Author: Kenneth Soldink

The 21st Century Academic Advisor: 3 Critical Skill Sets

by Daniel Fusch

This article is an excerpt from Sue Ohrablo’s acclaimed book High-Impact Advising: A Guide for Academic Advisors, which you can find here. Being an effective academic advisor is like being an expert juggler. It is easy to drop a ball now and then. In this article, I examine strategies to keep all the balls in the air in order to effectively support our students and help them persist toward graduation. The role of the academic advisor is complex, requiring advisors to effectively communicate with students, understand and interpret policies and procedures, follow institutional protocols, maintain student records, utilize technology, and engage in problem-solving. These activities can be categorized into three distinct skill sets: interpersonal, operational, and analytical. To deliver comprehensive advising assistance, an advisor needs to blend all of these skills. Here are some strategies for developing these essential skill sets and maximizing your effectiveness as an advisor. Interpersonal Skills I have had the privilege of interviewing numerous advisor candidates over the years, some who are aspiring to this new role, others who are experienced in the field. Most often, when asked what is the most important skill an advisor can bring to the position, prospective advisor candidates respond, “working with people.” […]

The Best and Worst Annual Fund Strategies

by Jim M. Langley

YOUR ANNUAL FUND THIS YEARFollow Jim Langley’s advice on what makes for the best and worst annual fund strategies to ensure this is a successful year for your annual giving operation. The 2 Worst Annual Fund Strategies Using the annual fund to balance the annual operating budget.Donors give much, much more in the name of philanthropy than they do for charitable purposes.  Charity calls people to meet an urgent need; philanthropy is a means by which people can create a better society.  If you cast your annual fund as a way of meeting urgent need, you raise unsettling questions in the minds of philanthropic investors: Failing to adjust your annual fund solicitations to loyal donors’ giving patterns.The vast majority of regular annual donors make their contributions in December. Yet, every year, they are subjected to repeated requests to give starting at the beginning of the year. This drumbeat of requests raises questions in the minds of many loyal donors about how much money is being spent to raise money. It also makes them feel that the school’s fundraising has become impersonal and machine-like. Loyalty should be prized and reinforced with personalized communications.  If donors have given two years or more on essentially […]

How MIT Plans to Develop Scalable, Differentiated Instruction

by Lisa Cook

Here’s how MIT and several partners are developing a Fly-by-Wire system to provide high-quality, differentiated instruction at scale and to better equip graduates to enter the workforce. SPOTLIGHT ON INNOVATION SERIES The US Department of Education has awarded multi-million dollar “First in the World” grants to 18 colleges and universities that are innovating to solve critical challenges with access, recruitment, retention, and student success. At AI, we have interviewed each of the recipients to learn more about the projects these institutions are pursuing, how their approaches are unique, and what other colleges and universities can learn from these new efforts. This was the second year of the First in the World grants. You can read our interviews with the 24 institutions that received 2014 grants here. MIT, partnering with edX and Arapahoe and Quinsigamond Community Colleges, is developing a Fly-by-Wire system to provide high-quality, differentiated instruction at scale and to better equip graduates entering the workforce with skills valued by employers and industry. Funded by a $2.9 million FIPSE First in the World grant, the Fly-by-Wire system is a digitally-enabled, differentiated blended-instruction intervention that is both scalable and cost-effective enough to meet the needs of learners at a range of institutions. […]

How Spelman College Will Use Metacognitive Awareness to Improve Academic Performance

by Lisa Cook

Metacognitive awareness (“thinking about thinking”) is a crucial skill to help students persist and succeed, and here’s how Spelman College hopes to help them master that skill. SPOTLIGHT ON INNOVATION SERIES The US Department of Education has awarded multi-million dollar “First in the World” grants to 18 colleges and universities that are innovating to solve critical challenges with access, recruitment, retention, and student success. At AI, we have interviewed each of the recipients to learn more about the projects these institutions are pursuing, how their approaches are unique, and what other colleges and universities can learn from these new efforts. This was the second year of the First in the World grants. You can read our interviews with the 24 institutions that received 2014 grants here. Metacognition, or “thinking about thinking,” is a crucial skill to help students persist and succeed, but a Spelman College psychology professor noticed that her junior and senior students hadn’t yet mastered that skill. In response, assistant professor of psychology Jimmeka Guillory started using metacognitive instruction in her class and immediately noticed a difference. Students demonstrated improvement in their awareness and academic performance, and importantly, more students started coming to seek help during her office hours. […]

Creating a Faculty Leadership Development Program

by David Kiel

Effective faculty leadership development is important because faculty are the main stakeholders in the university who are committed to the core academic and democratic values that underpin higher education in the US. If faculty members are not effective leaders, then higher education at every level is ineffective and does not fully reflect these core values. While senior administrators, parents, trustees, students, and alumni are also important stakeholders, they may not be as fully committed to the core academic values as faculty, whose professional identity center on these values. Yet, few institutions offer effective support in developing faculty leaders. Offering leadership development is distinct from offering faculty development generally. In general, faculty development should be understood to include career-long support for the main activities that are required in the faculty role: teaching, research and public service. It also includes broad professional and career development services that impart the skills needed for faculty to be effective organizational actors and productive scholars. These include: managing their time effectively, working well with others, knowing how to be influential and persuasive, talking with the media, communicating with the public, presenting data, solving organizational problems and other skills. Leadership development is a specialized and crucially important […]

The Transformational Small College President

by Marcel J. Dumestre, Ed.D.

The recent Sweet Briar crisis highlighted the difficulties that at-risk institutions face in ensuring their basic survival. Not only has the feasibility of a women’s college been questioned, but also the viability of small colleges in general. Often, colleges respond to difficulties with incremental improvements and enhancements — short-term remedies that tend not to address the fundamental issues; stories about substantive change are harder to find. What are proven ways for a president to lead an at-risk institution back to long-term, sustainable financial health? Answers were to be found at a recent Academic Impressions conference, “Foundations for Innovation at Small Institutions.” (You can read the paper that sparked this conference here.) The conference featured presidents of relatively small institutions who have led quite amazing turnarounds. I will share some of their stories — and insights that can be gleaned from them — below. A Diagnosis: What Makes the Small College Turnaround Difficult? Yet these turnarounds tend to be the exception rather than the rule. Why are so many at-risk institutions slow to react to their situation? The answer is that there is a clash of worldviews within the university, all competing for influence over the institution’s direction: It would be […]

6 Destructive Myths About Teams in Higher Education

Higher education will face daunting and complex challenges over the next decade, and campuses will need high-performing teams, especially a high-performing senior team, in order to face those challenges. In this paper, Patrick Sanaghan and Jillian Lohndorf expose 6 potentially destructive myths — myths that get in the way of building and nurturing a great team. Come to the Conference “Leading and Motivating Teams in Higher Education

Presidential Dialogues: The Changing Presidency in Higher Education

by Amit Mrig

College President: An Impossible Job? The president of a college or university stands in the cross-hairs, operating in an environment where the challenges are complex, there are no clear answers and decisions come in all shades of gray. All eyes are on the institution’s chief executive to navigate the strategic dilemmas facing their institutions. And as today’s presidents try to balance the competing demands of an array of stakeholders, they can’t always count on the buy-in and support of the board—leading them to spend much of their time managing the board. With all this complexity, the presidents that succeed tomorrow won’t be the same as the presidents that were successful yesterday. In the first of our Presidential Dialogues, we speak with five highly successful chief executives, asking their advice for new presidents. In this paper, hear from: This is the first of the AI Presidential Dialogues. Through this ongoing series, we will continue to convene leading minds in higher education to uncover those skill sets and ways of rethinking the president’s work that will educate boards and inform and empower aspiring presidents. Watch for future papers from this series. Read the report. Contact Me If you would like to talk with us […]

Managing an Aging Higher-Ed Workforce

by Lisa Cook, Academic Impressions As more faculty, administration, and staff approach retirement age, institutions must be ready to address the challenges that accompany an aging workforce. Most have already addressed financial planning, but many still struggle with other aging workforce concerns such as mental health issues, budgeting for an increase in disability accommodation requests, and how institutions can create possibilities for retirement that allow employees to exit gracefully. We talked to Susan Wheeler, University Counsel at James Madison University, to learn what institutions should be considering. Wheeler advises institutions to: Develop procedures to help support faculty suffering from mental health issues, and to define next steps if an intervention is not successful. Budget for increased employee ADA accommodations. Shape retirement or emeritus status plans to allow employees to maintain a relationship with the institution, thereby creating more possibilities for retirement. 1. What Can Institutions Do When Aging Employees Have Mental Health Issues? Although mental health issues affect both young and old, institutions might find themselves confronting one of the following scenarios as their employees grow older: A faculty member whose students begin reporting that she is falling asleep in class while guest lecturers lead the discussion, missing appointments, and beginning […]

A Plan to Build an Open Source Tool to Assess Student Skills and Predict Success

by Lisa Cook

SPOTLIGHT ON INNOVATION SERIES The US Department of Education has awarded multi-million dollar “First in the World” grants to 18 colleges and universities that are innovating to solve critical challenges with access, recruitment, retention, and student success. At AI, we have interviewed each of the recipients to learn more about the projects these institutions are pursuing, how their approaches are unique, and what other colleges and universities can learn from these new efforts. This was the second year of the First in the World grants. You can read our interviews with the 24 institutions that received 2014 grants here. Higher education for most students begins with proctored high-stakes placement exams that may not be the best approach, according to Jason Bryer, director of research and project evaluation at Excelsior College.  Proctored exams can be intimidating, especially at open-enrollment institutions where more than half of students are directed into non-credit remediation courses at an estimated cost of $4 billion per year. Excelsior College hopes to improve students’ early college experiences by developing an open-source assessment tool to measure student skills in academic and non-academic areas. They will use the $1.9 million First in the World grant to address the problem of placement […]