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.
In the amidst all of that is happening in our world, we still have great things occurring across our lives, our institutions, and NACADA.
In just a few short months all of us have experienced changes in our personal and professional lives like we most likely have never experienced before. It is so important that especially in this time of uncertainty, we stay connected with our colleagues and we take advantage of all the professional development opportunities possible.
The human mind is full of complex emotions and often these emotions drive us to places that we may not have prepared for. As academic advisors, we see students display a range of emotions every day. When deciding the best role for an advisor working with students experiencing negative affective emotions, it may be best to consider an advisor’s training and the context of the situation.
The term holistic advising has existed in the field of academic advising for years, but as an aspect of an office’s approach, not necessarily as a central design element in supporting students. When the word holistic is applied to advising, it suggests that advisors cannot look at students through a purely academic lens, but rather must regard them as a whole person.
Integrating academic and career advising is becoming more common. Many colleges offer career courses to help students through self-assessment, career exploration, and decision making as well as to provide students with the tools needed for the job search. Virginia Commonwealth University has implemented strategies to improve academic advising as a way to increase student progress and graduation rates.
Advising professionals usually view empathy positively, as something advisors should employ to understand and, thus, to better help their students. In as much as empathy aids advisors in better understanding students, empathy’s appeal is hard to ignore. But advisors should also want to use empathy cautiously, recognizing that it has real limits.
The Education and Professional Studies (CEPS) at the University of West Florida adopted a centralized advising model, restructuring how academic advising services were provided to students. This article extends the story by highlighting key considerations resulting from the inception of the advising center.
Organized anarchy is presented by the authors as the best organizational structure for meeting the needs of advisors by providing the space to practice both transformational and developmental advising in a way that most effectively meets the wide-ranging needs of students.
The restructure of an academic advising program included three areas of focus: a review of like-online institutions, process mapping by a business analyst, and subject-matter expertise from current leadership and academic advisors.
Given the critically important role of good advising, how can universities create an advising platform where advisors can readily share their best practices and access resources? One potential solution involves an Advisor Hub.
The author suggests the time has come to shift academic advising practices from a Millennial framework to a Generation Z (Gen Z) approach.
Academic advisors are witnessing a growing population of students that identify as first generation. These students need validation that they belong in a university setting and that their degree is attainable.
Complete editions of AAT are provided to facilitate one-touch capability, but readers are encouraged to view the individual articles and provide feedback to authors.
If each of us are to succeed in our work, we must continue to recognize or create opportunities in the chaos. If we look at history, and any moment within that brought great challenges, we can always find those who rise above or even excel under the pressure.
As The Global Community for Academic Advising, NACADA has supported academic advisors for 40 years by creating professional connections which often turn into personal friendships.
As the Fall 2020 semester begins, a call to serve incoming Black male students is warranted. Advisors and administrators can work together to improve the overall experience for Black male students beginning postsecondary education. The purpose of this essay is to present a charge for advising Black male students.
If every picture tells a story, then this article introducing five videos on the flipped advising approach is sharing many tales. For the time to re-examine adopting a flipped advising approach has become critical as we react and embrace new ways to advise our students during the COVID 19 pandemic.
Academic advisors work with students on a range of issues where students often identify anxiety as the cause of poor academic performance. Advisors can employ pragmatic approaches to address student anxiety and assist students in managing anxiety while adjusting to college life and academic pressure.
While advisors are not licensed counselors, they can support students who experience mental wellness struggles before referring them to additional resources such as counseling centers.
Similar to the way universities define a process for declaring a major, some advisors create a form for naming a parallel path. Not every form or process, however, is created equal. The author discussed practices and content suggested by vocational and educational psychologists that advisors can apply.
The challenge behind any best practice is determining what is most effective for a specific context and student population, and this is especially true for graduate student populations. As graduate students become more diverse with added complex life situations, advisors must further develop their existing retention strategies to reflect students’ needs.
An ecological perspective can help us to understand the differences between how students are impacted or influenced by their environments compared to their peers. This is crucial to keep in mind, as different students will react to and be influenced by their environments in different ways.
The authors propose that in order to produce greatness in our students, educators need to produce collaboration and greatness within our institutions and in our projects. They describe a grant-supported project to define a comprehensive strategy and implement a systematic process to help students confirm their career and educational plan, while supporting their efficient progression to degree credit courses, credential completion, and/or 4-year college transfer.
As colleges and universities prepared to welcome back students in person or otherwise for the Fall 2020 semester, advisors at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign took a moment to reflect on what had led us to this point and the quick decisions they made when changing course for Spring 2020.
The Spring 2020 semester will be remembered as one of the most challenging in the history of higher education. During challenging times where resilience is critical to student success, advisors must be prepared to empower and support students to persist.
The Emerging Leaders Program Advisory Board is pleased to announce the 2020-2022 NACADA Emerging Leaders and Mentors and congratulate the completing 2018-2020 Class.
President Cecilia Olivares ponders whether 2020 is the year that defines the start of the fourth era of academic advising and what that means for the association.
2020 is a year none of us across the globe will forget. Our personal lives have been changed in so many ways, and our professional lives in higher education have changed so much as well. Therefore, it is important that NACADA: The Global Community for Academic Advising continues to look toward the future and provides the highest quality professional development and outstanding opportunities to connect with each other.
Academic Advisors are seeing an increase in Generation Z students coming to campus with mental wellness struggles. In the midst of an unprecedented pandemic, students now face a bleak job market, financial insecurity, rampant unemployment, and uncertain health concerns. To promote student success, advising must adapt to best meet student needs.
Many higher education institutions offer graduate programs, but how diligently do these institutions pursue inclusive practices for their graduate students? At many institutions, graduate students represent a sizable student body with unique challenges and specific needs, but true efforts for inclusivity and connectedness would require increased, intentional consideration and planning.
By highlighting the roadmap between institutions, transfer guides can increase two-year degree completion and positively impact the transition, retention, and persistence of transfer students.
The continued influx of international students at American higher education institutions demands a better understanding of the motivation, background, needs, expectations, and challenges of these students which can only be achieved through adequate training for academic advisors.
On campus, student retention is everyone’s responsibility, and over the last decade, early alert initiatives have become incredibly buzzworthy. The authors offer reasons why academic advisors are best suited to respond to early alert notifications with at-risk students.
As technological advancements continue to disrupt the education sector, institutions are in a race to employ varying technological measures to adapt accordingly.
The benefits of a supportive and cordial relationship between advisors and students come into sharper focus when working with distant learners. Although the temporary and necessary shift to online-learning prompted by a global pandemic for otherwise campus-based students cannot be compared to full-time distant learners, many factors may overlap given that this learning environment may be new to many students.
The author offers ten tips for assisting students who seek a Fulbright award.
Assessment provides an opportunity to take a critical look at advising programs through the lens of continuous improvement and driven by data.
