While it can be difficult to move past the things that need to be done now, the NACADA Executive Office and Board of Directors work assiduously to adapt and innovate—not only to better serve our current members, but also our future members.
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2020 is an exciting year for NACADA as we celebrate our association’s 40th anniversary. NACADA has a rich history of enhancing student success and providing opportunities for networking and learning to a broad constituency of higher education professionals from all types of institutions across the globe. We continue to make a major impact not only on our members’ work, but also on institutions as they work to structure successful academic advising programs.
Since the 2017 NACADA Annual Conference, the NACADA Professional Development Committee (PDC) has worked to promote the Core Competencies and gather feedback from various constituencies. Much of the feedback has focused on how the published Core Competencies help members use the components as a roadmap for their own professional development. In this article, PDC members provide ideas and examples of how members are utilizing the Core Competencies for academic advising training and development.
Academic advisors frequently receive and analyze the important statistics of retention and graduation rates, but do not always have the time, space, or familiarity with a pathway for investigating their own practice to understand how they, in their advising practice, contribute to the story of how and why those numbers have come to be. Practitioner inquiry can produce deep knowledge of on-the-ground daily work as advisors that can help better serve students.
As the profession of academic advising makes its rightful case for stronger integration and recognition from the academy, advisors must consider how their practice not merely compliments but aligns with the already revered role of teaching faculty. While a stereotype persists that academic advising is simply assisting students in class scheduling, those well-versed in the profession understand that a myriad of perspectives, theories, and evidence-based approaches inform what is effective, and oftentimes transformational, advising practice.
Enhancing student success, as the purview of academic advisors, is ever-evolving, and recent success has been generated through course management software, an electronic tool that traditionally provides important links between students and their instructors.
This article will help academic advisors understand what ADHD is, how it impacts today’s college students, and what they can do to help those students.
A student’s inability to become socially integrated into the campus community can lead to both institutional and systematic departure. While a sense of belonging is beneficial to all students, it is vital to retain more black male students. Students’ relationships with their academic advisor is one where belonging can develop.
Notes are instrumental for student success and instructors understand that, but do academic advisors?
Science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) major requirements are unique; advising students in these fields requires unique approaches, supports, and resources.
It is common for undergraduate students to encounter barriers to timely graduation, and some of these barriers are inadvertently placed before students by institutional or administrative structures, routines, practices, and procedures. An office like the University of Texas at Arlington Graduation Help Desk, with the help of the advising community, can make an impact.
After 15 years in advising and 26 in higher education, the author has decided to use humor when explaining academic advising.
