A faculty advisor can be a crucial factor in a student’s academic success. Yet that fact is often underplayed at U.S. colleges, resulting in advisement efforts that are fragmented, confusing and unresponsive to student needs.
BMCC is taking meaningful steps to address that situation. Funded by a five-year $2.329 grant from the U.S. Department of Education under its Title V Program, the college is developing ways to raise student retention rates in the liberal arts by heightening the impact and relevance of academic advisement.
A two-way street According to Holly Messitt, an assistant professor of English and director of faculty mentoring for Title V, the project has two general aims: “On the faculty side, we’re looking to develop more responsive and effective advisors,” she says. “At the same time, we want to encourage and enable students to make fuller use of advisement in developing their educational plans.”
Faculty participation in the project is voluntary, with training workshops held before the start of each semester. Follow-up training throughout the semester covers advisement practice as well as the technology tools used to analyze and track results.
“Technology is critical to effective advisement,” says assistant mathematics professor Glenn Miller, who oversees the project’s technological component. “The systems we use enable advisers to record the outcomes of each student’s session in a database, so that the information is readily available the next time they meet. “
Participating faculty members are asked to rethink conventional notions of advisement and approach it from a developmental, rather than prescriptive viewpoint.
“Rather than simply lay out what courses a student should take, developmental advisement involves building a relationship with each student over time,” Miller says. “Research has shown that a student’s ability to form a relationship with a faculty member can be a compelling factor in determining whether the student remains in school.”
Opening up a dialogue Such relationships can give students a way of solving problems that might otherwise go unaddressed. Messitt recalls the time a student e-mailed her to confide her distress about having received a course grade of WU (“withdrawn unofficially”).
“She was understandably upset, because a WU is tantamount to an F and factors into the GPA,” says Messitt. “She said she’d been inundated lately by family and job responsibilities and had missed a few classes.” Messitt listened to the student and suggested how she might establish a dialogue with her professor what points to raise, what questions to ask. Messitt’s intent wasn’t necessarily to provide a quick fix to, she says, “but to help the student find a way to deal with the problem constructively.”
Now in its second year, BMCC’s Title V project has proven beneficial to the faculty members as well as the students who have been part of it. “Teachers know how overwhelming it can be to find 15 students lined up to see them during office hours,” says Messitt. “But when you know that you’ve build a relationship with each of those students, it makes it easier and a lot more rewarding.”
