I am a new faculty advisor. Tell me everything I need to know.

I just completed my first “unconference” sessions here at the NACADA (National Academic Advising Association) Region 1 conference, and I enjoyed having the chance to participate in two unique sessions. I have been reading about “unconferences” and “edcamps” in the blogo/twittersphere, but have not attended one before. I will have to write more about the process of the unconference another time and prepare for my next opportunities to attend and/or organize a similar event. It is definitely worth learning about this innovative format if you have not heard of it or attended one before. The NACADA region 1 conference is a traditional conference with presentations and poster sessions, but the organizers chose to set aside two session blocks for an unconference. Over the past two days, attendees were encouraged to submit session topics by writing them on slips of paper and putting them in a box. The organizers made a quick schedule of room assignments this afternoon, and held a 15-minute introduction to unconferences before letting us loose to choose a room and participate.

My topic was one of the chosen sessions, titled “I am a new faculty advisor. Tell me everything I need to know.” The title essentially describes my purpose in coming to the NACADA conference this week. I also have to acknowledge that because my husband is an academic advisor at another university, I was tagging along with him. I chose to attend the conference rather than hang out in a Montreal Starbucks and grade papers for three days, because I really want and need to learn more about my role as a faculty advisor. The conference is targeted primarily to professional academic advisors, but many sessions include discussions related to faculty advising as well. I am an assistant professor in my second year in a tenure-track  position, and advising is a part of my workload.

I came up with my unconference title after sneaking a peek at the other slips in the box, one of which was titled “30 minutes with a faculty advisor: Everything you ever wanted to know but were afraid to ask.” This session was facilitated by an associate professor with a strong involvement in academic advising at her institution, who just received tenure on Monday (congratulations Libby!) so I decided to attend her session and learn everything I could. She stayed around for my unconference session, and we were joined by two other participants as well.

So, what did I learn in the unconference? And in my other “regular” conference sessions so far? I am still processing through all of this new information and fortunately I will have my husband to confer with about the experience at home. I am starting to compile my take-away points and I have gotten a pretty good to-do list started. Before I got to Montreal, my advising to-do list only had one thing on it: email my advisees to meet with me, because it’s time to start planning for registration. I have been told that even taking that much initiative sets me apart from many other faculty members. Nonetheless, now that I have spent a day and a half at NACADA, here is my new to-do list:

1. Meet your colleagues in person and put a face with the name/email address. At my institution, we are small enough where that has happened organically in some cases, but there are some mystery faculty and staff members who I should just go find and say hello in person.
2. Use group advising to supplement individual advising. This has been on my mind for a while and was recommended by our director of academic advising. It’s taken a few semesters of having the same conversation 30 times in a row for me to realize that yes, I want to do this.
3. Be yourself… but learn how to be firm and develop your crap detection skills. As a former teacher and counselor of young children with emotional and behavior challenges, I am coming into higher education with a different background than most faculty members. I need to continue developing my style of advising and realize that this is a new setting and a new population, but I still need to do what feels true to me as an educator and a person.
4. Learn how to help students make the perfect schedule. This sounds like something I could get very good at, given my skills and personality. Some faculty advisors remain hands-off with this aspect of the work, but I might actually enjoy it, once I am able to learn the system better. For me, that will mean learning the old general education requirements, AND the new model that has been created. Good thing the old one is almost gone!
5. Lure advisees to meet with you by sending an attention-grabbing email. I do still need to send that email this weekend, as spring break comes to a close. I’m not sure whether to take the alarmist approach and induce a bit of fear to induce attendance, or entice students to come see me with promises of rewarding and valuable dialogue… or both?
6. Communicate with the student’s other advisor(s) and close any gaps. Most of my students have two faculty advisors—me from the education department, and another from their other major department. Then there is often a third advisor from the academic advising center involved. We rarely talk or email with each other. That seems like a poor system and if I can figure out how to improve that communication, I will.
7. Find out what is expected of you in the area of advising for tenure and promotion. One of the reasons I am motivated to provide high quality advising—I will admit—is the fact that my institution values advising as an important part of how faculty are evaluated for tenure and promotion. Based on what I am learning today, that message goes a long way towards promoting high-quality faculty advising. My to-do item is to find out exactly what the tenure committee is looking for and how this can be measured, documented, etc.
8. Hold some of your student advising meetings at the academic advising center, rather than your office. I like this idea--this allows students to see faculty and professional advisors in the same physical space. Psychologically, I think that does make a difference and can promote collaboration and consistency.
9. Take advantage of resources from NACADA  – this is their professional field of expertise! I am so pleased that I decided to come this week. I knew through my husband that this is a good professional organization with useful publications, conferences, and online resources, but now I am seeing it for myself and I will make use of what they have to offer.
10. Participate in another unconference. This has to go on the to-do list… I am very intrigued by the constructivist, grassroots, spontaneous, participatory, power-to-the-people nature of this format. I imagine that each one is unique, and luckily they exist for my academic discipline of K-12 education, so I will need to seek out an unconference or edcamp again soon.

If any readers would like to add something to my to-do list for faculty advising, please leave a comment or reply via Twitter. What else would you recommend?

20 Questions About RTI

I recently introduced my students to RTI (Response to Intervention) in a course I teach for early childhood education majors. We are reading "RTI in the Classroom" by Rachel Brown-Chidsey, Louise Bronaugh, and Kelly McGraw. Further readings come from online sources that I bookmark using Delicious. Yesterday in class we also had two invited guest speakers from a nearby school that is in the first year of implementing RTI in a school-wide, systematic way. A principal and a classroom teacher shared their experiences and took questions from the class. I asked the students to write exit tickets on their way out of class with their additional questions about RTI.

I was very impressed with the level of questioning that came from my group. This is an undergraduate / post-baccalaureate level course and in truth only counts as a third of a course for them in credits. However, this is a group that wants answers! They will also be researching interventions for the next several weeks to address the needs of case study students I have assigned to them. I wanted to share this wonderful list of questions generated by the class. This finally prompted me to start a blog and use this as my first post.

I am inviting our guest speakers to respond in the comments. Students can respond with answers to one another and further questions. Any readers of the blog are also invited to respond. I am also going to try an experiment and tweet this blog post out at the #NASP convention. The questions are numbered so that you can reference the question you are responding to in your comments.

1. How long does a child stay in Tier 3 before being referred to special education? How many kids end up going to Tier 3 and actually get better and don’t need special education?

2. How much time is spent on professional development to ensure teachers are prepared & well educated about RTI?

3. How often do kids come off IEPs? If making progress on IEPs, do you go back to Tier 3, or Tier 2 interventions?

4. How long do we progress monitor Tier 3 students before the teacher could consider keeping a student back a grade?

5. What is the line between getting pulled out of class vs. having an aide come into the classroom?

6. How did your school begin to implement RTI? Was it a long process to begin? Is this something that every school should/will do?

7. How can you ensure the support will get put in place? And that it follows through year after year?

8. Do you think 6 weeks is too long to wait between each evaluation? Can’t a teacher tell something isn’t working in a shorter amount of time? (3-4 weeks)

9. What steps do you take when a parent is against intervention? What if they feel their child does not need intervention?

10. Can parents request that their child has an aide without being on an IEP?

11. If the student is getting a Tier 2 or Tier 3 intervention at the end of the year, does it follow them into the next grade?

12. When you start a new schedule for Tier 2, what if there is more kids than last time, how do you fit them all in? Could this lead to pairing students who need solitary instruction?

13. Can you give an example of targeted intervention/instruction within the classroom?

14. Who is working with the small group of Tier 2 children? Always a FIEP (interventionist) or can the teacher work with them? If so, what is the rest of the class doing?

15. How does the teacher make several differentiations for each step in the day?

16. How would a teacher implement this if the principal is not behind RTI?

17. If kids are on Tier 2 and have progressed slightly but stay the same (above avg) do you keep them on because they have not increased progress or because they are above avg. they can be removed. Do you want to increase the progress? Or just above average?

18. What is the difference between “normal” teaching and Tier 1. I thought that tier 1 always is happening.

19. Where do special education teachers come in? Are they working more in the general population?

20. Are there manuals? Do teachers share resources, lesson plans?