In April 2003, a roundtable discussion on “Advising as Teaching” at the NACADA Region Two Conference brought together a roomful of experts in the twin fields of advising and teaching for a lively discussion. Those present agreed that it was valuable for those of us who teach and advise to explore our similarities for our own professional enrichment and for the welfare of our students. Our thanks go to the dedicated roundtable participants whose comments form the substance of this essay.
More than thirty years ago, Crookston (1972) advanced the idea that advising is a form of teaching. Roundtable participants agreed that advising and teaching are similar because both advisers and teachers instruct in the areas of skills and content. Advising teaches skills like decision-making and critical thinking, as well as content like curriculum and academic regulations. One adviser at the roundtable remarked that teaching students to navigate a college is like teaching them to write a research paper. Both tasks require the same analytical, organizational, and research skills and abilities. Advising and teaching are both interactive activities that result in student learning. Just as teachers and students can see themselves as jointly involved in a process of inquiry based in an academic discipline, so advisers and advisees are jointly involved in a process of inquiry resulting in students' intellectual growth and development.
Advising and teaching both move fledgling students to independent flight. Ideally, advisers and instructors work as a team so one person's expertise fills another's lack. But reality may fall short. How are we to achieve teamwork? Because academia tends to balkanize into separate spheres and locations, we may fail to realize that what counts as knowledge in one area barely registers as input on the radar of another. All that we regard as worth knowing in our many fields can be relevant to advising, but connecting our field-specific knowledge can be difficult. Like our students, we often fail to link our diverse domains. Grites (1994) asked faculty members at a variety of institutions to “write down [their] synonym(s) for academic advising” (p. 82). He was surprised and disheartened that he never received the term teaching as a response. If we connect our separate areas, we achieve synergy that is both more effective for our students and more satisfying for our professional development.
To be effective, advising and teaching must be developmental in several ways. Advisers and instructors must continue to develop professionally to improve their skills and knowledge bases, keeping abreast of developments in their fields. Advisers and instructors must constantly update what they know for their success and that of their students. Hence, advisers and instructors must prepare using state-of-the-art praxis—theoretically informed practices. Roundtable participants agreed that, in addition to learning from advising praxis, we learn from discipline-based praxis as well. Perhaps it's easy to see how professors of communication studies or psychology can bring their expertise to bear on advising, but it's just as important to find out what advisers can learn from faculty in fields like art or engineering. Ideally, we would all know everything. In reality, we must know our limits and connect to the right colleagues with questions we can't answer.
We must recognize our students' knowledge and abilities developed throughout their tenure at the institution. We must make initial assessments when meeting students so we can connect to the ongoing issues of their everyday lives. But while we begin by addressing students at their level, instructors and advisers aim to empower students toward new levels of autonomy and success. Hence, we must plan for changes in the content of our advising meetings as a student progresses from the first year to his or her senior year. Our earliest advising discussions with new first-year students provide orientation to the specific institution and the climate of higher education in general, while subsequent interactions offer input about the students' continuing progress toward academic and career goals and require increasing levels of participation and independence from advisees. One adviser at the roundtable suggested that we consider giving assignments to advisees just as we do with students. Rather than just telling an advisee what careers are available for a graduate in a certain major, we could require that the advisee go to the Career Center and research this topic, reporting back on a certain date.
Just as instructional programs improve as a result of effective assessment, so assessment creates opportunities for continuous improvement of the advising process. Questions about assessment and outcomes presuppose that the advising process has mission statements with clear, assessable goals. One roundtable participant said, “Without a mission, you're sunk!” Since diagnosis is a necessary part of assessment, we need a clear source of data about the skills and knowledge of higher education each student brings to the college campus. Sources for this data can be found through standardized national data available from the College Student Inventory (RMS/CSI) published by Noel-Levitz and the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) Freshman Survey (Noel-Levitz, n.d.; Higher Education Research Institute, n.d.). Advisers can create informal methods for diagnosis and data-gathering, such as saying at the initial adviser-student meeting, “Tell me about a book you read recently that you really enjoyed,” to assess the student's interests and preparedness for college studies.
The use of student satisfaction data for the assessment of advising may be easy to implement but will not get at the heart of the quality of the advising process. An adviser who gives students all the information they need may have a high satisfaction rating, but the one who helps students find the information and then requires that they prioritize this information and make informed choices may be a more helpful adviser in the long run. As with assessment of an institution's educational program, outcomes-based assessment of the advising program will yield rich and useful data. National data can be used as one measure of outcome. For instance, “Your First College Year,” a survey developed by the Higher Education Research Institute as a follow-up to the CIRP, can help the institution to assess how advising has influenced first-year students' development. The National Survey of Student Engagement can help the institution to discover if the advising process has helped students to become engaged in their learning (Kuh, 2003). However, in-house outcomes data are also crucial to outcomes assessment. Since student progress and retention correlates with institutional effectiveness, these measures can be used to show the power of effective advising.
Although advisers can use good pedagogical practices to improve advising, instructors can also use good advising practices to improve their teaching. Just as we need to consider how we teach in our roles as advisers, we also need to consider how we advise in the classroom as teachers. How do we bring into the classroom the idea that students are actively shaping their educations through the decisions they make? By sharing praxis, advisers and instructors enrich each other's professional development. And this synergy enriches the development of our students as well.