Subject: Group Advising — What is your opinion on individual academic advising sessions versus group academic advising?  If you use one of these more often than the other, please give reasons and examples when possible. (June-July 2005)

Comment from the Commission Chair/Editor: This tip suggestion came to me from someone who is feeling the "pinch" of increasing enrollment and not-increasing advising staff. Is quality of the interaction lost in a group advising session? How do you maintain "connectedness" within a group advising session? Anyway, thanks "someone" for some food for thought! Please, colleagues, respond to me at Linda.Chalmers@utsa.edu. Your colleague needs you!

• Group advising and individual advising complement each other.  Certain populations, goals, and information lend themselves to a group setting.  Others do not. We have had success with advising students in a group setting in the following situations:

1. Using a first-year seminar to talk about degree requirements, prepare students for registration, and to allow students to share their first-semester course experience for the benefit of others in the group.  (For example, having students talk about classes they are enjoying gives other students ideas for future classes.)
2. Using department/programs meetings each semester to inform students about major requirements, curricular changes, new courses, etc.
3. Using group meetings to pre-advise students who are going to study abroad or in an off-campus location or who wish to do an internship off campus.
4. Using group meetings for new transfer students (internal and external), addressing transitional issues and concerns.

These meetings also serve to introduce students with common interests or needs to each other, as well as to key advisers (staff and faculty).  Offering these topics on a regular cycle provides a consistent level of information for students, which then can be supplemented by individual meetings, as needed.  If students are availing themselves of the information at these sessions, they will come to individual advising sessions with questions, which are more honed or personal, and not necessarily needing more general information. 

Often within group advising sessions, students get more information than they would have in an individual session since they learn from each others questions, and the meeting facilitator will often have materials to share to remind students of what they learned.

Depending upon the population and topic, group sessions have been as small as 10-15, and as large as 80.  The facilitator would use different formats, of course, depending upon the size of the group.  The seminar-size group can have a lot of discussion.  The larger groups tend to be presentation following by a question-and-answer session.

Contributor: Rosanna Grassi, rmgrassi@syr.edu

• I work at a two year school that transfers 400-500 students a year to the school next door. We do group advising for the general education requirements during the first week of classes in the Fall. After three years of trying this it is clear that that it has had no effect on the number of students who later want individual time. It has, however, shaped the dialogue of those later sessions. Students are able to move quickly to their individual program of study and have more time to discuss program specific course and sequences. I tell my administrator that group advising doesn't save us any money but it has improved our service. We also do group advising for all four of our health occupations. These student move in cohorts already and always have the option of individual time later. Many of these students are satisfied with the group information as their majors are highly specific and non-elective . This does save us money as it allows us to keep just one adviser for these programs. In general I would say that group works best for our two year programs but not as well for our transfer students.

Contributor: Bradley D. Hoth, bhoth@wccnet.org