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Our first set of advising conversations for the semester provided time to share, reflect, and brainstorm with colleagues about useful strategies and goals in challenging advising conversations, ranging from getting students to make time for considering options in their class decisions to responding in the moment to trauma-informed revelations. A few key takeaways:
- Stopping to ask students about the outcome they want from a meeting helps you in terms of decision-making and time management.
- It’s important for your immediate response to the sharing of hard topics to be sympathetic. Then it’s ok to say, “let me think about this for a minute.” Having a standard strategy for yourself is really helpful in managing your own responses.
- It’s developmentally appropriate for 18 and 19-year-olds to just want a clear answer or to think only in terms of dualistic responses to your questions. This means it’s important to be persistent in reframing and breaking down questions rather than settling for “I don’t know.”
- Remember that you don’t have to get all questions answered in a single meeting. Pausing, follow-up by email or phone, or scheduling a follow-up meeting can all be effective strategies.
- As teachers we respond to things in the moment and improvise in our classrooms all the time. This is a fundamental skill in advising, too.
- Sarah Rundell shared this helpful list of Denison’s academic and student life resources.