by John E. (Ned) Donnelly
Academic advising is (or should be) considered central to the mission of higher education just as teaching always has been. And I think we need to move away from considering advising as a marginal service and toward recognizing its importance in accomplishing the college or university mission—we need to consider advising as important as we consider the roles and outcomes of teaching and learning.
But equating (or even comparing) advising to teaching raises a lot of questions—both for professors who perform the teaching role and for professional staff who perform the academic-advising role. For instance, are all good teachers by default also good advisors? Is advising something all professors are prepared to do (like teaching), or is it only for those who are professionally prepared in the advising specialty? Are all advisors prepared to be teachers? Should advising-as-teaching be required for tenure, promotion, or annual staff review?
If advising is teaching, then how is it done? Can or should we measure outcomes of advising as a classroom professor measures the mastery of course content? What would be advising’s “course content?” Should the approaches we use to advise students differ according to the content we teach? For example, would we design different strategies for advising “Gen Ed” as contrasted with advising “in the major”? What would an advising syllabus look like? Assuming we have the advising outcomes defined, how do we measure them? What rubrics do we have? What standards do we follow?
On the other hand, if advising is not teaching, then what is it? We know that advising is something students value. For example, according to the Student Satisfaction Inventory, students rate the importance of advising and instruction similarly. At the University of Cincinnati, instruction is considered #1 and advising #2 in students’ order of importance. Nationally, however, students rank advising #1. We also know that good advising by faculty and professional staff can lead to higher levels of student engagement and learning. Recent data presented to a national audience (and for which UC won a best-practice award) showed that support strategies, like certain kinds of advising, lead to significantly higher graduation rates for those who enter college with risk factors such as poor academic preparation. At UC, advising has a role that ensures an integrated undergraduate curriculum and co-curriculum as part of the institution’s academic plan.
But teachers and academic advisors have different core roles and responsibilities: The primary ethic of college and university faculty centers on the search for and the dissemination of truth. The primary ethic of full-time staff advisors, however, centers on the student and the institution; in other words, advisors believe that the ultimate responsibility for making decisions about educational plans and life goals rests with the individual student in the context of the mission and goals of the institution in which advising takes place.
What sets teaching apart from advising is that while professors look to their discipline to define their roles, academic advising find its definition in the needs of both the student and the institution.
I believe the purpose of academic advising stands apart from teaching as a unique and critical element to the institutional mission. Good academic advising adds value to a college degree just as good teaching does—but not in the same way. While the aims of teaching and advising—principally, the promotion of learning—are similar, the methods of achieving those aims differ from one another.
With students, a teacher must be content or discipline centered. But the advisor serves as a facilitator while the student attempts to make meaning of what the institution (and all its elements) asks of her, even as the student wrestles with the goals she has set for herself. In other words, an advisor has to be student and institution centered simultaneously. An advisor begins with the student’s identified educational goals and needs; then, serving as the primary interpreter of the institutional mission for the student, the advisor provides links to the institution’s academic and other offerings and helps the student choose and navigate a successful path through that maze. Academic advising can (and perhaps should) develop ways to measure learning outcomes and practice other aspects that have become hallmarks of good teaching; but that will take some time.
John E. (Ned) Donnelly
Office of the University Registrar
University of Cincinnati
