As part of the Strategic Doing for Student Success initiative, one work team is focused on enhancing a key part of students' college experience: the academic advising support they receive.
Tradara McLaurine and Shannon McCullough serve as co-chairs of the academic advising work team.
“The purpose of the academic advising work group is to come up with intentional, short-turnaround projects to create an advising strategy to help students not fall through the cracks,” McLaurine, senior executive director of campus career and advising services, said.
With the method’s approach using short-term objectives to achieve results, McCullough noted its effect in prompting team members to actively express their ideas.
“We can keep talking about the same initiatives, but it seems almost too future-thinking for some because there’s so many things that need to happen at the moment,” McCullough, assistant dean of admissions and student affairs in the Herron School of Art + Design, said. “We framed it as, actually ‘think about solving this question with something that is tangible right at the moment, where we don’t have to have the money, human resources, or whatever is that barrier.’ And then it was a total mindset shift for people, and I feel we started seeing more engagement.”
Both McLaurine and McCullough described the process for choosing team members as a recommendation-based and self-selection, both of which helped to heighten the curation of effective and varying perspectives.
“We went through the list of people we felt could be effective, making sure that we have a diverse type of role, experience, and relationship to academic advising,” McCullough said. “And also making sure that there was good representation both within schools, divisions, and campuses.”
Although the work team aims to address several areas over time, the team's current focus is on auditing and improving the Advising Records (AdRx) system used by academic advisors to support, track, and communicate with students about their academic progress.
"That [AdRx] usage is way too variable, so creating a standard process ensures that everybody’s serving students in the same potential way and that we have access to notes that provide good insight and documentation for all support networks across campus to help best support students," McCullough said.
McCullough is hopeful that the review will help train and propel advisors on the best practices to audit the system's usage and to identify imperative areas of training.
“Since the creation of the group, the team has created and distributed a survey to evaluate the necessary training for AdRx users and audited the list of AdRx tags being used by the campus to assess which tags need to be retired and to develop definitions for those that will remain,” McLaurine said.
This work is allowing our staff to bring all of themselves to the table to make an impact on our students.
Tradara McLaurine
While current projects for all Strategic Groups are expected to wrap up in May, McLaurine and McCullough are both equally thankful for the passion-filled efforts of work team members and are confident that the initiative will continue to be pursued with an innovative mindset.
“IU Indianapolis is a campus full of carers and do-ers," McLaurine said. "I believe what is driving this work is that before the team selected a project, everyone was asked what assets they were bringing to the table, and then as a group, the team decided on the project utilizing the strategic doing framework. Once the project was decided, everyone decided what assets they were going to provide to get the work done. The team created a space where members were able to be transparent and say, 'I want to be involved, but this semester, the only asset I can provide is a smile or encouragement,' and we said, 'We’ll take it!' A smile or words of encouragement is the strongest asset we all have, and I’m thankful that this work is allowing our staff to bring all of themselves to the table to make an impact on our students.”
For more information, contact the Division of Undergraduate Education Office of Communications at duecomm@iu.edu.
