Faculty Involvement Discussion Notes

Faculty involvement was one of four shared areas of interest for participants at the East Georgia CCG Regional Meeting held at Augusta University on March 7, 2016. Brief notes from the breakout conversation on this isse at the meeting follow:

Key Concern: Involvement of faculty must begin with initiatives that truly interest them and address a need without adding undue burden.

Observation: Two biggest pieces upon which faculty have impact:

• Instructional design, curriculum
• Advising

One Solution to Involvement: Begin with addressing the issue of advising students.

Disscussion Notes:

• Communication paths must be made explicit and simple, between faculty, professional advisors and students.
• Large variation of attitudes from faculty toward both faculty and professional advising. In general, however, faculty need to be included in the process. Faculty have knowledge in fields of study that advisors will not have.
• Perhaps create a position as Central Advisor who functions as Graduation Manager but works with a designated faculty member. This may allow for more mentoring activities. This would require professional training to get all pieces to work better together and would certainly include professional development for advisors. Perhaps an effective route is to “flip” the relationship and get faculty to train advisors.

• Create Advanced Faculty Advisors (Advising Fellows) that work with professional advisors. Faculty would require some recognition or reward for this. The Fellows would serve as mentors to the professional advisors.
• In general, provide some kind of recognition to faculty who serve as advisors or work on advising teams. At minimum, provide some kind of “bling.” See Victoria College (Texas) and their Center for Academic and Professional Excellence on ideas for recognizing faculty and professional advisors. http://www.victoriacollege.edu/WhatCapeDoes
• An excellent professional advisor should:
  
  • Know the academic program thoroughly
  • Know how to show path completion to students
  • Know when and how to contact faculty to ask questions
• Perhaps build Clusters of Advisors in subjects – to include professional advisor and designated faculty members. Allow professional advisors to do more administrative tasks and rely upon faculty for content. However, the Cluster approach would help educate the professional advisors on subject matter so they could grow as mentors/subject experts.
• Georgia College may serve as a model. They hire professional advisors by area, with master’s degrees. Georgia College hires from their own programs so the advisors already know their own school. Advisors go to all campus events. They follow a Clustered Advising model (see above) that seeks to fulfill the advisors as young professionals.