Developmental Advising Style: In this style, the advisor and student are “partners in educational discovery” This gives the student more agency in their decision making while still providing support from an advisor. Missouri State University discusses the difference between the traditional idea of advising– prescriptive– and this particular style—developmental. More information can be found here.
- Prescriptive advising: This model of advising holds that the academic advisor tells the student what to do, and the student does it. Prescriptive advising is linear communication from the advisor to the advisee and places most of the responsibility not on the student, but the advisor. The advisor is required to have the answers.
- Developmental advising: The developmental advising model holds that the academic advisor and the advisee are partners in educational discovery in which responsibility is shared between the participants. As in all endeavors that are primarily human relations, there are numerous discussions that attempt to define developmental advising in the literature. Here is one definition developed by David S. Crockett (1995):
Advising is a developmental process that assists students in the clarification of their life/career goals and in the development of educational plans for the realization of these goals. It is a decision-making process which assists students in realizing their maximum educational potential through communication and information exchanges with an advisor; it is ongoing, multi-faceted, and the responsibility of both student and advisor. The advisor serves as a facilitator of communication, a coordinator of learning experiences through course and career planning and program progress review, and an agent of referral to other campus services as necessary.
Prescriptive advising tends to be the “do it for them” model. Developmental advising is the “help them do it for themselves” model.
Burton and Wellington (1998) epitomize developmental advising when they say, “A developmental model of advising permits the advisor to help the advisee focus, through self-reflection, on interests and goals.” This allows the advisor and the advisee to work together in a collaborative effort to achieve commonly understood goals.
Appreciative Advising Style
This style of advising was developed by David Cooperrider from Case Western Reserve University. This model is student-centered and it involves questioning that is both positive and open-ended for students to allow them to reflect on their own about their goals and preferences. This model is utilized for advisors who want to work in collaboration with their students rather than in a prescriptive way. It is a developmental model as described above. Ohio University uses this model and has created this helpful chart describing the phases:
https://www.ohio.edu/uc/advising/appreciative.cfm
