An advising portfolio provides a rich and diverse way to document advising expertise. Portfolio use is increasingly prevalent in higher education. Student portfolios are used to demonstrate that students have met the desired outcomes of a given major or program. Faculty use teaching portfolios to illustrate their mastery when they apply for promotion or tenure. Universities create portfolios for a number of purposes and audiences—such as accreditation or student recruitment. Portfolios provide flexibility; advisors can use both quantitative and qualitative measures and can customize their portfolio to fit their particular advising situation. So using a portfolio to document advising performance puts advisors in the mainstream of assessment activities which are becoming more demanding as well as more sophisticated in their call for accountability.
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Advising higher education students is important work and is fast becoming stressful work. Students have higher service expectations while administration applies cost containment pressure: ’do more with less, faster, with higher quality’. Information technology conversions, new releases, and upgrades constantly challenge us to use IT to better to serve students. The positive power of humor can help us avoid stress, stay balanced and ready to have fun designing and building bridges to success for our students.
The NACADA Academic Advising Summer Institute brought together over 100 advising professionals with experts in the field to work on impacting student success at campuses across the nation.... This was not your average conference. This was not a drive-in workshop. This was an institute, an academic experience, and a refreshing start to the consideration of academic advising holistically....We all engaged in learning about advising structures and systems, research and development, and of course, politics and personalities as they pertain to setting an agenda for advising on our campuses....Summer Institute was a shared experience with other colleagues who care about the students we support; it was a professional development experience unlike any other.
Advice or advise? The semantics matter. Our students deserve the experience of advising, so let’s answer that call...
In the June 2016 edition of Academic Advising Today, NACADA Executive Director, Charlie Nutt, and NACADA President, David Spight, challenged members of NACADA to consider their role in and their contributions to the profession of advising... The work that lies ahead for NACADA members comes with the challenge of an evolving profession, and NACADA members will need to work collaboratively and steadily to capitalize on the momentum that has been created.
A personal advising philosophy should be sufficiently structured to give a framework to the advising process, but fluid enough to allow encounters with new scenarios, new students, and new academic and curricular developments. It should be nimble enough to respond to the ever-changing world of higher education in an ever-changing world.
