How to use academic advising to help students reflect on their learning

1. ACADEMIC ADVISING AND
MENTORING TO FACILITATE
REFLECTIVE LEARNING
Presented by: Dr. Mishkat Al Moumin,

2. REFLECTIVE LEARNING
Reflective learning is the process of
engaging the students in critically
examining the effectiveness of the actions
taken to learn the language (Farrell,
2016).

3. MEANS OF REFLECTIVE ENGAGEMENT
• The opportunity provided for the student to critically
examine and analyze challenges and take part in
addressing them include advising, mentoring, and
intervention.
• The student will take a step back to anchor his or her
reflection upon the daily performance that led to specific
results.

4. REFLECTIVE ADVISING
• Shifting to an advising approach that is based on praxis, a
practical strategy to engage the student in self-reflection.
• Providing structured opportunities for students to develop
their professional identities through reflection.
• Educating students to negotiate and act on their own
objectives, goals, and ambitions rather than accepting
whatever beliefs they assimilated from others without
questioning their validity.

5. NEW DIRECTION FOR ACADEMIC ADVISING
• Advising goes beyond development to
empowerment utilizing the idea of praxis, which is
defined as: reflection and action to achieve
transformation.
• Advising as a form of praxis that connects learning
with practical implications through critical
reflection.

6. MEANS OF REFLECTIVE ADVISING
• Effective in offering opportunities for
identifying challenges and in-depth
exploration.
• Not strong enough to promote
transformational change.
• Depends upon the student’s own
experience and insights.
• Critical self-reflection can be
detrimental.
• Effective in offering opportunities to
identify strategies.
• Provides venues to re-think beliefs and
assumptions which can lead to
transformational change.
• Offers a strategy to take learning a step
further.

7. THE PROCESS OF
REFLECTIVE ADVISING
- Identify goals and objectives, utilizing actionable
words to achieve the intended academic
progress, e.g., scoring B on the next Unit test or
ICPT, improving listening, reading, or speaking.
- Design a strategy to achieve the goal, practical
steps that the student can take on a daily basis to
complete the goal.
- Commit to implementing the strategy for at least
21 days; thus, create a new learning habit.
- Follow-up, check on the student’s progress
regularly. Also, educate the student to conduct
self-checks.
https://pixabay.com/en/unknown-identity-undiscovered-913584/

8. Reflect
Plan
Act
Evaluate

9. REFLECTIVE STRATEGIES
DLPT / ICPT
• Destressing, lowering the level of stress to
enable the students to handle the test.
• Awareness of available strategies and
approaches for taking the various ICPT tests.
• Enabling students to complete multiple-
choice tests successfully.
• Utilize students’ questionnaires to develop
personalized strategies.
UNIT TESTS / PERFORMANCE
IMPROVEMENT
• Improving listening, the ability to answer
comprehension questions accurately
• Improving reading, the ability to complete a
reading task on time.
• Improving vocabulary retention, the ability
to recall vocabulary.
• Improving speaking, the ability to produce
longer utterances.

10. THE POWER OF REFLECTION
“ Reflection with others, or through dialogue, offers the
power to challenge the different perspectives of the
learner, and ultimately, the potential for double-loop
learning.”
(Brockbank & McGill, 2017)

11. REFLECTIVE MENTORING
• Mentoring is a process of giving constructive and enabling feedback to the student, and then
allowing the student the opportunity to reflect on the feedback to hone language skills
(Ghanizadeh, 2017).
• The mentor is engaged in the success of the mentee through utilizing the feedback to address
areas needing improvement (Ibid).
• The mentee is engaged in a reflective process, i.e., keeping a learning journal, developing
academic goals and making a commitment to implement these goals via a signed mentorship
agreement.
• The goal is to foster more personalized attention and engage students in self-reflection
guided by those who know the students best, a teacher on the teaching team.

12. THE PROCESS OF REFLECTIVE MENTORING
• Each teacher, as mentor, is assigned @ three students
• Mentors identify the needs of mentees and develop action plans. They
provide assistance and encouragement as well as material resources.
• Mentors:
• Meet with individual mentees during first week in 7th hour to formulate a Mentorship
Contract
• Meet with mentees on a weekly/bi-weekly basis and conduct the Monthly Counseling
• Provide HW feedback and may assign additional tailored HW as needed
• Maintain a Mentoring Log
• Stay with their assigned mentees for approximately three months (until next ICPT test)

13. STARTING THE REFLECTIVE PROCESS
• Students will be introduce to the reflective process during ILS101.
Students are engaged in experiential learning activities during which
they are asked to reflect on their learning progress.
• After the first week of instruction, the SLS Specialists meet with the
teaching team to reflective on their students’ receptiveness towards the
language and the culture.
• Each mentor is asked to fill out a mentoring log for each session with a
given student that shows what was discussed and what issues were
raised.

14. DATA
ANALYSIS
• 69% of students report that their
mentor understands their personal
needs.
• 72% feel that their mentor provides
adequate advice about their
progress.
• 67% report that they meet with
their mentor on a regular basis.
Timeframe: April-
November 2018 with
108 surveyed.

15. CRITICAL INTERVENTION
• As interventionists, when the student experiences an
extremely negative (or positive event) the teacher engages
the student in self-review and self-evaluation (Trapman & el,
2017).
• Intervention creates a venue for the student to reflect upon
actions-taken or actions-missed.
• The end goal is developing a universally prepared student
through constructive-driven intervention ( Bosley, 2017).

16. OBJECTIVES EARLY INTERVENTION BOARD
• CMLI Office conducts an early intervention survey for all students,
identifies students at risk early in Semester 1, and organizes an Early
Intervention Prevention Board for these students. The Chair, teaching team
members, mentors, Academic Specialists, and SLS Specialists usually attend.
• To promote a culture of reflective learning through establishing visions and
goals.
• To increase student accountability by allowing a student the chance to reflect
on his or her performance.
• To provide the school leadership with the opportunity to engage the student in
a guided reflection process and allow the student to utilize his or her strengths
to address areas in need of improvement.

17. EARLY INTERVENTION CONUNDRUM
• In the Arabic dialect courses, struggling students tend to have their most difficulty with
listening early on. Once they start MSA reading late in Semester 1, reading becomes their
problem. This emphasis back-and-forth in skill areas creates havoc for students and for
advisors in knowing how to help students effectively.
• Once students take the first ICPT101 test, some, not all, experience a gap between
achievement expectations and the development of proficiency. Some are better at
achievement, which means they are studying the materials, but they struggle in building
proficiency.
• Students early on need to be made aware of this conundrum. While it is important to
advise/help students with the language skills, it is also important to provide support in
building proficiency.

18. QUESTIONS?
THANK YOU