The Six Phases

1. Disarm

The Disarm phase involves making a positive first impression with students and allaying any fear or suspicion they might have of meeting with the advisor.

2. Discover

The Discover phase is spent continuing to build rapport with students and learning about their strengths, skills, and abilities through utilizing effective and positive open-ended questions that encourages narratives.

3. Dream

The Dream phase involves uncovering students' hopes and dreams for their futures.

4. Design

The Design phase is spent co-creating a plan to make their hopes and dreams come true.

5. Deliver

The Deliver phase is the implementation phase where students carry out their plan, and the advisor's role is to support them as they encounter roadblocks.

6. Don't Settle

The Don't Settle phase involves challenging students to achieve their full potential and supporting them along their journey.^[3]

Professional certification

The University of South Carolina's Office of Appreciative Education now offers a professional rating for academic advisers: Appreciative Advising Certification. Certified Appreciative Advisors are committed to a standard of excellence in the field of advising and optimizing their students' educational experiences. The certification process includes successful attendance of the Appreciative Advising Institute or completion of the appreciative advising course, as well as completed advising rubrics, recommendations, a current CV, and personal advising theory.^[4]

Benefits of certification

• Advanced professional qualification^[4]
• Increased skills and knowledge
• Raised professional expectations
• Elevated advising experience for students

Appreciative Advising Institute

The Appreciative Advising Institute was first held in August 2011 in Las Vegas, Nevada. The 2012 Appreciative Advising Institute was held July 28–31 in Charleston, SC. The Institute is intentionally designed to teach participants the theoretical structure of appreciative advising and to provide skills training in implementing this framework. This conference is designed to provide ample opportunity for participants to extend theory to practice. Participants learn how the six phases help both the advisor and advisee optimize their educational experiences.^[5]

Appreciative Advising Course

The Appreciative Advising Course is designed to be a community of learners (instructors included). There are opportunities for participants to interact with other community members each week. This is done via discussion board conversations, as well as optional live chat dialogues. Active participants greatly enhance their own learning experience as well as that of the community. This is an eight-week course.^[6]

Academic recovery programming

When students feel academically discouraged, such as when they are on academic probation, they may need to be reminded of the strengths that led them to college in the first place. Students in academic trouble also typically have a limited time in which to improve their status. Practically, it is quicker to correct this status by building on strengths and maintaining a course load and engaging in academic and social behaviors that reflect these strengths than it is to attempt to correct long-standing deficits. The SAS 100 program at UNCG features the use of the Appreciative Advising Inventory as the basis for three mandatory advising sessions and the use of appreciative advising questions in weekly reflections and discussions. All instructors are trained to use appreciative advising in their meetings with the students. After the appreciative approach was introduced, retention of SAS 100 students improved 18%. When control and treatment groups were compared, the treatment group achieved a statistically significant GPA gain of .73 (p=. 03) compared to the control group at .42.^[8]

Internal transfer advising

Appreciative advising can be used in internal transfer cases in which a student has realized that their current declared major may not be a good fit, but are struggling to identify a new major. Student Academic Services at UNCG has used appreciative advising to assist declared pre-nursing majors who have not met continuance requirements. This began as a pilot program in the spring of 2005, and currently includes all pre-nursing majors who have a cumulative GPA that has been identified as not competitive by the School of Nursing. The goal of the program is to help students explore their options, given that they are unlikely to be accepted into the School of Nursing. Of the 145 students served by the program during the spring and fall semesters of 2005, 30% have changed their major, while an additional 43% continue to receive advising through Student Academic Services. The mean GPA for participants has also improved dramatically.^[9]

First-year Experience Program

UNCG's First-Year Experience program is called University Studies 101 (UNS 101), and uses a curriculum emphasizing appreciative advising. One stated aim of the program is to assist students in discovering their purposes, identifying their strengths, and aligning these newly discovered assets with plans for their future. The activities, class discussions, and assignments used in the course guide students through the six appreciative advising stages. A comprehensive program evaluation which includes the tracking of academic outcomes and assessment of student attitudes and behaviors has evidenced the positive impact of the UNS 101 program (Hutson & Atwood, 2005). For example, the freshman to sophomore retention rate of freshmen who completed UNS 101 in fall 2006 and returned for fall 2007 was 81.9%. This compares to a retention rate of 74.4% for freshmen who did not take the course. Meanwhile, the average first semester GPA for students who did not take the course was 2.49, while UNS 101 participants had an average first semester GPA of 2.72.