Faculty Advising: Roles, Rewards, and Requisites

Please meet the contributors to this chapter:

• Jordan Cofer is assistant vice president of academic affairs at Abraham Agricultural College and runs the college's Center for Teaching and Learning and all faculty development initiatives. He also oversees the library and runs faculty research initiatives, called “faculty enrichment funds.” Recently, he also managed the institution's “very first ever undergraduate research conference.” He is a professor of English and previously served as the department head for the Department of English Communications.
• Steven Dandaneau is associate provost at Colorado State University and executive director of the Reinvention Collaborative, a national consortium of research universities dedicated to advancing undergraduate education. Previously, he served as vice provost of undergraduate studies at Kansas State University, and it is in that capacity that he contributed to this discussion.
• Twaina Harris is director of academic advising at Claflin University, a small, private historically Black university (HBCU) in Orangeburg, South Carolina. She serves in two primary positions: one as director of Claflin's Career Pathway Initiative, which focuses on increasing the number of graduates who enter the work force or graduate or professional school, and as director of academic advising. Both of these are new positions at Claflin University.
• Kelly Wood is a professor of communications at Missouri State University; her role as a faculty member is also to advise “anywhere between 85 and 100 students, all pre-major advisees.” She also serves as the director of the first-year program involving all first-time new students at Missouri State.

• Wendy Troxel (WT): Thank you for joining in this discussion of faculty advising! Let me start by asking about perceived roles and responsibilities from this lens. In NACADA we use the term primary-role advisor to talk about those whose full-time job is advisor. Faculty don't have that prescriptive title but may have advising responsibilities. There's quite a lot in the literature about the perceptions of faculty of what they think their role is, so from your lens when you advise students, how would you describe your role?

• Kelly Wood: Some will see advising as teaching and approach it that way. They may have a syllabus or outcomes that they [use] to meet with those students or maybe include some assessments … [the question is], “how am I serving my students and what are the outcomes for them?” I think that is one approach—to see it as teaching and help students understand what they're gaining as advisees or what their goals are as a student and how they're going to reach their goals through classes, out-of-class experiences, through work, internships, and all of those great additional practices we have them do out of class.

  But over the years I have shifted, and probably the role I have taken on the most is mentoring and supporting students as a faculty member. I think that is the role I can take on the easiest, quickest, and just fall into most easily. I really want to see students develop and grow in themselves independently and autonomously.

  I've definitely changed my approach in advising over the years from the prescriptive kind of advisor telling students “here are the classes you need to take” to saying “we're going to talk about classes, but the rest of the time I want to talk about where you are, where is your head, what do you want to accomplish, and what do you need to succeed while you're here?” and really push students on those questions.

• Jordan Cofer: Yes. I completely agree with thinking of these roles differently. I really connect with the idea of advising as mentoring … when I was a faculty member advising undeclared [students] that was a difficult task, and I actually read a lot of the literature on advising undeclared [students]. That was a problem I never solved; it was really hard. I tried to direct them in different paths. That's a tough call. I think there's some inequity among faculty advising load, and that can definitely be an issue for faculty advising as well.
• WT: I have a couple questions that were triggered by your responses: Do you advise differently than you teach? Or would you say that your role in the classroom, your pedagogical stance in the classroom, is like your role as an advisor and mentor? In other words, when a student is sitting in your lecture or even a seminar, and then when you meet with a student in the advising scenario, is it an extension of your teaching?”
• Kelly: I think Jordan and I have similar backgrounds since he's taught in education and I advise in teaching communication, which is very similar, so, I don't know; are you teaching large lectures? I'm not.
• Jordan: I'm not. I have done a survey-level course that can be bigger, but I definitely do teach differently than I advise…. What I like about advising is you can be pretty blunt with them. You can say things to students that you probably wouldn't say in the classroom. If I have a student that maybe isn't showing up, missing appointments, and maybe I have him in my class, I can be pretty honest … and really try to help that student. I definitely advise differently than I teach.
• WT: Would you say you're pretty similar as a teacher and advisor, Kelly?
• Kelly: Yes. I think I advise much like I teach, and my teaching has shifted lately. I'm teaching the freshman seminar course and the introduction to communication major course, and I do a lot of advising there. Earlier I taught public speaking and interpersonal communication; those courses include a lot of mentoring and advising and helping students develop their own communication skills. If I think about a student who has come to me with real issues or troubles—maybe they've gone through an academic integrity issue or come off of probation or suspension—I probably do approach them a little bit differently than the students in the classroom, but for the most part, how I am in classroom is how I think I approach my students in advising. That's an interesting question—I had never really put those two together.
• WT: Steve, let's look at the structures and perceptions of the role of faculty advising from your most recent lens at a large state university.

• Steven Dandaneau: K-State employs a wide variety of advising models university wide and sometimes even within a specific college or division. In many cases, however, faculty play a leading, if not decisive, role. The Colleges of Agriculture (Ag) and Engineering, and many departments in the College of Arts and Sciences, rely extensively, and in some cases exclusively, on faculty advisors. In the case of Ag, faculty appointments include advising as an explicit role that is assigned a percentage of time. These percentages vary considerably, which provides for a de facto division of labor among faculty. Agriculture, in particular, values faculty–student connections, and academic advising plays an acknowledged, valued role in that process.

  More and more at K-State, academic leaders recognize that academic advising is a key to student success and to providing for a high-quality undergraduate experience overall. That extends from the provost's office to department leaders. With the advent of explicit attention to strategic enrollment management and responsibility-centered budgeting, this understanding will only deepen and grow.

  That said, faculty advisors are like faculty instructors: They do whatever they want, however they want. There is little buy-in to the university-wide advising syllabus; most faculty probably do not know it exists. I would venture that most faculty advisors—many hundreds—are untrained and ill-prepared to play their role, a role which, all things being equal, probably vacillates in their minds between getting students registered for classes and imparting a few tidbits of career and/or advanced education advice. I do not mean to sound cynical or to imply that faculty are cynical. I think lack of time, training, and support lead inexorably in this direction. Even the most caring and dedicated would have trouble meeting NACADA standards for effective academic advising.

• WT: Twaina, when you work with faculty do you talk about these kind of things?”

• Twaina Harris: We do, and since I've been director of academic advising here at Claflin, I conduct about four or five workshops annually just with faculty, because we have such a great need for professional development in terms of advising. But I can tell you just in general because we do have some faculty advisors that do such an exceptional job that I really would like to pull them away from the classroom and just have them do advising full time. And then we have the majority that blur the lines between advising as teaching and mentoring.

  We're a small HBCU of about 2000 students; the faculty work load (and they're discussing this now) is above the norm among higher ed [institutions], and so when we talk about advising in the advising workshops, they talk about the students they teach in their courses, even though they have specific students who are assigned to them to be their advisor. They tend to focus on the work that they're doing with the students they see on a more regular basis in the classroom. And then the same faculty members also have research interns that they're serving in a mentor capacity. So when you ask them about advising, they talk about the mentoring that they're doing with their research interns. The group that they're assigned to for advising … they don't spend as much time and don't do as much involved work with them because it's strictly prescriptive in the majority of cases here at Claflin. So advising to them means teaching and mentoring, and I think we have to do a better job in terms of what we do here at Claflin (I can't speak for all HBCUs) in helping faculty understand their role as a faculty advisor and their role as a teacher. Those lines do get blurred.

• WT: So it's kind of like group advising to them?
• Twaina: Yes, and not necessarily the students they're assigned to specifically advise. I've noticed that in the workshops.

• WT: Let's get to the “teaching, research, or service” piece. We got into a bit of this related to mentoring and the difference with labels as opposed to the difference in the nature of that relationship. So let's just get specific; at each of your institutions where does advising count (if it counts)? That may be different by disciplines based on your institutions, as well.
• Jordan: I work a lot with our promotion and tenure process, and actually we've had this conversation. Right now advising for us is all in our teaching category; out of the three, it makes more sense. We've actually talked behind closed doors about creating a separate section for engagement, but that's hard to capture. Over the last five years we've done some online surveys to gather feedback from students, but they rarely fill them out. So then we moved to doing physical surveys, trying to capture them on the spot, but then that becomes an issue because it's not as standardized as the actual course evaluations. So capturing and assessing and evaluating advising is really difficult. We do have, as one of our most prestigious end of the year awards, a sponsored advising award, and that's pretty competitive. We ask that the nominees put together a whole portfolio; it'll include letters from students and any kind of [artifacts]—I think it's up to twenty pages—and there are all different types of ways to document their influence on students.
• WT: At your institution, Jordan, do you also have primary-role advisors or are they all faculty?
• Jordan: We do have centralized advising center and academic support center but there are only four primary-role advisors there. So they cover a lot. They now cover our undeclared section, our university studies, and they also pre-register all of our students before the start of the semester. And then they answer any kind of advising-related questions and that sort of thing. We're STEM heavy [as an institution], so some of the disciplines and some of the advisors will end up with a lot more advisees than some of the other disciplines. That ends up being a conversation we have with others because of this issue.
• WT: How about Missouri State, Kelly?
• Kelly: We have a mixed model at Missouri State, and so the idea of “where does advising count?” just varies across all of our colleges. You know, the idealist in me says advising could count in all three areas as long as you negotiated that with your department head and dean and are supported for that. I negotiated to have a course-load reduction in my teaching so I could advise 100 students coming into the major, and nobody else wanted to do that but me. I negotiated that, but I was also a tenured full professor at the time; I don't know that we would negotiate that for an assistant professor as she's going up for tenure and promotion. However, there are faculty that have done quite a bit of conference work and publication work and research in advising and that is allowed to count toward their scholarly research, again as negotiated within a department. I don't think any faculty could use that as their sole scholarship, but in combination with their disciplinary scholarship it could count.
• Steve: In [the College of] Agriculture at Kansas State, advising counts. I'm not aware of another unit in which it does. K-State also offers coaching, mentoring, and counseling programs, and the lines which divide these from advising, while not always as clear as they could be, are mostly clear for most people, most of the time. One happy development is increasing attention to the scholarship of advising, but that we can attribute more to NACADA's generosity (and proximity) than to any other set of factors. Still, it is happening!

• Kelly: I would add, too, that like Jordan, we have an advising award that we give out every year. That's prestigious in the university and a really great opportunity for people to work toward and to have as a really important piece of their application [for tenure or promotion]. Again, I think it's developmental; as you get a little further and are tenured or associate or full [professor] you can change your role depending on what you can negotiate.

  We also have faculty advising centers, so I've been speaking, for example, out of the College of Arts and Letters. Our College of Business faculty members do zero student advising; they have a full College of Business advising center that advises those students from first year to graduation. Now they will tell you that they mentor-advise those students once they're admitted to the College of Business and they do resume work and networking and career preparation, but they do no academic advising. So if [you were talking to] the College of Business marketing professors, you wouldn't be getting any of the same responses from them—[it would be] very, very different. So mostly [the Colleges of] Arts and Letters, Health and Human Services, Humanities and Public Affairs, and Natural and Applied Sciences; those are the four primary colleges that have faculty advising, and the College of Agriculture, like Kansas State, actually. It does vary by program and by college but I tell you, that faculty advising award is a pretty high bar at the university, and is really important for people to have and to strive for.

• WT: That's fantastic. Your conversation about negotiating the ratios is important. That requires a lot of collegial discussions within the department.
• Kelly: When I was department head, there were just some folks that weren't comfortable with advising and worried about putting obstacles up for students trying to graduate on time or not reading up on the policies. There are concerns and yet they're awesome in the classroom and so, they may need to find different ways to engage in advising. They may not have as many advisees as someone else who likes advising, is good at it, and can handle that work. It's not for everybody, as we know.
• Jordan: I wanted to reflect on what Kelly said; we've kind of been on the same boat about faculty who do research on advising. I've presented at NACADA, and we've had faculty who did presentations and we would still count that on the research section.
• WT: It's a pedagogical type of research, isn't it?
• Jordan: I like that parallel. The teaching and learning aspect and pedagogical aspect; there's definitely that parallel. And we've talked about a lot about where each should count in our handbook, and I think if you're doing research on [advising] as you would any other discipline, I think it belongs in the research section.

• WT: Where advising hits all three traditional categories [teaching, research, and services] is interesting. So we touched on this a little bit with the evaluation process. What is the evidence that gets presented in the annual portfolio? Is it context? Is it about the nature of the conversation? Is it some of kind of outcome-based, student measure beyond satisfaction? It's hard enough to come up with an instrument of teaching evaluation much less advisor evaluation.
• Kelly: In our annual report, it was number of advisees, and if you've had 40% above the average you could get some extra points there. But like Jordan, we counted [advising] in scholarship if you had a conference presentation or a book chapter or an article or even an internal grant that focused on advising, but we too struggle with it. I'm interested in what Twaina might be doing with assessment. But yes, it's hard to survey students; it's hard to get beyond satisfaction. How do you get them to talk to you about what their needs are for advising?

• Twaina: Well, at Claflin, I know just for the tenure and promotion program evaluation tool, advising is coupled with teaching, and even the language that is used in the faculty handbook where advising is mentioned is all focused on teaching. There is really no language that clearly talks about advising and expectations. What I've been trying to work on with faculty in our workshops is “just like you have student learning outcomes for your courses, what are the goals you want to achieve in your advising sessions, and how can I help you assess those for your tenure and promotion performance application?” That has been a challenge—not an easy task whatsoever—because we're having a hard time thinking beyond the prescriptive model in developing goals.

  One thing we're doing for our students is that when they pre-register for the following semester we [give them] an advising survey that they have to access before they get to their courses—just a brief survey so I can get an idea from their perspective on how their advising experience was—not just their satisfaction—and if it's meeting what they're looking for from their advisors. That instrument has not been tied to the tenure or promotion process yet since we're just starting with it, but I do give the feedback to the advisor so they can see what their students are saying about the experience.

  There is an advising award that's being presented as we're meeting here today, The Meritorious Advising Award is what we're calling it. The person who won the award is an exceptional faculty advisor, and I would like to capture what he does with the students so that it can serve as a model for other faculty members. I'm trying to find a way to demonstrate what the advisors who win this award do, so that we can share with the other faculty advisors as a way to distinguish advising from teaching and mentoring.

• WT: What I've seen with some colleagues is that it's not always about the disposition for it; sometimes it's a little bit of an insecurity about it. The stakes are pretty high and it's a vulnerable relationship and it can be uncomfortable. Sometimes those who are very confident in their disciplinary role are a little less confident in an advising role with students.

• Jordan: Yes, I wanted to mention that when we talked about evidence for the portfolio. One of the things we often do is to use any kind of evidence we can, so like cards, notes, thank you's, emails, as evidence. So that's one thing we've done.

  But back to this idea of feeling insecure about your role as an advisor. What I often see when I run faculty academy training for new faculty, is a kind of unfamiliarity with it. But what you're describing about being steeped in your discipline … that's what makes me want to advise because I know about the discipline and what the trends are in the real world. I've had a lot of students that actually end up changing majors or go to grad school for something different than English, and at first they're afraid to tell me. But I only want for them what makes them happy! But knowing my discipline is what makes me want to advise. So I think there is some unfamiliarity that you mentioned with the high stakes. That did scare me at first, but you know, as a faculty member you can navigate it and figure it out and learn.

• WT: Good. So as we close this out, how do we get better at advising as faculty members? Can we force someone to do it better, to want to do more, to want to engage more deeply? There are plenty of institutions where there is no choice, and we can't negotiate out everything. So what have you seen as effective, professional development as opposed to just training on the curriculum, and the enrollment processes, and technology tools? Twaina, you're making a profession of this, so now in your role as department chair, is there a way to lead those who are resistant to the values of academic advising as a professional?
• Twaina: Well, we recently just started using professional part-time advisors to work with our first-year students because we know that is critical period. I've been talking to faculty from all disciplines here at Claflin trying to figure out what I can do in my role to help them, and from the students’ perspective, those who don't want to do advising can actually cause more harm.

• Kelly: It is a tough one. We struggle in transfer [student] advising. Transfer advising is even at another level of complexity and specialty that you need to have, as well as a fair amount of patience and time. And we get push-back about transfer advising because it takes longer and we promote that in our training that you should really take an hour with that first transfer advising appointment. We've had department heads that said that 15 [minutes] is enough, and that just hurts me to the core.

  You have to have the right people at the right place, so I applaud your effort to say that maybe with the first-year students we need to have this kind of advising experience, and we need to have other types of people here doing transfer advising, and other types of folks doing junior- and senior-level advising. I think a progressive idea like that is one way of valuing the different strengths that people have, but also making sure that [they have] a stake in it, that they're doing at least some part of that work and contributing to it. But finding out what is important—finding out how they want to contribute.

  We found that some people in our department—we're also playing around with group advising—there are some people that will just raise their hand and say “I'll do that,” but they don't like the one-on-one advising. So we're kind of experimenting with that and seeing who's going to step up to the plate to do the group advising [and how they] may be different than those who want to do one-on-one. So yes, I think it's being flexible with different approaches and seeing what your students respond to.

• WT: But there are not always options for structure and assignments, right?
• Steve: With the advent of a new position to coordinate advising across the campus, I am hopeful that K-State is on the cusp of seeing centralized professional development aimed at faculty advisors. We have excellent technological tools, but insufficient training and professional development opportunities. These things are changing, thankfully.
• Kelly: One thing that we have done in our college that I like is our dean a couple years ago started awarding people who have “master advising status.” The college gave faculty two hundred dollars extra per year for travel if they had their master advisor status renewed annually. That takes some money and some willingness on the part of administration [to decide] that, “yes, we are going to award faculty for maintaining that level of professional development.”
• WT: So you have a “career ladder” even for faculty advising? How does one get master advising status?

• Kelly: About 23 years ago we started a master advising training program on campus, and it was a two-day 16-hour training that morphed into fewer hours, but it's over a period of two days. To maintain that master advising status you have to do three hours of professional development in a period of a year. The academic advisement center director, Twaina's kind of position essentially, offers those programs—regular, three or four advisor forums, that we offer. You go and sign in, and it gets reported back that you've completed your three hours, and that's how you get the two hundred dollars added to your travel funds. That's been pretty popular, but in difficult budget times, however, an institution has to make the commitment for it.

  So those are things that we've done, and any respective dean may choose something else. They may say, “I'll give you one hour of summer teaching stipend” or teaching and advising resources. What works for a college is important.

• Jordan: Wendy, I like your question because it was “can you get better at advising?” I think about that with offering a lot of faculty development. Can you get better at teaching? For example, if I'm sold on active-learning strategies and have access to books about teaching, I may realize that even little changes represent a big commitment, which can be incredibly helpful toward student learning. Evidence-based learning is a helpful strategy for teaching, and so I wonder how we can do that with advising. Through professional development we can get better at advising. I definitely think there are attainable strategies to get better, but kind of like Twaina's point, it is hard when there's no real accountability. One thing I was thinking about, we can sell the promotion and tenure aspect to new faculty, since they come in they worry about getting tenure. We can sell advising as part of that if it really is a part of promotion and tenure.

  And then another thing is to reach out to department heads to consider where there are faculty who don't embrace the advising role, or are even against it, and who are actually hurting students due to their lack of understanding about important policies. They may not mean to, but sometimes it's the same advisor making mistakes. We've had pretty big mistakes at graduation time, for example, and there should be some sort of accountability. If someone keeps making those mistakes, they need to learn that they are actually doing the institution a huge disservice through their unwillingness to be accurate and care about the potential consequences.

• Kelly: Well absolutely. That is great transition, Jordan, because one of the last notes I made to myself when you asked Wendy the earlier question, “What don't faculty understand about advising, according to administrators?” What I wrote was that advising plays a key role in student success from the first semester to the last semester. So Jordan's comment about graduation is important, and on the front end for us, the importance of establishing what the role of advising is for first-year students is critical. There is good data to show that the more advising appointments a student has in a given year, the more likely students are to persist.
• WT: Right. You don't even have to know about the nature of the appointment; just sheer contact with someone who cares makes a difference.
• Kelly: It's so important to success and retention, and I wish faculty could see the role they play in that process. Most are convinced by data, so if we show them their department and college retention rates from first to second year compared to others and break it down to groups like first-generation, students of color, Pell eligible students, and say, “Hey, we're really losing students in this area, how can we focus our efforts?” and then get faculty to step up to the plate, and say, “I want to work with students who are struggling” or something like that. To me that's the most important message that we can communicate to faculty: how important it is. We're trying to use a new phrase, advising for student success instead of advising for class scheduling.
• Jordan: And kind of bouncing back to Wendy's point, I think a lot of faculty get into whatever they're into, whatever their discipline is, because they love the discipline. They're teaching because they care; I'd say the vast majority really do care. So I don't know if it's always communicated just how important advising is, and so it's helpful to show them the data, in whatever form makes sense for that department. We know from the literature that students who know somebody or feel like they have one close relationship are more likely to stay in college. So I think just to help them understand their role outside the classroom is just as important as their role inside the classroom.
• Steve: The hope is that, despite pressures associated with student success assessment, we can retain an understanding that academic guidance is first and foremost about human relationships. We cannot reduce these complex relationships to quantitative outcome measures, period. We have to respect advising for the complex professional undertaking that it is and support those who have what it takes to achieve success in this profession.
• WT: You've all raised some critically important topics and points. Thank you for your time and for your commitment to students and colleagues!

As both faculty advisors and primary-role advisors more deeply address the pedagogical aspects of their work, grounded in theory borrowed from many disciplines, the opportunities for collaborative inquiry also grow. White (2015) suggests:

For academic advising to flourish, it is imperative to continually examine the nature of the endeavor… . A scholarly imperative needs a healthy inquisitiveness to thoughtfully examine the current practices of academic advising and to develop new knowledge of how it can be practiced. (p. 274)