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Working with undergraduates necessarily means taking on advising roles. While formal responsibility might lie with advising staff at your institution, teaching a first-year seminar or a capstone automatically puts you in a position where students come to you for advice. So does guiding students on research projects or in practicums, teaching in an honors college, and working with students on high-impact practices (e.g., off-campus study and community-based learning).
Yet most faculty and instructors receive minimal, if any, training about how to do this important task well. As a result, advising is often transactional: helping students register for courses, declare a major, or check degree requirements. This was my early experience, and I was mostly at a loss for how to change it. How could I get students to my office? What did I do with them once they were there? What did I have to offer them? There are alternatives, evidence-based approaches that demonstrably increase success and retention, especially for students who are first-generation college attendees, from under-resourced communities, or from minoritized populations. What are these?
Importantly, evidence suggests that it isn’t so much the specific services available to students as the underlying philosophy of the programs. Strategies should be student focused, collaborative across administrative silos, designed to provide more than just academic support, and “rooted in the belief that students come to college with assets, strengths, and capabilities to foster their success” (p. 2). Successful advising—whether in a formal setting, a first-year seminar, a capstone course, or an off-campus study experience—is about nurturing and developing those qualities.
I would argue that we can even incorporate many of the above features into large classes, reinforcing the messages students should be receiving from formal advising.
Here are just a few ideas:
Lastly, we all have the student who shows up at the last minute for their registration code, when both you and they are too busy to have much of a meaningful engagement. There are also those students who are nonresponsive to our multiple efforts. In these situations, be persistent or use your campus early-alert system to alert others that an intervention may be needed.
McGill, C. M., Ali, M., & Barton, D. (2020). Skills and competencies for effective academic advising and personal tutoring. Frontiers in Education, 5, Article 135. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2020.00135
NACADA: The Global Community for Academic Advising
Promoting At-Promise Student Success
Amy B. Mulnix, PhD, currently is the interim associate secretary in the national Phi Beta Kappa office. Prior to that, she served as founding director of the Faculty Center at Franklin and Marshall College in Pennsylvania, where she supported faculty across the arc of their careers and the scopes of their academic identities.