Revised Working Paper:  7/08/04  ERMelander

“Advising as Educating:”

A Vision Leading to a Discovery Learning Model of Advising 

Overview: When individual advisers within an institution have different visions, assumptions, perceptions, or expectations regarding the mission or outcomes of higher education or the purposes, processes, practices, and outcomes of advising—i.e., when each embrace different “theories of advising,”then significant differences in advising practices result and, correspondingly, great difficulties arise in designing quality into the institution’s advising systems and reaching meaningful assessments and evaluations of their effectiveness.  A number of theories and models of advising have been proposed in the literature, each emphasizing different assumptions or propositions about what it means to produce an educated person and each implying different roles for advisers and for students.  While it is desirable to allow for a wide-band of individual differences in the roles and activities of advisers and advisees to accommodate the great diversity among them, it is important for there to be a shared vision of what are or should be the organizing principles for an institution’s advising system. 

This essay seeks to identify a compelling vision of “Advising as Educating” and, from that vision, derive some higher-order principles and qualities for an institutional advising system that will accommodate the widest range of prevailing theories and practices of advising and will allow for meaningful assessments and evaluations of advising effectiveness.  Indeed, from a basic set of organizational principles and from the “Advising as Educating” vision, seven basic organizing principles regarding the advising process are identified; in turn, they are combined to form an over-arching theory for an advising system that is labeled as the Discovery Learning Model of Advising which emphasizes Discovery Advising Learning within a Discovery Advising Curriculum to guide students in learning how to set and fulfill personal educational and developmental goals while navigating the institution’s multiple curricula.  The Discovery Learning Model of Advising is contrasted with the traditional “Diagnostic-Prescriptive/Acceptance Model of Advising” and conclusions are drawn regarding the implications for advising if the suggested Discovery Learning Model of Advising is to be adopted.

The essay is formed into six sections: Why the Interest in Theories and Models of Advising?;  The Vision of “Advising as Educating;” Seven Organizing Principles for Advising Systems; Components of the Discovery Learning Model of Advising; Comparisons with a Traditional Model of Advising; and Conclusions.

Why the interest in Theories and Models of Advising?

A practicing academic adviser might proclaim: “I just go about the practice of advising on a student-by-student basis; I care about each of my advisees.  I know a lot about the majors and courses offered at my institution and the places where students are likely to encounter difficulties.  I work hard to build a trusting relationship with students and learn what is important to each of them and, in turn, try to help them make the right decisions about what to major in, what courses to take, and, when they get in trouble in some way, I offer guidance on how they might solve their problems.  Where’s the theory or modeling in that; I just introduce them to useful information and offer practical advice and counsel. They choose what’s best for them.”

If advisors within the institution build their advising practices and “good advice” on their own individual assumptions, perceptions, or expectations regarding the mission and outcomes of higher education or the purposes, processes, practices, and outcomes of advising, the notions of advising as a system and quality in advising practice within the institution are in chaos. There are no standards or common benchmarks to reference when seeking system-wide improvements or documenting accountability responsibilities. Any attempts at improvement in advising situations without an overall guiding vision are without direction.  Students are left to experience whatever advising strategies their particular adviser happens to have come up with.

In the meantime, the public at large, legislators, students, and institutional leadership and budgeting administrators—the stakeholders for our institution’s educational programs— have all placed an enormous amount of trust in the proposition that the advising system and advisers within it are “doing the right thing” and are “doing it in the right way.”  These are the standard accountability questions.  In honoring that trust, how do we know and how can we demonstrate that, “in our advising system, we are doing the right thing?” and that we are “doing advising in the right way?”

Theories and models of advising provide a conceptual basis for organizing advising systems such that they are driven by the “right purposes” and are delivering services in the “right ways” and, in turn, can be assessed and evaluated in terms of their effectiveness and efficiencies in order to demonstrate they are meeting their goals and provide quality in their services.

The scholarship literature on advising provides a number of theories and models of advising that employ different assumptions or propositions about what it means to produce an educated person, with each implying different roles for advisers and students and often different subject matter as the content of adviser/advisee interactions.  So, a question arises—“Which of these theories or models should be adopted as the guiding framework for the design of an institutional advising system?”  Whatever framework is adopted, it should provide for a wide-range of individual differences in the roles and activities of advisers and advisees to allow for the great diversity among them, but it is important that it provides a shared over-all vision to guide the design and assessment of the advising system so that issues relating to “are we doing the right things in the right way” can be addressed in a coherent manner.  The shared vision should be the source of the organizing principles for the institution’s advising system. 

What is your own theory of advising that guides your advising practices?  Where does it come from?  How does it compare with the advising theories guiding your advising colleagues in their practices?  What are the basic principles regarding education, teaching, and learning that are embedded in your advising practices?  How can you personally demonstrate that you are “doing the right thing” and are “doing it in the right way” in your own advising practices?

What is needed is a common vision among advising practitioners within the institution so that they might organize and assess their own practices in ways that are consistent with the institution’s mission and goals and with each other.

The Vision of “Advising as Educating:”

The fundamental basis for answering the question “Are we doing the right thing” in advising is to make reference to the institution’s mission and goals.  If our advising system has as its purpose and is organized in ways that are consistent with and contribute to the institution’s achievement of its own mission and goals, we legitimately can claim “we are doing the right thing.”

At the core of every institution of Higher Education is the mission of providing for the education of its students, and many institutions—including Penn State—have goals that call for centering programs and services on the student, which translates in an educational context to “centering on the student as learner.”  So, to assure that the advising system and practicing advisers are “doing the right thing,” the institution-wide vision of advising should focus on “educating the student” and should be “centered on educating the student as a learner.”

If we combine this proposition regarding advising as “centered on educating the student as a learner” with the basic organizational function of the advising system “to provide guidance to students as they navigate through the institution’s educational opportunities toward achieving a degree, ”a very general “Vision of Advising as Educating” can be derived:  

“Advising is an educative process centered on assisting individual students in planning, acquiring, and assessing their own education as learners while navigating through the institution’s educational opportunities.”

For this general vision statement on advising to take on meaning, several terms need to be further specified or clarified—for instance: “an educative process, “ “planning, acquiring, and assessing their own education as learners, “and “navigating through the institution’s educational opportunities” all need further elaboration.

To be “an educative process,” advising must expose the student to intentional learning experiences that lead to the achievement of educational goals and objectives.  Intentional learning experiences in academic settings are typically referred to as the “curriculum,” with responsibilities for their design and delivery considered to be assigned to teachers/educators. So, an educative advising process involves an advising curriculum where the role of the adviser becomes that of an educator—one who provides and instructs in the advising curriculum. The object of the advising process is the education of the student as a learner, with the student recognized as having individualized educational goals and objectives as well as individual learner characteristics and capacities.

The term, “planning, acquiring and assessing their own education as learners” is subject to an enormous array of interpretations—especially with respect to what is meant by “acquiring an education.” In the traditionalist’s view, “acquiring an education” has meant to “fill the student’s mind with useful knowledge—mostly knowledge of subject-matter content but also of certain primary thinking and reasoning skills, i.e., cognitive skills.”  The basic premise about the mind in this view is that it is like a container holding or storing knowledge—much like a library or a computer hard disk, with cognitive skills serving to load the mental data base and memory serving as its organizer and search engine. Education is reduced to absorption and mastery of content.  Issues of curriculum and pedagogy are resolved in favor of defining core content and prescribing acquisition and memory exercises. An advising system under this “educating” view will only need to identify and prescribe the content of an educative advising curriculum that has no particular focus on developing learning capacities of the individual student.

Other perspectives call for education to include the acquisition of enhanced capacities for cultural understanding and good citizenship in community participation.  Topics are added to the academic curriculum under the heading of General Education that include content “everyone should know something about.” Under this perspective, education is still all about content, with mastery goals mixed with broad exposure.  The same types of basic curriculum and pedagogy solutions are prescribed.  Students are bunched and batched to receive similar instructional treatments, with individuality of learning readiness, goals, and outcomes viewed as things for the individual student to overcome—not as virtues or characteristics to be accommodated and elaborated upon within the advising system.  The advising system is content and teacher centered, not learning and student centered.  Again, an advising system under this “educating” view will only need to identify and prescribe the content of an advising curriculum that has no particular focus on developing learning capacities of the individual student.

At times, concerns for student development of social and interpersonal skills and personal identity characteristics are tacked on to the notion of “being educated in core content.” In these cases, the term “educating the whole student” is usually invoked, but the interpersonal developmental concerns are typically thought of as being best addressed outside the core academic curriculum—in the co-curriculum, if you will—falling under the responsibilities of Student Affairs rather than Academic Affairs. Challenges to advisers and students include issues of determining what particular interpersonal competencies an individual student learner should be developing and where in the academic or co-curriculum can those developmental experiences be obtained.  Questions of appropriate pedagogy and curricula content to employ in educating for social and psychological development are avoided by declarations that they are not of concern in the academic curriculum and that the co-curriculum does not have direct instructional responsibilities and cannot, therefore, be held directly accountable for the learning and developmental outcomes of individual students. An advising system under this “educating as developing the whole student” view will have to identify and prescribe the content of an advising curriculum that provides for the identification of important social and interpersonal competencies to be developed by the individual learner as well as for the identification of where in the institution’s educational environment these intentional learning opportunities are made available.  With organizational responsibilities for “whole student development” separated between Student and Academic Affairs, these are difficult obstacles to overcome.  

There is a long-standing notion in educational literature that education should be aimed at the development of students such that they can fully realize their unique individual potential in their adult lives.  Often this view is couched in terms of the student being liberated from the oppression of obstacles that get in the way of full self-realization—ignorance being a primary obstacle, but others include the lack of intellectual and moral capacities for self-authoring the construction and uses of knowledge, such as understanding, judgment, prediction, and problem-solving.  The term, “liberal education” is commonly employed in labeling these views on “what it means to be educated.” The key here is to recognize that education is being extended beyond content acquisition to include the development of intellectual and moral capacities of the individual student, i.e., that the concepts of learning and knowledge are being extended beyond content acquisition to forms of higher-order knowledge construction and application, including skills in the development of mental capacities for processing knowledge in making meaning, gaining understanding, and forming judgments. 

It turns out that these skills in knowledge construction and learning are highly dependent on the development within the student of intrapersonal skills and values as well as interpersonal skills in interacting and learning with and from others.  So, the person being educated for learning must also focus on her or his own intrapersonal and interpersonal development, i.e., on the development of the whole student as a learner.  The person educated in this way is able to be a self-author of knowledge construction and its uses and has the capacities to be a life-long learner.  In fact, this descriptor—to educate life-long learners—is often used to identify a central aim of education.  However, it typically is invoked without recognition of the need for a clear specification of a curriculum of learning experiences required for the development of higher-order knowledge construction and learning competencies.  The implicit assumption is made that, by fulfilling normal academic curriculum requirements for a degree, the student will simultaneously acquire these special capacities of a life-long learner.  But this assumption is rarely addressed, let alone validated, in assessments of learning processes and outcomes.  An advising system aimed at contributing to the development of the capacities of a life-long learner in the individual student will need to assist the student in clearly identifying what are the characteristics of a life-longer and how the individual student can develop them—i.e., a life-long learner “educative advising system” will need to provide an advising curriculum of intentional learning experiences that guide individual students in the development of their self-knowledge and skills about learning, thinking, and acting in the institution’s learning environment in ways that develop their capacities to be their own agent in authoring learning, meaning, understanding, judgments, and problem solutions.

For the purposes of this essay, we shall define an educated person as a competent life-long learner—someone who is capable of being a self-author of knowledge construction and the uses of knowledge in developing meaning and understanding, forming judgments, making decisions and solving problems. This requires acquisition and mastery of knowledge about the worlds the student will function in as an adult—physical domains, cultural domains, knowledge domains, and the domains of their own mind, their own thinking world.  Competent life-long learners have been specifically prepared to take responsibility for and manage their own learning and intellectual development so that they may realize their full individual and unique potential over their lifetimes. 

The remaining terms in the generic description of a Vision of Advising as Educating relate to the student’s “planning and assessing their own education as learners” and “navigating through the institution’s educational opportunities.”  In the traditionalist’s view, these activities do not emerge as problems because planning and navigating are treated as technical issues to be solved through a prescription of “following the check list of requirements for the degree you have chosen and select courses as available from the semester-by-semester schedule of course offerings.” The student’s progress in becoming educated is systematically assessed in terms of successfully completing courses specified as requirements in the academic degree program curriculum selected by the student.  If the student’s own educational goals as a learner extend beyond or more deeply than those established for the chosen academic program, there is no planning for or assessment of educational experiences that will lead to progress in achieving those goals by either the adviser or the student.  Planning, assessment, and navigation of the institution’s educational environment are all driven by academic curriculum requirements which reflect a perspective that education is all about content acquisition, which, in and of itself, does not address many important components of educating the whole student as a learner.  An educative advising process must provide learning opportunities for the student to gain competencies as a planner and assessor of their own education as a learner while simultaneously navigating the institution’s educational environment toward the fulfillment of degree requirements.

So, we will attempt to summarize and organize the themes of this discussion in the form of an expanded definition of a “Vision of Advising as Educating:”    

“Advising is an educative process providing a curriculum of instruction in intentional learning opportunities for individual students in planning, acquiring, and assessing their own education as learners—which is aimed at gaining capacities for becoming competent life-long learners, able and motivated to take responsibility for managing their own learning and intellectual development so that they may fully realize their individual and unique potential over their life-times.”

The learning obtained by the student in the advising curriculum represents extensions and augmentations of the learning typical aimed at in degree program requirements and Student Affairs programming. Learning in the advising curriculum builds on and is experienced simultaneously with student experiences in navigating the institution’s educational environment.  The content of the advising educative process includes the several knowledge domains represented in the advising educative curriculum.  The adviser is an educator, providing for advising curriculum design and instruction as well as guidance to the student in navigating the educational opportunities, expectations, and requirements of the institution.  The student is a learner and educational planner seeking to be educated in how to become a competent life-long learner—i.e., someone who is capable of being a self-author of knowledge construction and its uses in developing learning, understanding, forming judgments, and solving problems and understands how to navigate through the institution’s educational environment to meet goals. The responsibilities of the advisee include working collaboratively in interactions with the advisor and being proactive in engaging the Discovery Advising Curriculum, while making decisions in the dynamic construction of the individual’s navigational path.  The responsibilities of the institution’s instructional technology support infrastructure include providing communication systems to support interactions among advisers and advisees; providing a web-repository for storing and accessing the content and learning tools of the Discovery Advising Curriculum; providing and instructional management system to support the advisor’s development and instruction in the Discovery Advising Curriculum; and providing a personal e-repository for the student to construct, store, and share the student’s own Discovery Advising Learning products.

Seven Organizing Principles for Advising Systems;

The challenge for the educational institution is to provide an advising system that satisfies this definition of educative advising and that also has organizational capacities for demonstrating it is “doing the right things in advising and doing them in the right way.” One might ask, “To meet the institutional advising challenge, what characteristics should be designed into the institutional advising system?”  The organizing principles for an institutional educative advising system can be derived from principles of organization that address purposes, goals, functions, quality, and accountability and from the “Vision of Advising as Educating” which provide requirements for an advising system that will provide advising educative experiences to the student as learner.

First, from an organizational perspective, there are four basic principles to be used as guides in designing a quality educative advising systems:

1. Functionally, the advising system must be designed to provide guidance to students seeking to gain an education and navigate the institution’s educational opportunities.
2. To be “doing the right thing,” the policies and processes of the advising system and the practices of advisers must be aligned with the mission, goals, purposes, and objectives of the institution. 
3. To be “doing things in the right way,” i.e., to be effective in producing outcomes leading to the fulfillment of the institution’s goals and objectives, the quality of the advising system as reflected in the design and practices of the advising system must embody the basic scholarship findings of educational research on what makes for good teaching and learning.
4. Organizations and professionals responsible for advising systems are to be held accountable for aligning the goals and objectives of their programs and services with those of the institution and for designing quality into their processes and practices and for continuously monitoring and improving their performance in terms of effectiveness and efficiency. 

By combining these basic organizational principles and the Advising as Educating requirements specified in the definition above, we derive seven higher-order organizing principles for educative advising systems:

1. Advising Process is functionally responsible:  To fulfill it’s organizational functional responsibilities, the advising system must provide guidance and support for the student seeking to gain an education as a learner and educational planner while navigating the institution’s educational environment.
2. Advising Process is educative goal-driven:  To reflect the institution’s educational mission, goals, and objectives, the advising process is essentially educative—i.e., the advising system is to make available learning opportunities providing access to special domains of knowledge and skills needed by the student to become educated as a life-long learner and educational planner while navigating the institution’s educational environment.
3. Advising Process is Quality responsible:  To ensure quality, advising processes and practices are to be research-based—i.e., they must reflect and are to be assessed in terms of the principal findings of scholarship on education, curricula, teaching, and learning.
4. Advising Process is Knowledge Based:  The advising system is to provide access to knowledge content.  The subject matter of the advising educational system spans four knowledge domains—knowledge about educational goal setting, planning, and assessment; knowledge about student intellectual, intrapersonal, and intellectual developmental patterns and readiness; knowledge about the institution’s educational opportunities; and knowledge about knowledge structures, cognition, and learning.
5. Advising Process is learning and curriculum centered:  Educational learning opportunities provided advisees by the advising system are to be organized as an advising curriculum.
6. Adviser is an Educator:  The role of the adviser is that of an educator –to design, instruct, and assess educational opportunities in the advising curriculum, based on a professional background in the domains of advising knowledge and practiced skills in the application of scholarship knowledge relating to education, curricula, teaching and learning.
7. Student is a learner and educational planner:  The role of the advisee is that of a learner and an educational planner—to gain knowledge and skills from the four domains of the advising curriculum as well as from the institution’s other curricula and to set personal educational goals, design action paths, and assess learning outcomes while navigating the institution’s educational environment.

Components of the Discovery Learning Model of Advising—Discovery Advising Learning and the Discovery Advising Curriculum:

The Discovery Learning Model of Advising is to be developed in ways that incorporate these seven organizing principles for educative advising systems.  First, we identify the two major components of a Discovery Learning Model of Advising—the concepts of Discovery Advising Learning and a Discovery Knowledge Curriculum.

Educative advising learning is essentially a process of discovering knowledge to satisfy advising questions raised by the student seeking an education as a learner. Therefore, the term discovery is used in defining the learning and curriculum components of the educative advising process.  The advising questions raised by students in pursuit of an education aimed at developing competencies as a life-long learner are likely to fall in one of four categories:  1) How do I conduct my personal educational planning? 2) How well do I understand my educational readiness and preparation and how I am likely to develop educationally? 3) How well do I understand the educational and developmental opportunities, requirements, and expectations embedded in the institution’s formal academic curriculum and extra-curricular environment? 4) How do I become proficient in knowledge construction in the disciplines and in higher-order learning and cognition?

Discovery Advising Learning is defined as the knowledge and skills discovered by the student in the pursuit of understanding in these four areas of educative advising questions. Corresponding to these four areas of educative advising questions are four domains of knowledge that comprise the content of the Discovery Advising Curriculum.  The correspondence between the Discovery Advising Learning questions and the Discovery Advising Curriculum domains are presented in the following table.

Table I:  Discovery Advising Learning Questions and Corresponding

Discovery Advising Curriculum Knowledge Domains

Advising as Educating Discovery Advising Learning Questions	Advising as Educating Discovery Advising Curriculum Knowledge Domains
1. “How do I conduct my personal educational planning? —i.e., what learning is required in order for me to develop my capacities for taking charge of and assume responsibility for my own educational goal setting, action planning, decision-making, and progress evaluation.—i.e., how do I set goals, design action plans, make major choices and course selections, assess progress, and evaluate and revise goals and plans?”	Knowledge of educational planning:  knowledge on how to plan for an education as a learner—setting goals, strategizing, selecting action plans, and assessing learning outcomes;
2.     How well do I understand my educational readiness and preparation and how should I expect to develop educationally? —i.e., How do I learn about my personal readiness as a learner, my learning capacities and styles, and the stages of my personal and educational development?”	Knowledge of self:  knowledge of personal learning readiness, capacities, styles, and stages of personal learning and educational  development;
3.     “How well do I understand the educational and developmental opportunities, requirements, and expectations embedded in the institution’s formal academic curriculum and extra-curricular environment? —i.e., the institution’s educational goals, opportunities, requirements, and expectations for personal and intellectual growth and development?”	Knowledge of institutional environment:  knowledge of learning opportunities, expectations, and requirements in the institutional educational environment;
4.     “How do I become proficient in knowledge construction in the disciplines and in higher-order learning and cognition? —i.e., How do I learn about knowledge structures (meta-knowledge), learn about learning (meta-learning) and learn about thinking (meta-cognition), and develop my own ways of making meaning (own epistemology)?”	Meta-Knowledge:  knowledge on how knowledge is structured and how to personally learn, think, and make meaning.

The Discovery Advising Curriculum consists of the intentional discovery advising learning opportunities provided students in the four knowledge domains of the educative advising process. Learning opportunities in the discovery advising curriculum are to be organized as modules, each consisting of a syllabus, learning objectives, learning materials and activities, and learning assessment protocols.  Advisers as a community of educators are responsible for constructing, instructing, and assessing discovery advising curriculum learning modules.  Instruction is conducted following pedagogy practices which address learning as an active process of knowledge construction that transforms the student’s capacities for making meaning.  Students as advising learners engage in the advising learning modules under the instruction of the adviser.  Student learning outcomes in the form of constructed knowledge products developed through experiences with the advising learning modules are captured in personal advising learning portfolios.  The learning/knowledge products of the student are assessed and evaluated by the student, the adviser, and the administrators of the advising system—the student uses these evaluations to appraise their own educational plans and progress; the adviser uses these evaluations to appraise and design improvements in the learning modules of the discovery advising curriculum; the system administrators use these evaluations to appraise whether the advising system is “doing the right things in the right ways.”

The Discovery Learning Model of Advising is defined in terms of eight essential dimensions of an educative advising system that provides access to discovery learning in the discovery advising curriculum:  vision/goals, organizational structure, content, role of adviser, role of student, processes, practices, and assessment.

Table II: Defining Characteristics of the Discovery Learning Model of Advising

Advising System Dimensions and Guiding Principles	Advising System Characteristics under the Discovery Learning Model of Advising (Derived from the “Vision of Advising as Educating”)
1. Vision/Goals: The Advising System Vision and Goals should be aligned (made consistent) with the institution’s educational mission and goals. Institutional Mission: to provide for the education of the student Institutional Goals:  a) to center on the student as learner; b) to produce life-long learners.	• “Advising as an educative process focuses on the development of the individual student as a life-long learner and educational planner and is aimed at guiding the student in acquiring a self-authored education while navigating through the institution’s educational opportunities and fulfilling the requirements for a degree.”
2. Organizational Structure: The advising system organizational structure should clearly provide management, policies, and processes that assure fulfillment of the advising function within the organization and should clearly identify responsibilities of managers and professionals for demonstrating that the advising system is “doing the right thing?” and  is “doing it in the right way.”	• The organizational structure is to support: the development and delivery of the advising curriculum by advisers and the learning of students while engaged in the advising curriculum.  Advisers may need to develop their competencies in the four knowledge domains of the advising curriculum and in relevant educational, teaching, and learning scholarship literature. Frequent evaluations of the advising system’s effectiveness, efficiency, and quality should be conducted and reported, with indicated improvements made to the system.

Table II:  (Continued)

Advising System Dimensions and Guiding Principles	Advising System Characteristics under the Discovery Learning Model of Advising (Derived from the “Vision of Advising as Educating”)
3. Content: The content of the Advising System should consist of learning and knowledge construction experiences that guide and empower the student in understanding and achieving the institution’s and individual’s own educational goals	• In the context of educative advising, the subject-matter content of the advising system consists of four knowledge domains comprising the advising curriculum: knowledge on educational planning; knowledge of self; knowledge of institutional environment; and meta-knowledge re knowledge structures, cognition, and learning.

4.  Role of Adviser:  Adviser is an educator and is responsible for providing and evaluating learning opportunities that move student toward becoming a competent life-long learner  as well as completing degree requirements	• The role of the adviser is that of an educator –to design, instruct, and assess educational opportunities in the advising curriculum, based on a professional background in the domains of advising knowledge and skills and a practiced familiarity with the scholarship of education, curricula, teaching and learning. Advisers must have basic knowledge about educational planning, programming, curriculum development and assessment, knowledge structures, learning, cognition, and student development and skills in applying them to practice. Advisers must have skills in interacting and building effective relationships with students.
5.  Role of Student: Advisees are responsible for learning how to set goals, conduct educational planning, and assess outcomes; and to construct knowledge about the institution’s educational opportunities, expectations, and requirements and about knowledge structures, learning, cognition, and making meaning.	• The role of the advisee is that of a learner and an educational planner—to gain knowledge and skills from the four domains of the advising curriculum as well as from the institution’s other curricula and to set educational goals, design action paths, and assess learning outcomes while navigating the institution’s educational environment.

6.  Processes:  The advising system processes should deliver services effectively and efficiently while enabling the student’s navigation of the educational environment while gaining the knowledge and skills needed to become educated.

• Educative Advising Processes are to support the development, instruction and assessment by advisers of the Discovery Advising Curriculum and to provide students with access to information on institutional educational opportunities, expectations, and requirements.  Additionally, the processes are to support students in their learning engagements with the Discovery Advising Curriculum and in constructing, storing, and assessing advising knowledge products in their discovery advising learning portfolios.  The processes should support effective communications among advisers and students and should allow for continuous monitoring and improvement of quality of educative advising.

Table II:  (Continued)

Advising System Dimensions and Guiding Principles

Advising System Characteristics under the Discovery Learning Model of Advising (Derived from the “Vision of Advising as Educating”)

7.  Practices:  “Good Practices” in the advising system are to reflect knowledge of professional practitioners gained through their experience and applications of relevant theory-based educational, teaching, and learning principles.

• “Good Practices” in the educative advising system should be based on standards developed through dialogue among members of the learning community of professional educative advisers, The good practices are to reflect the experience and application in theory-based principles of education, teaching, and learning.

8.  Assessment: Assessment if the advising system is needed to ensure that the system is “doing the right thing in the right way.” Two basic questions need to be addressed: “Are the goals of the advising system aligned with the educational goals of the institution;” and “Is performance of the advising system such that the goals are being achieved in an effective and efficient manner?”

• Assessment in the educative advising system is conducted at three levels—the student who conducts self-assessments of learning and progress; the adviser who assesses the learning of the student as well as the effectiveness of the advising curriculum; and the system administrator who assesses the overall quality and performance of the system.

Discovery advising is defined as an educative, goal-driven, knowledge-based, quality-responsible, student-centered interactive process:

•  in which the adviser designs and delivers educative interventions and activities that are aimed at assisting the student in planning, discovering, learning, and constructing knowledge:

• in order to more  effectively  navigate the institution’s educational environment toward the achievement of personalized educational goals and,

• more generally, in order to acquire capacities for self-directed knowledge-building, learning, and decision-making to better understand and more effectively and responsibly function as a life-long learner in the larger world environment.

The Discovery Learning Model of Advising takes a comprehensive view of the purposes of higher education to include the acquisition of both academic and personal knowledge and skills, while centering on the development of the individual student as a life-long learner and educational planner. The central problem of advising is considered to be the development of knowledge and skills that allow the student to dynamically construct a path of learning experiences that leads to the fulfillment of the student’s goals and to the acquisition of capacities for self-direction in knowledge-building, learning, and decision-making. 

Advising learning is discovery learning and is aimed at developing the student’s personal knowledge and skills in the practices of being an effective self-designer, planner, and assessor of personal educational navigation paths. Advising instruction provided by the adviser is aimed at developing the advisee’s educational planning knowledge and navigation skills by mentoring the student’s engagement with the Discovery Advising Curriculum.  

The discovery advising curriculum is, in actuality, the institution’s meta-curriculum—it guides the student in personal goal setting, planning, and assessment and guides the student’s learning about, actual engagement in, and navigation through the institution’s formal academic curriculum and co-curriculum opportunities. The design and delivery of the discovery curriculum by advisers are activities and responsibilities of educators.  Advisors need special expertise, knowledge, and experience in designing the discovery curriculum and in guiding and mentoring students through the learning activities embedded in the discovery curriculum.

Table III:  Mapping Institutional Curricula on Knowledge Domains

Curriculum Components	Knowledge/Skills Domains	Educational Goals and Objectives		Responsible Educational Expertise
Discovery Curriculum
• Educational Planning	• Knowledge of Planning Process • Educational Targets	• Educational Planning Skills	Professional Educational Advisers
•  Self-Knowledge	• Educational Readiness • Developmental Processes and Patterns	• Clarification of Educational Goals • Clarification of Developmental Status	Professional Development Advisers and Counselors
•  Institutional Knowledge	• Educational Environment Knowledge	• Clarification of Educational Targets	Professional Educational Advisers
•  Meta Learning and Meta Cognition Knowledge	• Learning processes and skills • Thinking processes and Skills	•  Life-Long Learning and Thinking Skills • Clarification of Educational Goals	• Professional Educational Advisers • Learning and Cognition Professionals
Academic Curriculum
•  Major/Minor	Discipline-based	• Discipline content and methodologies		Discipline Faculty
•  General Education	• Organization of Knowledge • Global Knowledge • Ethical reasoning • Cognitive Skills • Creativity Skills • Leadership Knowledge/Skills • Interpersonal Knowledge/Skills • Intrapersonal Knowledge/Skills	• Interdisciplinary approaches to problem solving • Active and Collaborative Learning skills • Authorship of personal values • Authorship of personal epistemology		General Education Faculty

Table III: (Continued)

Co-Curriculum
•  Community Engagement	• Community Organization • Interpersonal Knowledge/Skills • Intrapersonal Knowledge/Skills	• Collaboration • Team work • Group Leadership	Student Affairs Educational Professionals
•  Career Development	• Occupational Knowledge • Personal Knowledge	• Career Planning Skills • Clarification of Educational Goals	Career Development Professionals

In each area in which structured learning opportunities are provided by the institution—i.e., in each curricular area— discover advisory learning, academic, and co-curricular—all forms of learning and development—cognitive, intrapersonal, and interpersonal—occur.  The challenge to the institution is to recognize that the different sets of professionals on campus—be they advising professionals, faculty, or student affairs—each offer different professional expertise in terms of knowledge and skills to bring to the educational and learning development of students and, in turn, to find creative ways of bringing their differing expertise to bear in coordinated, coherent ways on the education of each student.

The various curricular domains all share responsibilities for the cognitive, intrapersonal, and interpersonal learning and development of each student.  Faculty in the Academic Colleges and Faculty Senate are obviously primarily responsible for the governance, design, delivery, and evaluation of the academic curriculum.  The Division of Undergraduate Studies (DUS), as the University’s professional advising unit, would seem to be the obvious unit to be primarily responsible for the governance, design, delivery, and evaluation of the discovery advising learning curriculum.  Similarly, Student Affairs would seem to be the obvious organizational unit to assume primarily responsible for the governance, design, delivery, and evaluation of the co-curriculum.  In each of these cases, these are shared responsibilities for addressing the educational development needs of the whole student.   There needs to be an overriding commitment among all three domains to partnering in the development and delivery of coordinated programming that is mutually reinforcing in their impact on student learning and development. 

To summarize, the Discovery Learning Model of Advising incorporates seven basic defining principles regarding the advising process—educative events; functional responsibility, quality-driven, knowledge-based, learning-centered, advisor as educator; and student-centered.  The challenge is to design and implement within the institution an educational context for discovery learning, i.e., devise a discovery advisory process and a discovery advising curriculum that incorporates these principles.

It should be noted that the two basic notions derived from the “Vision of Advising as Educating” that a) educating the student should be centered on increasing the student’s capacities for learning and constructing knowledge, and, in turn, b) that the advising system should be proactive and prominent in the institution’s educational environment in guiding students toward more active and responsible roles in their own educational development and planning are also themes that are featured in two relatively recent reports published by professional higher education associations.¹  

One report, published in 2003 by the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) and called Greater Expectations:  A New Vision for Learning as a Nation goes to College, concludes, for example,” that students need to become intentional learners who can adapt to new environments, integrate knowledge from different sources, and continue learning through-out their lives.  They should become empowered through the mastery of intellectual and practical skills, informed by knowledge about the natural and social worlds and about forms of inquiry basic to these studies, and responsible for their personal actions and for civic values” and that advising systems should “help each student create a plan of study leading to the essential outcomes of a twenty-first century education—able to adapt to new environments, integrate knowledge from different sources, and continue learning throughout their lives. There will be many alternative paths up the educational mountain. But every student needs a sense of direction, markers as well as knowledgeable guides, and navigational tools to support the journey.”

A second report, jointly published in 2004 by the American College Personnel Association (ACPA) and the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA) and called, Learning Reconsidered:  A Campus-Wide Focus on the Student Experience, recommends that “the focus of education must shift from information transfer to a focus on transforming the student’s capacities for making meaning” by engaging students in transformative learning, which “involves behavior, meaning making, and cognitive and emotional development in…three arenas, social, academic, and institutional, with three integrated outcomes—construction of knowledge, construction of meaning, and construction of self in society.” “It is increasingly important for students to become managers of their own learning processes and goals.  This is understood as helping students themselves become more intentional learners—e.g., engaging large goals for their learning; setting expectations for their own accomplishments; acquiring, through guidance, greater capacity for self-reflection and the construction of meaning; developing personal learning portfolios (can be electronic) to document their achievements; and working with advisers and faculty to design educational experiences that integrate their learning activities.”

Neither of these reports, however, provide details or specifications on how advising systems are to be changed such that they can fulfill these responsibilities for guiding students to center their education on developing their own learning and educational planning capacities.  The concepts of Discovery Advising Leaning and Discovery Advising Curriculum provided in this essay directly speak to the omissions of these other reports.

Comparisons of the Discovery Learning Model of Advising with a Traditional Model of Advising:

There is common scenario of advising in practice that captures the traditional model of advising: The advisee comes to the adviser with a “problem” concerning what choices or decisions to make regarding the degree or major program to select, courses to take, or goals to set as the advisee “navigates” through the institution’s educational opportunities in order to satisfy requirements for graduation.  The advisee turns to the advisor and asks for advice.  The advisor interacts with the advisee, asking diagnostic types of questions, and then proceeds to “prescribe” a solution to the advisee’s problem in the form of recommended actions or decisions to undertake.  The student is expected to “accept” the prescribed solution offered by the adviser and to proceed towards implementing the “advice.”

There are some common speculations underlying this often-observed advising scenario:  The advisee’s approach to the adviser occurs in the context of partially shared assumptions, perspectives, and expectations on both their parts. The advisor represents the authority of the institution and has “certified expertise” reflecting professional training, access to specialized information and knowledge, and practiced experiences on which to base diagnoses and problem-solution prescriptions.  The student is expected to come to the interaction having identified, at least tentatively, a general set of personal goals and decisions about academic and career directions to be provided as responses to the advisor’s diagnostic questions and, in turn, to “accept” and act upon the authoritative advice prescribed by the adviser.

These common speculations reflected in the commonly observed adviser/advisee scenario can be assembled into to what might be described as the “Diagnostic Prescriptive/Acceptance Model of Advising.  This same model can be observed as forming the core of practice in other advising professions such as medicine and law.  The “Diagnostic Prescriptive/Acceptance Model” as practiced in advising can be identified in terms of its component parts:

• The “content” of advising consists of an exchange of information and a dialogue that leads to the diagnosis and prescription of a solution to the student’s choice or decision problems relating to navigating the institution’s educational opportunities.

•  Advising is implemented through a personal relationship involving communications, information transmittals, and assessment interactions between advisee and advisor.  The effectiveness of the relationship depends on the advisor having established a caring and understanding rapport and the advisee adopting a trusting and accepting stance.

•  The Adviser’s role is one of authority based on “institutionally certified expertise” based on a presumption of knowledge of institutional educational mission and programming, discipline knowledge structures, student cognitive and moral development patterns, and theories and practices of individual knowledge construction, learning, and thinking, and, in addition, practiced skills in diagnosing and prescribing solutions to advisee problems of choice and actions.  This presumption of specialized knowledge on the part of the adviser is typically not validated in practice.  The advisor is considered as a diagnostician and prescriber of recommended actions.  If the adviser is to be considered a teacher in this scenario, then teaching is best described as “telling, based on the adviser’s own knowledge.”

•  The Advisee’s role in the interaction is essentially passive, requiring only some preliminary thoughts on personal goals and major educational and developmental directions and, in addition, a willingness to accept and act upon the prescriptions of the authority figure.   If the advisee is considered to be a learner in this scenario, then learning is best described as “passive absorption” of the knowledge and wisdom passed on by the advisor-teacher.

•  The immediate outcome of advising is a solution to the student’s “current navigational problem;” the ultimate advising outcome after several adviser/advisee interactions is progress in the student’s fulfillment of graduation requirements and attainment of a degree. In this context, an advising system will be assessed as having higher quality if it leads to fewer students dropping out and more students fulfilling graduation requirements on time.  The quality of the education achieved by the student—how well prepared is the student to be self-directed in future knowledge-building, learning, and decision-making—is not a focused concern.

The traditional Diagnostic-Prescriptive/Acceptance Model of Advising can be compared with the Discovery Learning Model of Advising by drawing contrasts along the eight defining dimensions of advising systems identified in the above section of this essay.

Table IV:  Comparisons to the Discovery Learning Model of Advising with the Diagnostic Prescriptive/Acceptance Model of Advising

Advising System Characteristics under the Discovery Learning Model of Advising	Advising System Characteristics under the Traditional Model of Advising as Diagnostic-Prescriptive/Acceptance
1.  Vision/Goals

• “Advising as an educative process focuses on the development of the individual student as a life-long learner and is aimed at guiding the student in acquiring a self-authored education while navigating through the institution’s educational opportunities and fulfilling the requirements for a degree.”	• Advising is envisioned as a process to assist the student in making academic choices of majors and courses, with the goal of the student successfully completing the requirements for the degree.  The assumption is made that the educational goals of the institution and student are embedded in and are consistent with the published requirements for the degree.
2. Organizational Structure:
• The organizational structure is to support: the development and delivery of the advising curriculum by advisers and the learning of advisees while engaged in the advising curriculum.  Advisers may need to develop their competencies in the four knowledge domains of the advising curriculum and in relevant educational, teaching, and learning scholarship literature. Frequent evaluations of the advising system’s effectiveness, efficiency, and quality should be conducted and reported, with indicated improvements made to the system.	•  The organizational structure is to support access by adviser and student to information about students’ readiness and institutional academic program requirements and course availabilities.  It also is to support contacts and the development of a trusting relationship between adviser and student. Organizationally, there are no common standards for the professional qualifications of advisers.
3. Content:
• In the context of educative advising, the subject-matter content of the advising system consists of the four knowledge domains comprising the advising curriculum: knowledge on how to plan for an education as a learner—setting goals, strategizing, selecting action plans, and assessing learning outcomes; knowledge of personal learning readiness, capacities, styles, and stages of personal learning and educational development; knowledge of learning opportunities, expectations, and requirements in the institutional educational environment; knowledge on how knowledge is structured and how to personally learn, think, and make meaning.	• The “content” of advising is embedded in the exchange of information and dialogue between adviser and student that leads to the diagnosis and prescription of a solution to the student’s choice or decision problems relating to navigating the institution’s educational opportunities. The knowledge content of the exchange is derived from the professional expertise of the adviser.

Table IV (Continued)

Advising System Characteristics under the Discovery Learning Model of Advising	Advising System Characteristics under the Traditional Model of Advising as Diagnostic-Prescriptive/Acceptance
4.  Role of Adviser:
•  The role of the adviser is that of an educator –to design, instruct, and assess educational opportunities in the advising curriculum, based on a professional background in the domains of advising knowledge and skills and a practiced familiarity with the scholarship of education, curricula, teaching and learning. Advisers must have basic knowledge about educational planning, programming, curriculum development and assessment, knowledge structures, learning, cognition, and student development and skills in applying them to practice. Advisers must have skills in interacting and building effective relationships with students.	• The Adviser’s role is one of authority based on “institutionally certified expertise” requiring knowledge of institutional educational mission and programming, discipline knowledge structures, student cognitive and moral development patterns, and theories and practices of individual knowledge construction, learning, and thinking, and, in addition, practiced skills in diagnosing and prescribing solutions to advisee problems of choice and actions.  The advisor is a diagnostician and a prescriber of recommended actions.  If the adviser is to be considered a teacher in this scenario, then teaching is best described as “telling, based on the adviser’s own knowledge.”
5.  Role of Student:
• The role of the advisee is that of a self-analyst of learning and an educational planner—seeking to gain knowledge and skills from the four domains of the advising curriculum as well as from the institution’s other curricula and to set educational goals, design action paths, and assess learning outcomes while navigating the institution’s educational environment.	• The Advisee’s role in advising interactions with the adviser is essentially passive, requiring only some preliminary thoughts on personal goals and major educational and developmental directions and, in addition, a willingness to accept and act upon the prescriptions of the authority figure.   If the advisee is considered to be a learner in this scenario, then learning is best described as “passive absorption” of the knowledge and wisdom of the advisor-teacher.
6.  Processes:
•  Educative Advising Processes are to support the development, instruction and assessment by advisers of the Discovery Advising Curriculum and to provide students with access to information on institutional educational opportunities, expectations, and requirements.  Additionally, the processes are to support students in their learning engagements with the Discovery Advising Curriculum and in constructing, storing, and assessing advising knowledge products in their discovery advising learning portfolios.	• Advising is implemented through a personal relationship involving communications, information transmittals, and assessment interactions between advisee and advisor.  The effectiveness of the relationship depends on the advisor having established a caring and understanding rapport and the advisee adopting a trusting and accepting stance. The processes should support effective communications among advisers and students and should allow for continuous monitoring and improvement of quality of educative advising.

Table IV (Continued):

Advising System Characteristics under the Discovery Learning Model of Advising	Advising System Characteristics under the Traditional Model of Advising as Diagnostic-Prescriptive/Acceptance
7.  Practices:
• “Good Practices” in the educative advising system should be based on standards developed through dialogue among members of the learning community of professional educative advisers, The good practices are to reflect the experience and application in theory-based principles of education, teaching, and learning.	• Practices across the system are not organized around any single shared vision; there is no basis for arriving at goals or standards of good practice.
8.  Assessment:
• Assessment in the educative advising system is conducted at three levels—the student who conducts self-assessments of learning and progress; the adviser who assesses the learning of the student as well as the effectiveness of the advising curriculum; and the system administrator who assesses the overall quality and performance of the system.	• Assessment, if addressed at all, is a casual, unstructured activity.  No built-in responsibilities assigned to validate the accountability questions for the advising system of “doing the right things in the right ways.”

In comparing these two models for advising, the Discovery Learning Model has many compelling advantages over the Diagnostic Prescriptive/ Acceptance Model.  It is more principled in its design—primarily, that it is shaped by a common vision, based on principals and goals of organizations, education, teaching, and learning, that allow for assessing its quality and effectiveness and for demonstrating its accountability to stakeholders. It is student learning centered and leads to higher-ordered learning that promotes the development of characteristics associated with being a competent life-long learner having capacities for self-authoring their experiences across the multiple domains of their worlds.

It has disadvantages, however, in that it demands more of both students and advisers. It demands more of the student in terms of additional learning activities imposed by the discovery advising curriculum on top of the program requirements for a major; for the adviser, there are additional professional demands in terms of participating in the design, instruction, and assessment of discovery advising learning opportunities in the several knowledge domains of the discovery advising curriculum.  This may require additional professional development on the part of many advisers. 

The question that then arises is to whether the benefits of the Discovery Learning Model of Advising outweigh the requirements for more and deeper involvements by both students and advisors?   With respect to students, this question can be more sharply defined if a basic feature of the Discovery Learning Model of Advising is recognized:  Since the model incorporates all of the advising features and learning outcomes of the more traditional model, including a focus on assisting students in meeting the requirements for their chosen major, the extra benefits of applying the model in terms of greater and deeper knowledge gains and greater capacities for self-authorship can be viewed as direct offsets for their extra energy and involvements in the Discovery Advising Curriculum.  Students can directly balance whether the opportunity for “taking charge” of their own education and for “gaining capacities for authoring their own future roles in and contributions to the many worlds in which they will participate during their future adult lives” is worth the extra energies and involvements with their advisor in the Discovery Advising Curriculum.  For Advisers, the benefit/cost comparisons are more confounded—the costs are clear: more professional involvement in curriculum design, instruction, and assessment—but the benefits for the adviser are less direct and more in terms of meeting professional and advising system standards and expectations and, perhaps, the intrinsic rewards of significantly contributing to the learning and educational development of the individual advisee.  

The choice of which model to adopt on a system-wide basis cannot be left to a student-by-student, adviser-by-adviser voluntary basis.  Individual advisers cannot be expected to design and deliver a unique Discovery Advising Curriculum for each individual student advisee—no more than individual instructors in the academic curriculum can be expected to design and deliver a different version of the academic curriculum for each individual student. The economies of scale necessary for making feasible the development of a discovery advising curriculum require that a system-wide decision be made, with the community of advising practitioners all collaborating and contributing to the design, delivery, and assessment of the Discovery Advising Curriculum and with individual students actually having a viable option available for electing the more powerful educational path. Otherwise, the advising system will become, by default, a chaotic happening where everyone—adviser and student—follows her or his own vision.  Within the context of a system-wide adoption of the “Vision of Advising as Educating” and, in turn, the Discovery Learning Model of Advising, use of the Diagnostic Prescriptive/Acceptance model should be allowed on the discretion of the adviser in specific cases with individual students, but under well-defined circumstances where the exception makes for “good practice.”

There are conditions under which putting into practice the Diagnostic Prescriptive/ Acceptance Model of Advising maybe appropriate for guiding the interactions of an adviser and advisee.  For example, if the purposes of higher education are considered to be the production of more and better qualified persons for specific positions in the workforce in contrast to assuming higher education purposes are to produce more and better generally educated individuals—i.e., producing more creative, more independent, more well-rounded, and more effective individual thinkers, designers, analysts, evaluators, problem-solvers, life-long learners, social interactors, and citizen participants—then the basic advising navigational problems aimed at assisting the student in extracting the most from institutional educational opportunities are addressed and solved in very different ways. 

When preparation for entry into the workforce is the agreed upon goal of the individual student after full collaborative consideration of the implications of making that choice has been undertaken by both the adviser and advisee, the Diagnostic Prescriptive/Acceptance Model of Advising probably works reasonably well. The focus in such advising situations is on job requirements and education takes on characteristics of training.  Educational programming aimed at training persons ready to enter the workforce and meet exacting position requirements results in tighter specifications of course and degree program requirements. The “right ways of navigating” through a training curriculum can be more narrowly and more precisely prescribed in terms of attaining specific knowledge and skills useful in fulfilling particular job requirements.  But the mission of higher education is generally considered broader than workforce training.  And even if workforce preparation is considered as the driving force for enrollment in higher education by many entering freshmen, a strong case can be made for the proposition that someone is better prepared for positive long-term contributions and success in the workforce if they are competent life-long learners and able to be adaptive in response to changing career situations than if they are trained with a tight focus on entry-level qualifications.

On certain occasions in managing the engagement of a particular student in the Discovery Advising Curriculum, it may be appropriate to adopt on a temporary basis the streamlined adviser-student interactions prescribed by the Diagnostic Prescriptive/Acceptance Model of Advising.  Particularly when the student is initially engaging in the advising process as an entering freshmen or at the time a student is switching majors, the need for immediate decisions about course selection make it desirable to short-cut the student’s learning activities in the Discovery Advising Curriculum and replace them with the diagnostic prescriptive expertise of the adviser, especially if the adviser’s diagnostic questioning and assembling of evidence for that particular student is shaped by expert knowledge of what the learning activities and learning product outcomes would be if the student were to enter into a more involved engagement in the Discovery Advising Curriculum. When the student has time to be more reflective and gain deeper insights on their own perspectives of educational goals, learning and planning strategies, and assessment protocols, the student should then be encouraged to engage in the Discovery Advising Curriculum in order to develop personal long-term diagnoses and prescriptions of next steps in the educational process to either replace or substantiate the diagnoses and prescriptions of the adviser.

Producing more and better generally educated persons puts more emphasis on customized diagnosing—i.e., gaining information and constructing knowledge that is relevant and meaningful with respect to the individual student—and on constructing customized decision and action navigational plans—i.e., developing and assessing action plans in ways that reflect the unique goals, readiness, and knowledge of the individual advisee and that allow for an evaluation of progress and the effectiveness of the plan in terms of the student meeting personalized goals (one of which might be related to vocational preparation), while developing the characteristics of a well-educated person. 

The role of the adviser when the purposes of the advising system are to produce more and better generally educated persons switches from one of “diagnosing and prescribing” to one of teaching the student—exposing, encouraging, guiding the student—to reflect on what it means to be an educated person and on how the student can develop the knowledge and skills necessary to achieve that outcome.  The role of the advisor becomes that of an educator—providing materials and experiences of excellence that increase the capacities of the student to make new and personalized meanings of his or her educational experiences. 

The role of the advisee switches from a passive role—“tell me what I should do”—to an active learner role—“help me understand and acquire knowledge about what it means to be an educated person and how I can develop skills as a decision maker, planner, and evaluator of my own development as a navigator through the institution’s educational opportunities—and by extension, a navigator through learning and career opportunities throughout my lifetime.”

The relationship between advisor and advisee still needs to be based on mutual trust and caring, but its focus is shifted.  No longer is the student merely an object to be processed to conform to predetermined specifications; rather, the focus is on improving the student’s own capacities as a creative and responsible agent of self-development and self-determination and of constructive contributions to the worlds of work and community.  The relationship becomes focused on collaboration in constructing diagnoses and developing navigational action plans centered on the individual student’s unique stage of development and reflecting meaningful knowledge about that student’s individual goals and readiness, about relevant institutional educational programming opportunities, and about general structures for knowledge-building, learning, thinking, and decision-making.

The literature on theories of advising offers a number of different labels and constructs about what advising is and how it should be modeled.   Some stress the purposes of higher education as being on the development of academic knowledge and cognition skills and are given labels such as Academically Centered Advising [Lowenstein (1999)] and Praxis Advising [Hemwall and Trachte (1999)]. Others stress the importance of the student developing interpersonal and intrapersonal knowledge and skills and capacities for making self-based determinations of meaning and are given labels such as Developmental Advising as introduced by Crookson (1972) and elaborated upon by Chickering (1994) and others.  Still others stress the importance of focusing on academic goals and on career goals in developing navigational paths for individual students and are labeled with terms such as the O’Banion Advising Model, or the Integrated Advising Model [Burton and Wellington (1998)]. The literature on advising suggests an active debate among those who feel the emphasis should be on academics—sometimes to the exclusion of paying attention to student development—and those who are inclined in opposite directions, with both camps making sure that it is clear what kinds of professional expertise is needed by the advisor.  The arguments end up pitting the expertise of student affairs professionals with that of academic professionals, particularly faculty. What is needed is an overarching theory of advising that appropriately recognizes the different dimensions of student development—cognitive, intrapersonal, and interpersonal—and how all curricular domains—be they academic, co-curricular, or advising—have shared responsibilities for collaborating in addressing the development of the whole student with all the power of their respective professional knowledge and skill expertise.  It is hoped that the “Advising is Educating” model proposed in this essay is just such an overarching theory of advising.

In all of these cases of alternative possible theories of advising, there is a strong propensity to refer to the role of the advisor as that of a teacher.  However, the teaching responsibilities, activities, and materials of the advisor are never fully elaborated upon.  References are made to activities of the advisor such as:  “the advisor should engage the student in dialogue, should encourage the student to consider or reflect on, or should require the student to construct a plan or schedule.”  There is little or no emphasis on what the student should be learning—i.e., what knowledge the student should be constructing—or on what pedagogy the advisor-teacher is to deploy or on what learning activities the advisee-student should be undertaking in order to develop the knowledge and the skills needed to conduct educational navigation planning.  In short, there is no emphasis on the advising curriculum students should be engaged in order to learn and construct knowledge necessary to be an effective educational opportunity planners, navigators, and assessors.

Conclusions.

Beginning with a “Vision of Advising as Educating” and some basic organizational principles, the key concepts of, Competent Life-Long Learner, Discovery Advising Learning, Discovery Advising, and Discovery Advising Curriculum have been developed and assembled into a Discovery Learning Model of Advising. When comparisons are made with other models of advising, in particular, with the traditional Diagnostic Prescriptive/Acceptance Model, the Discovery Learning Model of Advising emerges as the more powerful in terms of being both more centered on student learning and educational development and more responsive to organizational principles, allowing for the demonstration of accountability for “doing the right things in advising and for doing them in the right ways.” 

The Discovery Learning Model of Advising can be viewed as providing a meta-curriculum, the Discovery Advising Curriculum, for students that has two very positive features:  it allows students to design a customized navigational path through the institution’s other curricula opportunities based on their own individual educational goals; and it provides an opportunity for gaining self-empowerment capacities over and above what is likely to be the outcome of an education based only on acquiring the knowledge necessary for satisfying the normal degree requirements of the institution.

The Discovery Learning Model of Advising reflects a vision of educative advising that positions the adviser as an educator, responsible for professional knowledge and skills not only in making educational diagnoses and prescriptions to guide the student in navigating the institution’s academic curriculum, but also for professional knowledge and skills needed in educating the student in educational planning, personal learning, and knowledge construction.

The Discovery Learning Model of Advising provides specific details on what is required for an advising system that will meet the requirements for extended advising services that are being called for in two major reports from professional higher education associations.  One report from the Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) calls for advising systems that “help each student create a plan of study leading to the essential outcomes of a twenty-first century education—able to adapt to new environments, integrate knowledge from different sources, and continue learning through-out their lives. There will be many alternative paths up the educational mountain. But every student needs a sense of direction, markers as well as knowledgeable guides, and navigational tools to support the journey.”  The second report, jointly published by the American College Personnel Administrators (ACPA) and the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA) recommends that advising systems should “emphasize enabling students to take responsibility for their own learning and helping students gain the knowledge, skills, and perspectives needed to guide their own learning and have established and documented learning outcomes,” and “It is increasingly important for students to become managers of their own learning processes and goals.  This is understood as helping students themselves become more intentional learners—e.g., engaging large goals for their learning; setting expectations for their own accomplishments; acquiring, through guidance, greater capacity for self-reflection and the construction of meaning; developing personal learning portfolios (can be electronic) to document their achievements; and working with advisers and faculty to design educational experiences that integrate their learning activities” and, further, “To produce “intentional learners, we must provide guidance as students design their own learning plans and conceive their roles, abilities, and contributions in the larger society.” Neither of these reports provide any indications of how advising systems are to designed or transformed to meet these requirements.  The educative advising system embedded in the Discovery Learning Model of Advising provides responses to questions of how advising must be re-shaped to meet these requirements.

Finally, if we adopt the “Vision of Advising as Educating” and implement a Discovery Learning Model of Advising, we can lay claim that the student is being “Educated for Life.”  To educate is to help students come into conscious possession of their own powers of agency, especially through integration of thinking, feeling, and actions, in gaining an understanding of themselves and their world and developing their own capacities for constructive and responsible actions.  Educating is helping the student to increase their intellectual, interpersonal, and intrapersonal capacities–develop reasoning powers, gain understanding, develop and establish criteria—in order to make meaning, form judgments, and take effective actions in certain contexts. “Increasing intellectual and personal capabilities” is learning.  Learning occurs through engagement in educative events and materials. It involves study, experience, reflection, and action in repeated cycles.  When educative events and materials are intentionally designed as interventions in the student’s experiences, they form a curriculum to guide learning.   A broadly and generally educated person has the capacity of using her or his knowledge and intelligence with more power in making meaning, evaluating, and taking effective actions in a wide variety of contexts [Gowin (1981)].

Education also provides students with opportunities to exercise their curiosity, to appreciate the human condition, to expand their capacities for invention or artistic expression, to enrich their lives beyond the utilitarian. Conversely, students need to know that the human condition can be destructive and prejudicial, that for any number of reasons, humans make errors, some of them inconsequential and some with devastating consequences. And lastly, education must confirm for students the power of education, not just as a means to an end, say, as an individual goal of some sort of personal happiness, but as an liberating effect unto it itself, with the power to understand, to make sense of what might appear chaotic, to seek solutions not only to individual concerns but to community, national and international issues [White (2004)].

Advising is educating. Advising is helping students come into conscious possession of their own powers of thinking, feeling, and action to gain an understanding and make meaning of their own educational environment.   To be a curriculum navigator is to be a planner, evaluator, and decision maker in selecting a path among the institution’s educational opportunities. To do this, students must gain and apply certain kinds of knowledge—both explicit and tacit—about themselves, about their environment, and about the processes for learning, thinking, knowledge-construction, and decision-making.  To gain and apply this knowledge involves discovery learning, i.e., repeated cycles of study, experience, reflection, and taking action, as the student discovers the knowledge of self, educational opportunities, and meta-processes used in making educations decisions.  The adviser provides access to the discovery advising curriculum and guides and instructs the student through the discovery learning events, materials, and activities of the discovery curriculum.  The student’s navigational path through the curriculum emerges through taking “action steps” in each cycle of the discovery learning process.  The action steps represent adjustments in the student’s educational goals and plans.   

To be come educated in navigating the institutions educational environment represents self-development in gaining knowledge and skills that are transferable and applicable to a wide-range of environments and experiences students will encounter in making meaning, making choices, and navigating among opportunities in their lives beyond college.  It is in this sense that discovery advising is “educating for life.”  As advising educators, we have the opportunity to respond to a noble calling—helping students capture the true essence of education as empowerment to "lead out" to something better, not just for the individual but for the society (and world) in which that person exits.

There will be challenges in implementing an advising system based on a “Vision of Advising as Educating” and the Discovery Learning Model of Advising.  It will require an institution to buy into the notion that its advising system should be held responsible for supporting the institution’s educational mission and goals and for providing students with advising services that center on developing their educational, learning, and intellectual capacities—not only indirectly by providing guidance in the regular academic curriculum but directly through the provision of a personal learning and development advising curriculum. It will require that the professional competencies of advisers be extended to include knowledge and skills needed to design, deliver, and assess the educational advising curriculum; in some cases, this will require an organized institution-wide professional development program for advisers.  Further, the institutional governance and technology infrastructure systems will need to be realigned such that they support advisers in the setting of standards and designing and delivering of instruction in the advising curriculum and, equally, support students in their engagements with the advising curriculum.  Individually, advisers will need to professionally commit to their role as educators, with all that implies in terms of professional development and allocation of time among their professional activities. Students will need to individually commit to investing more of their energies toward their own personal development. 

But these challenges are not insurmountable. Obviously, it will take strong leadership, and perhaps more resources, to shape both the visioning and the practices of management in the advising community such that it sees itself and operates as a learning and educating community, responsible for the personal educational development of individual students and in need of transforming itself. Contributing significantly to the educational development of individual students is, after all, a very noble cause.

Footnotes:

1.     (page 13) These ideas derived from the “Vision of Advising as Educating” about centering advising on the learning and educational development of students are very similar to ideas put forth in two relatively recent reports from professional associations in higher education.

a.     AAC&U (Association of American Colleges and Universities), (2003). Greater Expectations:  A New Vision for Learning as a Nation goes to College, available at: http://www.greaterexpectations.org

Makes these points:

• Students need to become Intentional Learners who can adapt to new environments, integrate knowledge from different sources, and continue learning through-out their lives.  They should become :

– empowered through the mastery of intellectual and practical skills, 

– informed by knowledge about the natural and social worlds and about forms of inquiry basic to these studies, and

– responsible for their personal actions and for civic values.                                           

• Advising systems should “help each student create a plan of study leading to the essential outcomes of a twenty-first century education—able to adapt to new environments, integrate knowledge from different sources, and continue learning through-out their lives. There will be many alternative paths up the educational mountain. But every student needs a sense of direction, markers as well as knowledgeable guides, and navigational tools to support the journey.”

b. ACPA (American College Personnel Association) and NASPA (National Association of Student Personnel Administrators), (2004). Learning Reconsidered:  A Campus-Wide Focus on the Student Experience, Washington, DC: authors.

Makes these points:

•  the focus of education must shift from information transfer to a focus on transforming the student’s capacities for making meaning.

•  where the core of the learning experience is focused on development of the student’s reflective processes.

• Learning is a complex, holistic, multi-centric activity that occurs throughout and across the college experience.

• transformative learning involves behavior, meaning making, and cognitive and emotional development in all three arenas, social, academic, and institutional, with three integrated outcomes—construction of knowledge, construction of meaning, and construction of self in society    

•  For institutions to become learner-centered—they must emphasize enabling students to take responsibility for their own learning and to helping students gain the knowledge, skills, and perspectives needed to guide their own learning and have established and documented learning outcomes.  

•  Advising systems should “emphasize enabling students to take responsibility for their own learning and helping students gain the knowledge, skills, and perspectives needed to guide their own learning and have established and documented learning outcomes.”

• “It is increasingly important for students to become managers of their own learning processes and goals.  This is understood as helping students themselves become more intentional learners—e.g., engaging large goals for their learning; setting expectations for their own accomplishments; acquiring, through guidance, greater capacity for self-reflection and the construction of meaning; developing personal learning portfolios (can be electronic) to document their achievements; and working with advisers and faculty to design educational experiences that integrate their learning activities.”

• To produce “intentional learners, we must provide guidance as students design their own learning plans and conceive their roles, abilities, and contributions in the larger society

References:

1.     AAC&U (Association of American Colleges and Universities), (2003). Greater Expectations:  A New Vision for Learning as a Nation goes to College, available at: http://www.greaterexpectations.org

2.     ACPA (American College Personnel Association) and NASPA (National Association of Student Personnel Administrators), (2004). Learning Reconsidered:  A Campus-Wide Focus on the Student Experience, Washington, DC: authors.

3.     Barr, R. and J. Tagg, From Teaching to Learning, Change, Nov/Dec, 1995.

4.     Baxter Magolda, Marcia B. (1999) Creating Contexts for Learning and Self-Authorship:  Constructive-Development Pedagogy,  Vanderbilt University Press,

5.     Beck, A. (1999). Advising Undecided Students:  Lessons from Chaos Theory, NACADA Journal, 19:1, 45-49.

6.     Berieter, C., (2002). Education and Mind in the Knowledge Age, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

7.     Bransford, J D.,, A. L. Brown, R. R. Cocking, ed.,  (2000), How People Learn:  Brain, Mind, Experience, and School, Expanded Edition, Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, National Research Council, National Academy Press.

8.     Burton, J. and K. Wellington (1998). The O’Banion Model of Academic Advising: An Integrative Approach, NACADA Journal, 18:2,  13-20.

9.     Chickering, A.W. (1994) Empowering Lifelong Self-Development, NACADA Journal, 14:2,  50-53.

10.  Crookston, B.B. (1972). A Developmental View of Academic Advising as Teaching.  Journal of College Student Personnel , 13,12-17. Reprinted in NACADA Journal 14:2, 5-9.

11.    Doherty, A., T. Riordan, J. Roth. (2002).  Student Leaarning: A Central Focus for Institutions of Higher Education, Alverno College Institute. Milwaukee, Wisconson.

12.    Donald, J. G., (2002). Learning to Think: Disciplinary Perspectives, Jossey-Bass.

13.    Frost,S. (1994). Advising Alliances: Sharing Responsibility for Student Success, NACADA Journal, 14:2,  54-58

14.    Gardner, H. (1999). Intelligence Reframed: Multiple Intelligences for the 21^st Century, Basic Books, New York, NY.

15.    Gowin, D. Bob, (1981),  Educating, Cornell University Press

16.    Grites, T and V. Gordon (2000) Developmental Academic Advising Revisited. NACADA Journal, 20:1, 12-15.

17.    Hagen, P. (1994). Academic Advising as Dialectic, NACADA Journal, 14:2, 85-88.

18.    Hemwall, M.K. and K. C. Trachte, Learning at the Core:  Toward a New Understanding of Academic Advising, NACADA Journal, 19:1, 5-11.

19.    Kirk-Kuwaye, M. (1998). Using Metaphor in Academic Advising, NACADA Journal, 18:1,  50-53.

20.    Lazear, David (1991).  Seven Ways of Knowing:  Teaching for Multiple Intelligences; A Handbook of Techniques for Expanding Intelligence.  Second Edition.  IRI/Skylight Training and Publishing, Inc. Palatine, Ill.

21.    Lowenstein, M. (1999). An Alternative to the Development Theory of Advising, The Mentor, Center for Excellence in Academic Advising, www.psu.edu/dus/mentor.

22.    Langer, E. J. (1997), The Power of Mindful Learning, Addison-Wiley.

23.    Lave, J. and E. Wenger, (1991). Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation, Cambridge University Press.

24.    Mentowski, M. and Associates, (2000).  Learning that Lasts: Integrating Learning, Development, and Performance in College and Beyond, Jossey-Bass.

25.    Miller, M. A. (1994). Developmental Advising: Where Teaching and Learning Intersect, NACADA Journal, 14:2, 43-45.

26.    Novak, J. D. and D. Bob Gowin, (1984). Learning How to Learn, Cambridge University Press.

27.    O’Banion, T. (1994). An Academic Advising Model, NACADA Journal, 14:2, 10-16.

28.    Weigel, V. B., (2002). Deep Learning for a Digital Age: Technologiy’s Untapped Potential to Enrich Higher Education, Jossey-Bass.

29.    White, E. (2004) Private e-mail correspondence.