Somebody pinch me. I must be dreaming!
I have spent hours and hours watching Learner’s Mindset Discussions. Never would I ever have dreamed I would be in one! What a dream come true to sit and visit with two inspirational educators.
Author: The Advisor That Cares
Disclaimer: The views expressed on this page belong to me as the creator and are not meant to express or imply any views of my organization, its affiliates, or employees.
Congrats May 2023 grads!
So excited to celebrate with my fellow ADL friends! While my graduation isn’t until December, many of my fellows graduated in December, May, and August.
Contributions, 5315
Measurement Strategy Course
- Spring 2023
- Course Number: EDLD 5315
- Course Title: Assessing Digital Learning and Instruction
Contributions to learning and learning community
I am giving myself a score of 97 out of 100
Crediting Core Group Members: Annababette Diemecke, Ashleigh Carter, Kristin Winzer, Patrick Rodriguez, and Valary Patterson
Crediting Collective Members: https://advising.blog/collaborations/
Key and Supporting
Contributions
Since I am not pursuing the accelerated path to program completion, I do my best to welcome new members to the learning community and help foster connections for others interested in similar projects. Many of us have stayed active in our collaborative group through a Google Drive and a GroupMe chat, both of which I host for the group.
Our learning community is committed to supporting one another. I have witnessed the power of the collective as members with no common classes come together to troubleshoot a website issue or clarify an assignment. Anytime, day or night, someone is willing to give support. I am excited to help foster that learning environment for myself and my classmates. I always ensure that I provide helpful feed-forward to my core collaboration group and all the members of the ADL Collective GroupMe chat.
I continue to refine, revisit and revise all prior assignments throughout this course, and this session pushed me to look objectively at my innovation plan. Learning about action research, struggling through writing challenges, and putting everything together into the final compilation continues to make this experience authentic. I can see my innovation coming to life. I am prepared to implement the strategies learned throughout.
I dissected the assigned course readings and pursued my information on the topics of this session. Specifically, throughout my literature review, I continued to deepen my learning on my topic as I followed links from cited sources.
I always met the course activity deadlines and posted discussion prompts and replies in hopes of engaging in a dialog about the action research process.
I engaged in every opportunity presented by hosting Zoom sessions and attending all class meetings and office hours. I engage in chat threads to review assignments, clarify questions, and provide support. I always cite source material in blogs and discussion postings. I have actively shared additional sources of information on the topics we study to offer breadcrumbs to my classmates and future ADL students and to further my understanding. I have truly embraced the learners’ mindset.
Reflections
What Worked?
In the simplest terms? The Learners’ Mindset
Embracing the opportunity to learn even more about my innovation plan worked. Completing my second literature review was an immense learning experience overcoming fears and self-doubt.
Sharing my writing struggles through blogging was also helpful throughout the learning process. As I worked through learning about action research, I blogged about the experience and my thoughts on narrowing my topic. I see the benefits of doing the work and evaluating the learning process.
The support given and found throughout the ADL Cohort Collective GroupMe chat is still the most humbling thing to witness. I created this group chat after losing all the members of my first learning community. Out of a desperate need to find myself a learning community, I founded a support group that I hope will continue long after I complete the program.
What could be better?
The semester had an unusual survival feel to it. I found myself craving the discussions and interactions my classmates and I have had over the last several semesters. I am trying to determine if the course material had everyone deep in the research process or if it was the time of the year keeping everyone busy with work and family commitments.
I kept giving support and encouragement by checking in with community members. The term seemed detached, collectively.
We still came together when a member needed help, but there were fewer in-depth conversations about our projects. Again, likely because of the nature of academic research and writing. I would have liked to experience more discussion on each course component. We had a few Zoom sessions and worked through assignments, but I missed learning with my classmates at the level we had in the past.
Feed Forward and AR
Share your action research plan with your colleagues/classmates and seek their input on how well you have addressed the overarching questions:
- What is the problem or question you are really trying to address?
- What method and research design will you use?
- How will you deal with your research participants (privacy, ethics, etc.)?
- What general procedures will you follow?
- What are your measures?
- What instruments will you use to gather your data?
- How will manage and handle your results and data?
- How do you plan to analyze your results?
- How do you plan to discuss and share your results?
Believe it
You have to believe it.
Leaning into the learners’ mindset, I have to ask myself daily to believe and trust it.
I have been entirely transparent about my writing struggles. I voiced in class that I need more confidence in my understanding of the subject matter to give my analysis and knowledge of other authors’ statements and research. This lack of confidence sends me back to the research reading and collecting more information, sources, and additional research. I can cite sources all day, but when I have to draw connections between material and express my understanding, I trigger memories of my K-12 educational experience and lose confidence. Research can become my distraction technique (an observation grad school has illuminated) to avoid the vulnerability that is academic writing.
Since I have reviewed hundreds of pieces of literature on my innovation topic formally over the last year and four months but professionally for the previous nine years and ten months, this topic is truly a passion project of the heart. Born out of desperation to help students, the advocate in me also desperately wants this tool for advisors. We are in tear-filled meetings over a crisis of self-issues. Advisors watch the battle young adults face with themselves over your disappointment if they decide whether or not they are pursuing their goals and dreams or yours.
I desperately want advising to be about the transformative development I read about in the literature. I felt disappointed after my first literature review as I recognized I was not meeting the goals and standards set by my profession. I now see that I am efficient at prescriptive advising. From a medical professional background, procedural information transfer, triaging issues, and answering questions came naturally. I know how to connect students to policy and procedures. I efficiently direct them to their departmental information on degree plans and course information. I am helpful and efficient at answering questions with source links (because advisors are only as good as the accuracy of the published information). I have always had an efficiency perspective. Therefore, I formalized my advising process, communications, and documentation for record keeping.
An advising course provides advisors and students a voice to illuminate problems faced by learners as expressed through cohort/meta-major discussions and assessments. Advisors could improve resources with an advising course, grade book, discussion boards, collaborative group sessions, and modules on common issues. Flipped advising would allow that effort to improve even further through media and collaboration with an advising team. I suspect turnover is both from burnout and demoralization. Advising is a passion profession. Many interview questions touch on helping people achieve their goals. Yet it can become a repetitive process of covering the same policies, procedures, and systems instead of all the things it could be if these items didn’t consume advising interactions. The ability to extend the advising sessions and depth beyond a 30-minute advising appointment twice a semester (optimistically). How can we help transform learners’ lives in 1 hour a term? Flipped advising would help us meet those needs while also relieving us of so many of the repetitive interactions we have day after day. Those fulfilling aspects of developmental advising forge a bond between advisor and advisee. Those connections are the ones that make commencement so special and a commitment to this profession so worth it.
Advisors consistently wonder if their efforts improved outcomes, but the cyclical and reactive nature of the industry can have us moving on to the next initiative with no feedback on the last one. Smiling faces that thank you for supporting them while wearing caps and gowns sure go a long way in motivating outcomes and innovations.
So now, I need to support all those beliefs with evidence from the existing literature.
By golly, I think I understand the point of a literature review finally.
Educause Amazing!
They get me! They really get me.
Reference
Mojeiko, L., Haskell, A., & Dunn, S. (2021, January 19). Learner-Centered advising for student success: Leveraging backward design, collaboration, and the LMS. EDUCAUSE. https://er.educause.edu/blogs/2021/1/learner-centered-advising-for-student-success-leveraging-backward-design-collaboration-and-the-lms
Research Fatigue
I am stuck in this place where I keep seeking more and more research. I keep questioning my search terms and the relevance of the results. I thought I was sure about my research topic, but the more I read, the more lost I felt. Every article appeals to me because I do this as my career and for personal interest in graduate school. The topic of advising is a personal passion—making the connection between research and my belief that flipping advising can improve the prescriptive aspects (terminology picked up in the research process). As a result of flipped advising, additional time becomes available to dig into developmental aspects (more understanding learned through research) of the advising relationship.
I can tell that the advising relationship is important to me. My innovation is about creating a stronger advising relationship. My frustration with the prescriptive aspects of my role drives desperation to find an effective alternative solution. I am searching to find ways that creating space by limiting information transfer components will improve advising interaction through student empowerment. Relationships and empowerment are the answers to why I am doing this research. I am proposing this innovation, and why my initial step of action research has to focus on the first prescriptive step of course registration as the example of student agency. The administration is always going to focus on enrollment. Advisors want to help students get enrolled to begin fostering an advising relationship that can guide them through their educational pursuits and also help them explore their goals and aspirations.
I struggle to find specific sources for advising’s impact on student agency. Still, several sources reference student ownership and self-efficacy, making the connection clear enough to support the literature review and my research.
When I was initially researching what a literature review is, the Smart Student suggested that writer’s block indicates the need to do additional research, so then I go and read more literature. The cycle begins again!
I’m blogging through this process because I am determined not to let it break me (this time). I am determined to see through the purpose and meaning of this research process. I feel like I’m right on the cusp of understanding the point of this torturous exercise… errr I mean, I am embracing this authentic learning opportunity.
Advancing Academic Advising: A Collaborative Approach to Transform Advising & the Student Experience
Echo Pittman, PhD, is the Associate Director (Academic Advising & Outreach) in the Office of the Registrar at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Sarah Arnott, MMSC, PMP is the Manager, Strategic, Planning & Liaison in the Office of the Chief Information Officer at Memorial University of Newfoundland.
Introduction
Concerns about the student educational experience, student progress, and degree completion often motivate post-secondary institutions to actively seek innovative ways to enhance engagement and improve student success. It is known that student success is affected by a wide range of factors. However, quality academic advising plays a positive role in enhancing students’ sense of belonging and persistence (Drake, 2011; Kuhn, 2006) as Drake (2011) describes the power of advising by stating, “it is the very human art of building relationships with students and helping them connect their personal strengths and interests with their academic and life goals” (p. 8).
Recognizing academic advising plays…
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Paraphrasing – Pros in Prose
Calling all paraphrasing pros!
First, I am looking for all of your tips and techniques for effective review of literature (literally, how you take notes while reviewing it).
- Do you take notes as you go, one article at a time?
- Do you make notes across multiple articles based on themes/topics? Do you create a page of notes on multiple articles under those different headings?
- Do you write a summary as you review the piece of literature?
- Do you record quotes that strike you throughout the review process or highlight those of particular relevance or interest?
Second, what is your method for synthesizing the information without stating someone else’s idea as your own?
- Paranoid of plagiarism, my papers turn into direct quotes galore.
- How do you paraphrase an article?
- Do you summarize each section of the literature?
- Do you summarize the overall point of the literature?
- How do you review the article with your research topic in mind yet avoid biased material selections?
No, really. I want your tips and input.
I am desperate to improve in these areas.
Academic Writing & Mindset
I greatly appreciate Dr. Meeuwse holding office hours. This has rejuvenized the collaborative aspect of learning that I enjoy (and miss) so very much. I love that we have a facilitator who genuinely wants to help us be successful in our writing. I have picked up some great tips for approaching this literature review. I already feel more comfortable and familiar with the content of my research. I still really struggle to articulate how I believe my innovation plans are innovative and are the first of many steps toward a better experience for students and advisors.
Last week, Dr. Meeuwse shared a tip on her research approach during her doctoral experience.
She gave a beautiful nugget of knowledge when she suggested we approach paraphrasing by making bullet points of no more than two words (citing the source as we go) while reviewing relevant literature.
Tonight she gave additional details.
Read the article through, read it aloud, making bullet points with in-text citations, then put it away (the source material). Go and write sentences from memory (trying not to return to the source material so you aren’t tempted to reuse the authors’ words or meanings instead of expressing your learning).
This program’s craftsmanship never ceases to amaze me. I have a very specific visual image in my head of Dr. Harapnuik telling us how sneakily he manipulates us into learning.
Embarking on this course, I really had to give myself a pep talk. I dreaded whichever class had another one of those dang lit reviews. I forced myself to reflect as those old patterns of panic tried to creep in. Almost immediately, I recognized that I had to own whether or not I had embraced and accepted a learner’s mindset. Would I let research and academic writing scare me away from the authentic work I have been doing throughout this program to bring flipped advising to life?
Looking at the work I have completed up to this point in the program made me recognize that I am very familiar with my innovation plan. I am approaching my research efforts with much more specificity than my first attempt at a literature review. I definitely have a better understanding of the point of the darn thing. I am still struggling to explain what I hope to do with flipped advising and how students accurately identifying coursework for registration is the first significant step forward for our advisors and students.
Nonetheless, by standing on multiple means of support found in the literature, I will have a clearer picture of exactly how action research will guide the process toward revolutionizing advising.
The Advisor That Cares 