If Advising is Teaching, What Do Advisors Teach?

Introduction

In this paper, I develop and espouse a view of the most important way in which advising is (or can be) like teaching. In the process, I also advance a larger concept, which is to support a particular philosophy of advising in which the similarity of advising to teaching is considered pivotal and more important than the similarity of advising to other worthy activities. By necessity, I discuss the general characteristics that make one philosophy of advising preferable to another.

Any philosophy of advising will be based on a specific notion of what constitutes the essential core of the activity of advising, as opposed to what is incidental to it. A philosophy of advising will also include a view of the characteristics of advising excellence. If philosophies of advising disagree regarding what is at the core of advising, they will also disagree regarding the activities that define an excellent advisor.

The phrase advising as teaching entered the advising vocabulary as part of the title of a seminal article by Crookston (1972). Crookston's article was instrumental in launching the developmental model of advising, which has become the dominant paradigm in the field. Yet Crookston did not say much about teaching, nor did he shed much light on how advising is like teaching. This omission is no accident. For advising to be perceived as similar to teaching in a significant way it needs to be perceived differently than proponents of the developmental paradigm see it.

Through this paper, the reader will examine three possible models of advising, and with respect to each of them, consider how advising is like teaching. The models are:

• advising as bookkeeping, similar to that which Crookston called prescriptive advising;

• advising as counseling, similar to that which is commonly called developmental advising; and

• advising as the coaching of learning.

I argue that the most compelling model of both teaching and advising is not the developmental paradigm but the learning-centered paradigm. On the latter view, the excellent advisor plays a role with respect to a student's entire curriculum that is analogous to the role that the excellent teacher plays with respect to the content of a single course. To explain this, I introduce and develop a concept called the logic of the curriculum. The excellent advisor helps the student to understand, and indeed in a certain sense, to create the logic of the student's curriculum.

In the process of developing an account of learning-centered advising, I show that the paradigm allows the advisor's role to be elevated to a position of the utmost importance in higher education. The advisor provides a service to the student that is distinct from that of anyone else on campus. Such an elevation is itself an argument for implementation of the proposed model. I conclude the argument with a brief description of the practical consequences of adopting the learning-centered model.

The Prescriptive and Developmental Models

Advising as Teaching

Because developmental advising has been the dominant paradigm for so long, many writers have attempted to pick up the discussion where Crookston left it. In the process, some detail has been added to Crookston's sketchy account of teaching. For example, Kramer (2003) listed nine principles of effective advising that “are also at the heart of the successful classroom experience. Their application to advising is why Crookston coined the term advising as teaching” (p. 6). The principles are that faculty must

1) engage the student; 2) provide personal meaning to students' academic goals; 3) collaborate with others or use the full range of institutional resources; 4) share, give, and take responsibility; 5) connect academic interests with personal interests; 6) stimulate and support student academic and career planning; 7) promote intellectual and personal growth and success; 8) assess, evaluate, or track student progress; and 9) establish rapport with students.

Kramer urged advisors to model their practices on that of teachers by, for example, devising an advising syllabus analogous to a course syllabus.

Kramer's principles put more meat on the bare bones of Crookston's advising-as-teaching concept. However, even fleshed out, Crookston's description of advising as teaching communicates more about the nonprescriptive style and technique of teaching and advising that it does about the topics advisors teach or about how excellence in teaching sheds light on excellence in advising.

In an effort to connect advising to teaching, Wade and Yoder (1995) stated:

Teaching and advising both reflect an ongoing process requiring two way communication between student and teacher or student and adviser. Effective teaching and effective advising reflect a developmental relationship that focuses on the needs and personal growth requirements of the student/advisee. Teaching is not telling and advising is not telling. (p. 100)

According to Wade and Yoder, effective teachers and advisors share a number of characteristics. Both are “caring, good listeners, knowledgeable about their content areas, and prepared. Both believe in the human dignity of all their students. Their behaviors reflect clarity, enthusiasm, warmth, flexibility, availability, and businesslike, task-oriented behaviors.”

These characterizations are certainly positive, and they offer ideas that both teachers and advisors should take into account. However, they are less helpful in defining the core of advising because they do not differentiate teachers and advisors from many other professionals on campus. The behaviors described should be found in the registrar's office, the financial aid office, and the bursar's office, not to mention the counseling center, as much as in the classroom or advising office.

Perhaps more important, neither Kramer (2003) nor Wade and Yoder (1995) offer an account of teaching that illuminates the nature of advising. Their statements lack a focus on the relationship between teaching and learning. Teaching that is focused on learning and the primacy of the academic, but not on prescriptivism, can be easily found, and most can quickly identify the excellent teachers with whom they are familiar.

Teaching and Learning

The excellent teacher focuses on the academic material in a way that promotes active learning. The description is familiar, not groundbreaking. Unlike Crookston's definition, it is based upon a conception of teaching that most academics would recognize as central to excellent college teaching. It is therefore the foundation on which an account of advising as teaching should be based.

• The excellent teacher organizes and sequences the material to facilitate students' learning. Concepts are introduced in an order such that students will be most likely to see the logical progression of the course and the interrelationships of the ideas presented. In particular, a clear distinction is drawn between basic principles and the supporting details.

• focuses on modes of thinking. Students are led to discover, recognize, and imitate the distinctive modes of reasoning that characterize the discipline.

• models for the student how one might interact with the material. This needs to be done with sensitivity because students are not to get the impression that the instructor has the only way to respond to the material, but useful modeling can be accomplished.

• helps to put material in perspective with other information students have acquired. Students are invited to find ways that the ideas studied confirm, explain, are explained by, or conflict with ideas that they have previously absorbed from the course, other courses, or everyday life.

• brings out interrelationships of ideas. For example, students place events, theories, or phenomena (a) and (b) into context by seeing how (a) led historically to (b), contradicts (b), or is an example of (b).

• sometimes puts the course as a whole in perspective by relating it to other courses students have taken or to the entire curriculum.

• helps students to synthesize an overview of the material. By understanding the structure or logic of the material, the student can assimilate and (if necessary) memorize some of the relevant facts. In this context logic refers to a logical structure that is sometimes reflected in a course outline but not always kept in the students' view throughout the course. For example, when students are required to master specific facts, perhaps even to memorize them, the excellent teacher keeps students motivated by keeping the logic behind the course in the forefront and thereby helping students understand why the facts matter.

Perhaps the ability to help students synthesize an overview of the logic of the course is the most important attribute of the excellent teacher. The excellent instructor coaches each student to develop for her or himself a sense of the course's logic and of how the ideas fit together to make a coherent whole. The instructor may also have a more specific goal, based on the discipline and level of course, regarding the students' understanding of the course's logic. The teacher's goal may lie on a continuum characterized by his or her belief that the student should a) see the course's logic in more or less the same way as the instructor to z) find or construct her or his own distinctive logic.

The listed qualities and activities describe, in part, the type of teaching that deserves to be called excellent. In the next part of the paper, a picture of advising as teaching is modeled after the described picture of teaching; it is a different picture from that suggested by Crookston of developmental teaching because the instructor is not focused broadly on personal development but more specifically on facilitating learning. Of course, excellent teachers may attend to students' personal development, and I would not dispute sometimes this is a desirable activity for professors; however, it is not the primary responsibility of a professor.

Learning the Curriculum

What does this description of teaching imply about advising? I suggest that an excellent advisor does the same for the student's entire curriculum that the excellent teacher does for one course (Lowenstein, 2000). The entire curriculum refers both to the student's major and to the courses taken to meet general education requirements. The relationships to which I subsequently refer may be between two individual courses or between two groups of courses. The underlying thesis is as follows: Learning transpires when a student makes sense of his or her overall curriculum just as it does when a person understands an individual course, and the former is every bit as important as the latter. In fact, learning in each individual course is enhanced by the learning of the curriculum, and thus may continue long after the course has been completed. Finally, whereas the individual course is the domain of the professor, the overall curriculum is most often the domain of the academic advisor, and the excellent advisor coaches the student through the process of learning the curriculum.

More specifically, the excellent advisor, who shares this view of the task:

• helps students put each part of the curriculum into perspective. That is, she or he helps them get past the clichés about breadth of education and focus on how the different areas of study support each other.

• compares and contrasts modes of thinking found among the various disciplines. He or she might ask challenging questions of the advisee: How is reasoning in natural science similar to that in social science, and how is it different? How is literary criticism different from both natural and social sciences? Are there any similarities between them?

• helps students sequence their learning experiences to optimize their effectiveness. Maybe a student can pass marketing research without having taken quantitative methods, but the student will not learn as much as if she or he had an understanding of statistics.

• brings out interrelations among disciplines and modes of thought, helping the student to discover how they complement each other. For example, a student might study aggression in a psychology course and then come across the term aggression again in international politics. He or she will benefit from trying to relate the two ways of thinking about the term.

• helps the student pay attention to transferable skills being developed and to focus on how various courses enhance these in distinctive ways. Students' mastery of generic skills will be greatly facilitated if it is done more consciously than it usually is done. By talking (for example) about the role logical reasoning plays in two courses, advisors make the student much more conscious of its meaning and importance; the student is also more likely to spot it without prompting in the future.

• helps the student focus on modes of learning that are being mastered and understand that intellectual growth involves mastering a variety of learning methods. Some courses emphasize understanding a block of material; others are more focused on mastering certain intellectual or physical techniques.

• helps the student synthesize an overview of her or his education and gain an understanding of its structure or logic. How does one course support, contrast with, or follow upon another? How does this cluster of courses support, contrast with, or follow upon that cluster? How does each contribute to an overarching explanation about the world and an individual's place in it?

Every time the student needs to make a choice (of majors, of tracks within a major, of individual courses), the advisor has a teachable moment, and the excellent advisor seeks to help the student decide, in the context of his or her emerging understanding, the direction and goals as well as the logic of his or her education as a whole.

The advisor knows that many of the requirements that the faculty have created are intended to impose a portion of the curriculum's logic; a general education distribution is required for a reason. However, just as within an individual course, students can often create their own logics that depend on their own experiences and the direction of their thinking, so each student individually constructs relationships between courses and groups of courses that may be a little different from those of every other student. For this reason, the logic of a student's curriculum is partly influenced by decisions that the faculty and the institution have made and partly is the result of the student's own creative work. Even with regard to the former, however, notwithstanding the fact that the faculty have arranged the curriculum based on their own idea of its logic, the students have the opportunity to re-create that logic for themselves as they experience the courses.

Making Meaning of the Curriculum

Some authors have recognized the benefits of focusing on students' learning to elucidate the purpose of advising. For example, Hemwall and Trachte (2003) share my concern for defining advisor teaching, and they also perceive that advising needs to help the student gain perspective on her or his entire education and provide an opportunity to develop higher-order thinking skills. They have suggested using the institutional mission statement as a teaching text to help students set learning goals. They also recognize that “thinking about advising as learning requires understanding and applying the principle that students learn through the active construction of knowledge” (p. 17), an insight similar to my point that, in the advising process, the student has the opportunity to construct the logic of his or her curriculum.

Reynolds (2003) made a related observation:

Without the cohesion of a strong curriculum and people (including advisors and directors of advising programs) who can articulate clearly the purpose of the curriculum, students may graduate believing that they have completed a series of unconnected courses, marked by checks on an arbitrarily mandated list, without being aware that they have also acquired skills (and marketable ones at that) that can foster self-guided learning. (p. 23)

Reynolds recognized the central importance of the logic of the curriculum. I would add an emphasis on the need for the student to discover and create this logic with the advisor's coaching.

What are some of the relationships that comprise the logic of the curriculum? The following account is sketchy and preliminary; it can be expanded, corrected, or taken in entirely different directions. However, I wish to provide at least enough details to support my contention that there are important concepts to be taught and learned in this area. With this in mind, I suggest that the following list presents some ideas about the relational elements of the curriculum that can be shared with students:

• Instructive contrast: study of a discipline that is enhanced by understanding how it differs from other disciplines. The difference may lie in the complementary methods used to study the same topics or in the complementary aspects of the topic under study.

• Skill dependency: a course must be completed for students to develop the skills needed to master another course. Students come to college familiar with this requirement in mathematics, but in other disciplines, the necessary skills buildup may be too subtle for students to see on their own.

• Content dependency: a course must be completed for students to understand concepts that will be used in another. This case is more common within a discipline than between disciplines.

• Content coverage: a series of courses is needed for students to see the range of material. Examples of content than spans many courses include a series of historical periods or regional literatures. The complementary study of microeconomics and macroeconomics provides another example.

• Cause and effect: one course should be taken before another because it covers events or phenomena that are/were the causes of events covered in the latter class. This might occur in areas such as art history.

• Methodology coverage: a discipline includes several methodologies, and multiple courses must be completed for the student to become adept at all of them. For example, a literature program might include courses employing different schools of criticism.

• Reduction: if one discipline (usually in science) can be reduced to (i.e. completely explained in terms of) another, it is desirable to study the latter first. The order may not be crucial to student understanding of the courses, but the connection of the material needs to be developed.

In many cases, often based on the relational elements listed above, the faculty has created prerequisite sequences so that students are required to take courses in a certain order. When these sequences have been defined, advisors may not have the burden of persuading students to follow the rules (a prescriptive task), but they still have the opportunity to enhance student learning by helping them to understand the relationships among the courses. Where sequencing rules are not imposed, advisors have the opportunity to help students think through the relationships among the courses and make sequencing choices with those relationships in mind.

Learning-Centered Advising

The college student has the task of creating meaning out of her or his learning, or alternatively, of creating a curriculum, or an education out of the raw materials of the various courses that she or he takes. This task is accomplished by building an edifice in which the various components are related to each other in the various ways described. Each student will have a unique curricular structure; even two students who take the same set of courses may have different educations because they may relate the component courses in different ways.

The advisor is the student's coach in this process, and the role is an essential one. Few students come to college with any experience in the type of thinking needed for creating a logic to the curriculum, or even with the notion that such a task might exist. The advisor has the unique opportunity to introduce the student to the idea that an education is not just the sum of its parts, to provide examples by recommending some choices with a structural rationale, to encourage early efforts at thoughtful curriculum building, and to support generally the student throughout the curriculum-building process. Advisors are more likely to use Socratic questioning than lecturing because the student will learn better from thinking through the process than from being told how to perform it.

The curriculum-building process will probably start with discussion of the reasons for the requirements that the student must meet. The rationale for the general education requirements is usually more of a mystery to students than is that for the major, but each is worth trying to comprehend. Students who understand the reasoning behind requirements have made a key step toward being able to use similar reasoning to make choices where they are permitted and to fit those choices into the growing whole. Advisors can help students make this transition.

The student gains from this process by understanding better the reasons both for the fixed rules, policies, and requirements and for the choices that he or she makes. Moreover I believe that the student with a strong grasp of the role of each course in her or his curriculum is also likely to learn more in each course. He or she will constantly be relating the material to that of other classes, which in turn will provide new perspectives on the new and old material. This phenomenon is one of the reasons why a well-constructed education prepares one for lifelong learning: The learning continues every time new information is juxtaposed with previously acquired knowledge, and both old and new ideas are transformed in the process.

In fact, when considered as coach for curriculum building, the advisor is arguably the most important person in the student's educational world. Bits and pieces of learned material from classes will have varying degrees of importance in the life of the graduate, but if the student has successfully organized those pieces into a coherent worldview, the process can be repeated throughout life and becomes a powerful, invaluable tool for organizing and thinking about almost anything. Every day the lifelong learner will want to thank the person who helped her or him master such a skill. Even if circumstances change or his or her worldview is altered, the lifelong learner will still be using the skills developed in partnership with his or her advisor.

So, what do advisors teach? The answers are as follows:

• how to find/create the logic of one's education;

• how to view the seemingly disconnected pieces of curriculum as parts of a whole that makes sense to the learner, so that she or he learns more from them;

• how to base educational choices on a developing sense of the overall edifice being self-built; and

• how to continually enhance learning experiences by relating them to knowledge that has been previously learned.

Because learning is the key concept, I refer to this described philosophy as the learning-centered philosophy of advising. The practice described might be labeled learning-centered advising.

What, then, should be said about the developmental view? The early advocates of developmental advising deserve credit for promoting a vision that took advising beyond bookkeeping. However, the learning-centered view captures the best of the developmental model and allows one to look beyond it. The learning-centered view shares the virtues of the developmental model:

• Advising is not seen as prescriptive.

• Advising is an interactive process.

• The student is not passive but plays an active role.

• The student is changed by the advising experience.

However, according to the learning-centered view, the core purpose of advising is to enhance learning, a more academically oriented goal than the broader personal growth advocated by developmental-model proponents. Advisors following the learning-centered model will undoubtedly pay some attention to the affective development of students, just as many good teachers do. In fact, they will also offer some prescriptive advising every so often, when the circumstances call for it, just as developmental advisors will. However, neither of these practices will define the profession. At its core, advising enhances student learning, and advisors' primary objective is to coach advisees into an understanding of the overall structure and logic of their curriculum.

Implications

The developmental model has been the dominant paradigm in academic advising for years. This status has consequences. Many official and unofficial practices of advisors and advising systems are based on decisions that reflect a developmental prejudice and could have been made differently if a different model had been the impetus behind them.

Most important, advisors will be trained in the paradigm to which the trainers subscribe. If advising is to be like developmental counseling, people who are trained to be counselors and know much about student development will be (and are) sought for advising positions. O'Banion (1972), in one of the seminal expositions of developmental advising, took this view. For O'Banion counseling is the heart of advising, and counselors are the people best suited to do it.

However, if advising is about facilitating and enhancing academic learning, institutions hiring advisors will be looking for the breadth of academic background of advising candidates as well as their appreciation of the contributions of a range of disciplines. Curriculum experts chosen as advisors will likely have liberal arts educations, but no single or combination of disciplines will likely dominate their backgrounds. They have been trained to take a broad view, to integrate ideas synthetically. Many university faculty members will be well qualified to be advisors; some may not. However, advisors who are not faculty may profit from having some of the same preparation that faculty receive. More important, nonfaculty advisors need to meet frequently with the faculty, to be present when faculty members are discussing curricular changes, and to understand the concepts and skills that faculty want their students to learn.

In most departments, at most institutions, faculty members are currently engaged in the important work of outcomes assessment. They are defining the desired learning for the students in their departments and devising methods of measuring whether that learning has taken place. With the assessment information, they can make adjustments to curriculum or pedagogy if learning goals are not met. Advisors, if their task is as I have described it, should be aware of the faculty's ideas regarding learning goals, so that they can help students to understand how these goals involve them. Students will understand their educations better if they know what faculty intend them to learn, and so they will profit from advisors whose advice is informed by the faculty's intentions.

Selection and training of advisors is not the only area that would be affected by a change in paradigm. The advising community is currently engaged in a number of projects that might proceed differently if advising were understood as being about learning rather than intrapersonal development. For example, the following tasks will be approached differently under a learning-centered paradigm than under a developmental paradigm:

• arriving at a consensus definition of advising,

• assessing the outcomes of advising,

• considering the certification of advisors (presumably with criteria), and

• offering a graduate level curriculum for advisors under NACADA sponsorship.

Paradigms are important. They affect how people understand their work and how they do it. The developmental paradigm helped define advising as a profession for 30 years, but it fails to illuminate important areas of the profession's possible impact. In particular, it sheds no light on the relationship between advising and teaching. The learning-centered paradigm offers to make the advisor's role one of the most exciting and essential in academe. For the first time, the advising profession has a paradigm that provides real content to the idea of advising as teaching.