The author shares insights gained during her own classroom experience.
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With all the talk about helicopter parents and overparenting, it can be easy to forget that many parents have an incredible investment of time, love, money, and energy in their child’s education. The authors gathered data from advisors on their perceptions of their interactions with parents and asked for examples of effective strategies for working with parents.
Most students intuitively know graduate programs differ from undergraduate programs; however, most cannot articulate how different they actually are or what those distinctions may be. The authors contend that providing an orientation program is a vital component to the transition process.
Students who do not meet minimum grade point average (GPA) requirements are generally placed on an academic warning or probationary status that is often universally applied to all students and administrated by faculty or advisors. However, each students’ reasons for missing this academic mark are unique. Regular connection with an advisor can be very impactful and meaningful to students because they are able to articulate their obstacles to someone in an open dialogue.
The author shares his own experience with academically grieving students and a process to identify such students.
Students may be like Odysseus: full of dreams, interests, fears, and confusions, ready to begin their academic, personal, social, and developmental wanderings. Graduation, much like Ithaca, is the desired destination. Advisors, like the Goddess Athena, need wisdom, knowledge, resources, and authenticity to help student find the right paths during their wanderings.
With the expansion of China’s higher education since 1998, more and more academic advisors are needed to work with Chinese undergraduates. Understanding their sophisticated social culture values is the first and necessary step for advisors in and out of China.
Advising administrators and training developers frequently ask how advisors can build relational core competencies such as communicating inclusively and conducting successful advising interactions. The author presents theory-informed practical recommendations for advisors to help address the “how” of some of the relational core competencies.
Most major academic advising theories stress the importance of the advising relationship. In advising, the quality of the relationship between advisor and student is at the heart of most interventions. The author notes that the shared focus of various advising theories on factors that foster the advisor-student relationship is very similar to the common factors theory in psychology.
In the world of improvisational (improv) comedy, advancing is the process of moving a scene forward. In the world of academic advising where student success is a central narrative, it is imperative that advisors help students advance their own scene.