Learning how to Learn
October 20, 2016
AVPs come from all walks of student affairs and higher education backgrounds. Many of us move from a specific role such as: Director of Residential Life, Director of Union/Auxiliary Services, or Director of Admissions, and have specific skills set. As we move up in position, it seems more challenging to understand how to do and connect all the pieces of our job. Every job on campus provides opportunities for growth for ourselves and increasing our responsibility to help our teams. After working with my current team to help them gain the necessary skills for their next move to an AVP position it made me reflect, ‘how do we learn how to learn?’ Specifically, I looked at supervision for my team and how supervision changes as you move up.
The Association of College Personnel Administrators (ACPA) and the National Association Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA) note that supervision is an important skill for student affairs professionals to learn; however may not be addressed in graduate school and therefore adding more responsibility on the mid-level managers. As the AVP, we are responsible for the direction and guidance of mid-level managers who are likely to be responsible for new professionals. Supervision can be the key to keeping our new professionals in the field---no pressure!
Scholarship addresses different supervision models used in the field; however, how you learn those models is challenging. Our energy should be focused on learning how to learn as it is vital to professional development. Hence, being exposed to exercises that promote critical reflection such as the analysis of case studies is imperative. Time for critical reflection should be part of student affairs professionals’ daily lives (Reason & Kimball, 2012). As the AVP, we can be intentional about our meeting agendas and providing space and opportunities for teams to critically reflect. We must also remind ourselves to take time to reflect on our job, students, teams, and ourselves as we seek to learn new tasks and become better supervisors.
Last, it is important that as we move up we master the ability to learn on the job and we have a responsibility to help our teams learn how to learn on the job. Reflection on our work can help us learn how to learn the necessary skills to do our critical work. With a few tweaks to our daily work, we can encourage our teams to learn how to learn new skills on the job, and to be top notch supervisors.
Tips on helping our teams learn to supervise (or any new task on the job):
1. Provide employees the opportunity to design and implement a self-directed learning project concerning supervision.
2. Host a workshop to discuss good and bad techniques used by participants’ previous supervisors.
3. Focusing on time management skills and work/ life balance strategies in graduate programs and on-the-job.
4. Teach learning strategies employed to learn supervision.
5. Provide opportunities for team members to discuss barriers and supports needed to learn supervisor and to being a supervisor.
6. Engage support staff and new professionals in developing rich supervisor-supervisee relationships.
American College Personnel Association & National Association of Student Personnel Administrators. (2010). ACPA/ NASPA professional competency areas for student affairs practitioners. Washington, DC: Authors.
Nichols, K. N. & Baumgarnter, L.M. (2016). Midlevel managers’ supervisory learning journeys. College Student Affairs Journal, Volume 34 (2), pp. XX-XX
Reason, R. D., & Kimball, E. W. (2012). A new theory-to-practice model for student affairs: Integrating scholarship, context and reflection. Journal of Student Affairs Research and Practice, 49, 359-376. doi:10.1515/jsarp-2012-6436