“I’m worried about getting an F in one of my classes,” a student told me, “even though I only missed three weeks.” As his academic adviser and as a longtime lecturer on my campus — a state university of about 27,000 students — I knew how much material and how many assignments could be missed in a three-week span. Still, to better understand the situation, I spoke with his professor.
“Three weeks? Try three months!” the professor exclaimed, stunned by the student’s revisionist claim. The professor said she’d tried repeatedly, to no avail, to reach the student by phone and email.
After spending the past five years as a full-time staff member in academic advising, in addition to teaching for several years, at San Francisco State University, I’ve now returned to serving as a full-time lecturer again who also does some advising. What I’ve learned from those two very different roles: Academic counselors and faculty members don’t have the opportunity to communicate or collaborate on an undergraduate’s behalf nearly as much or as routinely as we should.
Of course, faculty members have student-advising duties to varying degrees, depending on the campus. My focus here is on institutions with separate staff members who are responsible for guiding undergraduates on their course schedules, graduation requirements, and other forms of academic counseling.
In recent years, the field of academic advising has emphasized the virtues of a holistic approach — that is, focusing not just on courses and credits but also on other factors, such as cultural values, family obligations, and financial hardships. For all of that talk, however, the need for faculty-adviser exchanges rarely gets championed. Yet the quality of academic advising risks being compromised when staff counselors don’t have access to faculty input. After all, it’s faculty members who witness how students do in class, and how they cope with course requirements.
The same week that I had a visit from the advisee who’d missed three weeks (or three months) of class, another student came to see me lamenting an “unfair” final grade that he’d received from a different instructor. Undergraduates often approach the academic-advising office with such complaints because staff counselors frequently serve as students’ advocates. Some students conclude, in turn, that an adviser can influence a course grade. But academic advisers can’t — and shouldn’t.
Nonetheless, to help that student gain perspective on his final course grade, I visited with his professor — a longtime colleague — to get her input. Her class records reflected that, far from being harsh, the student’s final grade had been quite fair: Dalmatians are less spotty than his attendance was. During a follow-up session, the student and I discussed the value of attendance and other good academic habits that lead to scholastic and professional success. It was not a one-way moralizing lecture but a positive conversation geared toward the student’s long-term goals.
If we are serious about student success — and about advising as a key way to achieve it — then academic counselors and faculty members must engage with one another about our students early and often. Our too-frequent lack of communication surfaced recently in a conversation with an academic adviser. He described a frustrated student: “She said she got good grades in the class, but the professor refused anyway to write her a letter of recommendation. Can you believe that?”
His reflexive siding against the instructor revealed the essential need for academic advisers — and other staff members and administrators — to understand the dynamics of the classroom. And that is best gleaned from direct interaction with faculty members.
Almost every instructor has taught students whose work garners good grades but whose behavior may leave the faculty member reluctant to write a letter of recommendation. Perhaps the students are habitually late or often absent (for reasons within their control). Maybe the student spends too much class time texting, doesn’t participate in class discussions, or treats another student inappropriately. In the case of my colleague’s advisee, did the student fall short of such classroom expectations? Or was it a simpler matter — the student didn’t give the instructor enough notice to write the letter? Or none of the above?
I don’t know the instructor’s rationale for declining to write the recommendation because the student didn’t spell out the reason, and the adviser didn’t reach out to the faculty member. If he had, the adviser could then have used what he learned to guide the student on better ways to make future letter requests, tailored to that student’s distinct circumstance.
The need for greater interaction between staff advisers and faculty members is certainly not particular to my university. I’ve talked with academic advisers at other institutions who tell me of a similar faculty-staff divide on their campus.
Encouragingly, when I mention the value — and more than that, the necessity — of faculty members and advisers working together, the response is always positive from both groups. Staff members in academic advising would benefit by a direct-from-the-source understanding of what’s happening in the classroom. And clearly faculty members stand to benefit, too, when academic advisers share their expertise on diverse counseling practices, breadth requirements, policies, and campus resources. Such exchanges ensure that everyone is on the same page in helping a student.
The true question, then, is not whether to collaborate, but how. What’s needed is a systemic approach: The institution itself should advance ways to bring these two sets of colleagues together — with that dedicated time counted as “service” for faculty members and acknowledged in staff advisers’ annual evaluations.
One path to better collaboration: Create a faculty-staff board on academic advising. That type of board is uncommon in higher education but could bring together instructors and counselors to brainstorm about advising strategies. In the fall of 2015, when I began working as an academic adviser, my advising center had created just such an advisory board. A faculty member who had served on the board at its inception told me in an email interview for this essay: “I felt that the advisers and admin were truly listening to faculty, and that our perspectives and suggestions made a difference in the [advising center’s] policies and practices.”
Shared ideas, shared governance: This is how academe is supposed to work.
Regular communication between faculty members and academic counselors often leads to more opportunities for collaboration, such as advising-related presentations at department meetings. Those conversations further strengthen advising by helping counselors pinpoint when students should be directed to their instructor for additional support, rather than to other contacts on the campus. For example, a student struggling with coursework may turn for help to a counselor, who typically will suggest the student seek tutoring. That advice makes sense since every campus has a tutoring center. But the first step should always be to encourage students to speak with their professor: No one understands the assignment as well as the person who designed it, who has precise expectations of how it should be completed, and — vitally — who determines the grade.
For academic counseling to be at its most effective, we must move past the notion that it should proceed independent of a faculty perspective. No student benefits when instructors and advisers remain in separate lanes. To borrow a phrase from the poet Ogden Nash, that tactic is “one-way thinking on a two-way street.”
