The Coach Behind the Medal: What the Winter Olympics Can Teach Higher Ed About Academic Advising
Behind every Olympic medalist is someone (a coach, a mentor, a scout) who saw something in them before they saw it in themselves. Someone who understood the sport deeply enough to recognize raw potential and knew how to cultivate it into world-class performance. In higher education, we call those people academic advisors. And the quality of that advising can mean the difference between a student who thrives and one who never finds their footing.
Rubrics That Stick the Landing: Lessons from Olympic Scoring
When the inevitable challenge arrives, the meticulous, defensible standards embedded in your rubrics will be the most effective advocates for student achievement, faculty equity, and the integrity of your degrees. A well-designed rubric provides the most effective mechanism for achieving transparency, protecting instructional consistency, and affirming academic standards. Let's break down what that looks like, Olympic style.
How You Finish
Institutions need to revisit their mission and really ask themselves, why. Why do they exist? But most importantly, how do we continue to meet the needs of students and society when what we have always done is not possible right now? Now is the time for institutions to rethink how to deliver effectively deliver education that provides opportunities for all students who face an unknown future.