Category: Advising

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.