‘Everybody makes mistakes’: self-compassion and student agency

Self-efficacy, agency and self-compassion are crucial for students' 'becoming' in higher education. They play pivotal roles in shaping academic and personal/professional development and help foster a sense of empowerment and purpose that drives students towards achieving their goals and realising their potential, whilst retaining the empathy and understanding needed to avoid disabling self-criticism in the face of life’s inevitable setbacks and disappointments. 

Self-efficacy 

Self-efficacy refers to an individual's belief in their capacity to demonstrate dispositions and behaviours associated with success. High self-efficacy can enhance academic motivation, resilience and performance. 

When students believe in their abilities, they are more likely to engage deeply with their studies, persist in the face of difficulties and adopt growth mindsets. This confidence can lead to better academic outcomes and a more fulfilling educational experience.  

A student with high self-efficacy is more likely to tackle complex problems, seek help when needed and recover from setbacks. 

Agency 

Agency, meanwhile, refers to the capacity of individuals to act with greater autonomy and independence.  

Greater student agency is characterised by an increased willingness to take the initiative, try new things, take calculated risks and engage in additional experiential learning opportunities such as internships, research projects, mobility opportunities and other extracurricular activities.  

Agency underpins students’ readiness to take ownership of their learning, empowering them to set goals, seek out resources, or identify (and even create) pathways that align with their interests and/or aspirations.  

Self-compassion 

Self-compassion, however, is the vital catalyst impacting students’ emotional wellbeing, academic performance and overall experience and unleashes the potential associated with dispositions such as self-efficacy and agency.  

In an academic culture that often emphasises high achievement, students are sometimes vulnerable to excessive self-criticism if they fall short of their own very high expectations. Self-compassion means treating oneself with kindness, fosters a healthy mindset toward failure and imperfection and acknowledges our shared humanity by maintaining a measured and balanced perspective on personal challenges and any areas for further development.  

Self-compassion helps students manage stress and anxiety: maintaining a positive outlook mitigates the worst effects of tough times (eg burnout or mental fatigue) and helps sustain motivation and engagement with their studies.  

Mistakes can be viewed as opportunities for learning and growth rather than as indicators of an individual’s lack of worth or limited capabilities. 

What’s more, in cultivating an understanding and more forgiving attitude towards themselves, students are more likely to extend that same compassion to others, enriching peer interactions and social ‘connectedness’. 

Transition  

Entering the new, ‘foreign’ environment of higher education presents students with challenges of adaptation. Some find this process very hard, feeling out of place as a result; experiencing isolation; overwhelmed by alien institutional processes and cultures; and/or hampered in building and sustaining connections with fellow students and their tutors. Students need our support through these transitions: it’s not just a matter of ‘doing the right thing’ it’s rational self-interest if we want to keep our students and see them become everything they can be.  

Belonging 

It has long been understood that lack of a sense of belonging, ie failing to ‘become or remain incorporated in the intellectual and social life of the [higher education] institution’ is frequently associated with student decisions to break off their educational experiences (Tinto et al, 1993). 

Poor course choices and academic difficulties are only part of the story. There is an increasing realisation that as HE practitioners we ignore so-called soft factors such as ‘relationships, pedagogy, trust, emotional security and sense of belonging’ at our peril (Nairz-Wirth, 2017). 

Open access tool 

For those of you interested in ‘the science’, the Dispositions for success scales were developed by Birmingham City University (Egan et al., 2021,). Their subsequent adaptation as part of the Erasmus+ ENTRANTS project became available in 2023-24 and offer a fabulous, open-access tool that HE professionals anywhere can make available to their students to provide a starting point for powerful conversations about metacognition, learning to learn and ‘becoming’ everything they can be.  

If you haven’t come across the tool, we would recommend that you take a look by first completing the survey yourself to see what your students will see. 

We will conclude by stressing that to get the most out of it, the survey needs to be accompanied by those related student-staff discussions. ‘Goals without plans are just wishes’ after all (Saint-Exupéry).  

Advance HE framework for student success 

‘Student access, retention, attainment and progression’, part of the Essential Frameworks for Enhancing Student Success series, succinctly points to how best realise your/our ambitions for excellent outcomes through student enablement by paying attention to the need for: 

• professional development for those involved in coaching and academic / personal tuition as ‘An antidote to accident’; 
• joined up support systems, processes and practices in order to achieve ‘One-team working’; 
• the promotion of student enablement, learner autonomy and growth mindset with students themselves because ‘Whether you think that you can or you think that you can’t: you’re right!’; and 
• recognition and celebration for (and of) your students and your staff because ‘Nothing succeeds like success!’  

Professor Mark O’Hara is Senior Consultant (Education) at Advance HE, a National Teaching Fellow and winner of the Collaborative Award for Teaching Excellence (CATE) in the UK. He has over 30 years’ experience in higher education in a variety of roles including Head of Student Experience, Associate Dean and Associate PVC (Education). Mark is also Vice-Chair of the European Association for Institutional Research (EAIR).  

Professor Silke Preymann holds the position of Scientific Head of Diversity Management at University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria. She works as a researcher in the Department for Higher Education Research and Development and has led a number of international projects in the field of student engagement, belongingness and EDI in higher education.