How Faculty Can Work With Us

Faculty can flag students who are at risk in their courses in Starfish. Faculty advisers may reach out to advisees who receive an at risk report. 

  • Faculty play a crucial role in the Starfish early alert/progress report process. Your insight helps identify students at risk, and by filing a report, you communicate that at risk concern to the student directly as well as to his/her advisor(s). If you advise students and receive a report, please reach out to the student and offer to help connect them to appropriate campus resources, including the academic resources at the Center for Academic Achievement. 

Faculty who teach student athletes can respond to targeted progress reports on specific at risk student athletes. 

  • When Academic Support for Student Athletes staff is notified that a student athlete is at risk, staff members will follow up and meet with student athletes to help improve their course performance. 

Faculty can acquaint students with tutoring services by: 

  • Including information about the Center’s tutoring services in your course syllabus. Informational paragraphs for your syllabi are sent out prior to the start of the semester. 
  • Having a representative from the Center (professional staff, tutor, SI leader) visit your class to share information with your students, what services the Center provides, and how to schedule appointments. 
  • Sharing workshop and relevant event information with your students throughout the semester. 

Faculty can help students identify a need for tutoring. 

Students might not realize that they may benefit from tutoring, especially if they never used tutoring in high school. If students share comments like the following, you might encourage them to consider if tutoring or academic coaching might be useful in addition to utilizing your office hours for help: 

  • “I studied for hours but still didn’t do well.” 
  • “I thought I understood the reading but then couldn’t remember any of it on the quiz.” 
  • “I did well on my homework problems but not the quiz/test.” 

Tutoring can provide extra practice, help students re-evaluate their strategies, and prompt them to make sure they truly understand material rather than simply committing everything to memory. 

Faculty can clarify misconceptions about who uses tutoring and what tutoring is and is not. 

  • Students may think tutoring is only for weak or struggling students and they “aren’t smart” if utilize tutoring. However, at the Center, we promote the idea that thoughtful, proactive students seek tutoring and point out that we serve a range of students, including graduate students. Many of our tutors make use of tutoring themselves. 
  • Students may not understand what writing tutoring involves. A writing tutor helps students with a range of concerns, including higher-order issues as well as specific citation and grammar questions. While writing tutors help students notice and correct mistakes, they do not solely edit grammar. Writing tutors work to improve students’ writing ability while working on their various writing assignments. 
  • Subject tutoring works best if the student attempts to complete the work or understand the content ahead of time and if they bring specific questions to the session. A tutoring session is an interactive meeting, so students should be prepared to work and to practice on their own afterwards. 
  • Academic coaching often seems like a vague idea to students and they might need help understanding what it is and how it can help. Academic coaching can help students examine their time management, studying, reading, note-taking, and test-taking strategies. Academic coaching is also a good bridge to connect students to other tutoring resources. 
  • Students might have unrealistic expectations for tutoring. Tutoring will likely be ineffective, relative to the student’s expectations, if students wait until just before a test or the paper’s due date, or if they haven’t been doing the homework, reading, and engaging in class. 

Faculty can share specific facts about tutoring. 

  • Peer tutors are recommended by faculty, have at least a 3.25 GPA (3.5 GPA for graduate students), and go through both an interview process, and over ten hours of training before they start tutoring. They also attend ongoing training sessions each semester. 
  • All tutoring services are free. 

Other ways we can support faculty and faculty can support our work: 

  • We can design a workshop tailored to your course and the needs of your students. Past examples include Studying and Test-taking for Anatomy and Physiology, Test-taking in Graduate Nursing courses, APA Fundamentals workshops brought to your classroom, etc. We especially welcome co-facilitation—we can share strategies while you provide good examples of applying those strategies to course content (such as sample exam questions). 
  • You can provide recommendations for students who might be good tutors and help us find new tutors for your courses. 
  • We welcome your insight and/or involvement in tutor training. If interested in supporting tutor training, please contact us at tutoringsupport@lasalle.edu.

We are always looking for ways to partner with faculty, so do not hesitate to contact us to see how we can help you support student success!