant and difficult work undertaken by university wellbeing and student support colleagues and signpost some useful resources:

• AMOSSHE The Student Services Organisation Reports here
• The Wellbeing Thesis for PhD students.
• TogetherAll’s online safe space for wellbeing support.
• Petra Boynton’s excellent guide Being Well in Academia also tackles the specifics of broader topic.

Instead, I want to address some specifics around setting boundaries. Firstly, personal tutoring, where the lines between academic and pastoral care can get murky.  UKAT offers support for personal tutors and advises that effective personal tutoring depends on, among other things, a balance between being human, deploying active listening skills, knowing your limits and setting boundaries (UKAT, 2020).  To get you reflecting on this, here are some questions to ponder:

• What are your limits and boundaries in personal tutoring?
• What difference will it make to you to be clear about your limits?
• How will you communicate this to your students?

Finally, I wanted to mention another factor that can challenge lecturers’ boundaries: the involvement of parents in their children’s education experience.  Firstly, if parents are involved, there’s a GDPR consideration around what information can be given out; there are also potential safeguarding issues around protecting the students’ identity.  The student is the adult responsible party here: for decisions, for what is shared, and for their engagement.  A lecturer works with the student (not the parent).  If this is you, there’s a great thread on WIASN Facebook (post 10 Jan 2023) with advice and experiences about how to set up a meeting with the student and parent if you decide to have one.

To help support the setting of boundaries, I refer you to Michelle Elman’s ‘selfish method’ in The Joy of Being Selfish (2021):

Stories: This goes back to the things we tell ourselves that get in the way of putting the boundaries in place.  Stick to the facts!

Emotions: Again, thinking about barriers to setting boundaries, what feelings do you have?  What is really going on?  Have you processed any negative feelings around your stories?

Let go of conclusions: If you have to have a difficult conversation, people often go in with fixed ideas about what the result will be.  Let go of any defensiveness and be open-minded.

Find the desired outcome: When you are setting boundaries, be clear about what you want.  How will you know that you have set the right boundaries in the right ways?  What will change?

Initiate conversation: Going back to the earlier point, when is the right time, and what is the right space in which to set out these boundaries?

Set the boundary: Elman (2021: 52) is really clear on this: ‘Boundaries are not a decision you make with the other party’.

Hold the boundary: If it is crossed, you need to uphold the boundary.  For Ellman, this means that if a boundary is crossed for a second time, the boundary is re-stated and a consequence is put in place.

Remember – boundaries don’t have to be absolutely rigid and unyielding.  To mangle a nice axiom from Prince Ea, boundaries are not about having walls; they’re about having doors, and you choose whether to open or not.

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