Advising Advice

The six phases of our holistic advising initiative are based on the work of Dr. Jenny Bloom (Florida Atlantic University) who described the concept of Appreciative Advising, and last year (2020) we hosted Dr. Amanda Propst-Cuevas (Florida Atlantic University), Dr. Bloom's colleague, for a day-long workshop on Appreciative Advising.We used that experience as a starting place for W&L's holistic advising Fall Academy session where we worked with the six phases: disarm, discover, dream, design, deliver, and deeper reflection, and their definitions to produce our own guidelines for holistic advising. Below is the result of our deliberations with an amazing group of faculty & staff who produced this work in progress.

As we know many of you advise students on many important matters, including academic pressure points, we wanted to make sure that you are aware of substantive changes in add/drop and pass/fail timelines and procedures approved by the faculty this past spring.In some ways, the new policy is more liberal than the previous timeline, allowingstudents a bit more latitude to adjust their schedule. This is more relevant in recent years given the standard credit ceiling of 15 credits (vs. a 14-credit ceiling as recently as a few years ago). Far more students in recent years have the ability to drop a class without falling into an underload. In contrast, we don't think there will be nearly as many exceptions made by FEC going forward.

We are now in the second year of our summer registration system. Twelve of your colleagues, along with me, Fred, Elizabeth, Jason, and Kim, among others, worked over the summer to help incoming FY students develop their fall term schedule.We want to make sure the handoff to you, our initial advisers, goes more smoothly this year. In the next week, you will receive your new initial advisees' names and contact information. Your advisees, in turn, will receive their schedules. Some will reach out to their summer registration advisers with questions, but the summer registration advisers will advise them to reach out to you. This is handoff time.

When things feel a little overwhelming check out one of these helpful resources for W&L students: