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 “I decided to try to answer the multiple questions by citing my earlier thoughts on the general topic of student responsibility, which were articulated in my 1979 AAHE-ERIC Research Report. In that document I described 'academic advising as a decision-making process during which students realize their maximum educational potential through communication and information exchanges with an advisor ... The advisor serves as a facilitator of communication, a coordinator of learning experiences, and a referral agent' (p.1).'For the student to accept the advisor's advice blindly is to abdicate responsibility. For the advisor to determine every answer for the student is to inhibit growth. The advisor must respect the student's rights of responsibility, self-determination, and even failure; the student must accept them ... If students learn nothing else from their college experience, at least they should leave the institution with a sense of responsibility for their actions and the consequences resulting from those actions. The advising relationship fosters that sense, and emphasis on its shared responsibility cannot be overstated' (p.39). I have attempted to practice this philosophy for 30 years, and it seems to answer most of the questions posed here.” ~ Tom Grites, Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, March 9 “How much advising is just right is a function of the interaction between advisor and student. We have just finished the debate on this campus about whether advising should be a requirement for registration (every semester) or not. My feeling is that there should be a structure for getting the student to see an advisor regularly, but some flexibility there to allow student and advisor to discuss the option of not meeting every semester, or perhaps meeting more than once in a semester. At our community college, we allow the advisor and student to plan more than one semester at at time if they choose. This is especially helpful for the older, part-time students in lock-step programs who don't need as much 'hand-holding.' ”~ John Wick, Naugatuck Valley Community College, March 9 “Years ago, in a leadership program for adults, I used Hersey and Blanchard's book on management. Their model referring to both the familiarity of the task and the worker's (student's?) need for relationship sounds relevant here. Someone starting out needs help. Someone who needs reassurance needs help. Someone starting out in need of reassurance needs lots of help. Eventually we hope that students become both wise in the ways of the institution and emotionally independent so that they don't need us anymore.
However, that pattern could be modified as we open up new challenges to our maturing students. Someone who begins by wanting to know just the requirements may end up having long talks about the way an ethics and technology course relates to a senior design project. The shift, then, is away from information giving and toward mentoring, which can be 'more' in the sense that it takes more time. Discovering coherence in a curriculum, a pretty sophisticated task, could take hours of talk spread over several sessions.On the other hand, if by 'more' we mean getting in people's faces, 'intrusive' or 'proactive' advising, I've yet to be convinced of its usefulness, except maybe with students who enter academia deeply fearing that they shouldn't be there and that nobody cares about them. Anyone raising teenagers knows that they do not respond to nagging. Communications that come too often and without substantial new content get filtered to trash or deposited in the circular file. Further, constant e-mails or notes from the adviser may shift the student's sense of responsibility off to the adviser, in the belief that if any deadlines are coming up the adviser will always let them know ahead of time. I would argue that if post-secondary education is one's union card to the middle class, part of the dues consists of paying attention to one's bureaucratic environment. Just as a citizen has to know the IRS deadline, so a student has to know the late-drop deadline; no one is going to e-mail them a personal invitation to pay their taxes. There's a trick in all this. If we don't pester our students constantly to do what they need to do, then we have to make the right material available to them at the right moment. We have to imagine how they think, organize our information according to their needs, and make it available where and when they will find it. Giving them the power to make choices is meaningless unless the information is all there to make good decisions.” ~ Marion Schwartz, Penn State - University Park, March 20 The Mentor is published by Penn State's Division of Undergraduate Studies Available online at www.psu.edu/dus/mentor/ Privacy and Legal Statements | Copyright | © The Pennsylvania State University | All rights reserved | |
