Our children are six and nine, and with our older child in particular, the urge to troubleshoot, problem-solve, and begin to “fix” things enters our minds before she has finished describing a challenging moment at school or with a friend. The impulse is entirely natural, but when repeated across multiple interactions, it can teach something we did not intend—that the solution will come from the outside, while eroding their sense of agency and ownership in the process. Advisors know this impulse well.
Every Proctor student is assigned a faculty advisor, and for most students that relationship becomes a steady presence throughout their Proctor experience. The advisor is the primary point of contact for families and is a mentor, advocate, and academic counselor. The advisor guides the student to discover new interests while holding them accountable to community expectations.
This summer, Proctor's professional community read David Brooks' How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen, and this past week, we came together as a full faculty to discuss it. The discussion was framed around one of Proctor's superpowers: knowing each other. Building deliberate relationships, with students and with colleagues, sits at the core of our role as educators.
Brooks' chapter on accompaniment offers a useful framework for advising. He identifies four qualities. Patience, borrowed from the philosopher Simone Weil's idea of “negative effort,” means holding back and working on the other person's timetable. "Trust is built slowly," Brooks writes. "People rightly guard their own psychological space and erect gates that can be passed through only in their own good time." Playfulness matters because people are more fully human at play, and a game of cards or making pancakes during advisory creates connections. In explaining other-centeredness, Brooks draws from music: the pianist accompanying a singer does not control the piece, but they do not simply stand by. “They are partners, marking something together, but the accompanist is in the supportive role.” And presence means, simply, being there, particularly in challenging moments – checking in after a disappointing game, stopping to talk on a campus path, or noticing that a student seems quieter than usual. Most of life, Brooks argues, is not spent in deep conversation. Instead, we spend it doing things together, "not face to face but side by side."
None of this means the advisor stops solving problems. Writing in NAIS's Independent Teacher, Sam Osherson described advising and deep listening not as in opposition but as two poles of a single caring relationship. Traditional "advising" is often task-oriented and prescriptive, and it emphasizes the adult talking. Deep listeners ask more questions, and advisors at Proctor must be adept at doing both, moving along the continuum.
Once a term, every advisory group takes a turn on dish duty. The tradition began in the 1940s as a way to hold down tuition by reducing support staff, and it has long outlived that purpose. Advisor and advisees stand in the dishroom together, scraping plates and loading racks, shoulder to shoulder. On the surface, it may not appear that an hour of scraping plates is an essential part of the advisory model, or that it has much to do with the relationship between an advisor and an advisee. These are exactly the kinds of interactions through which trusting relationships are formed.
One question on our discussion sheet asked faculty to think of someone in their own lives who makes them feel known and truly seen, and to name what that person does differently. It is a question worth returning to as we think of our own approach to advising. Being seen, Brooks argues, is generative rather than simply pleasant. No one can fully appreciate their own strengths until another person mirrors them back. Perhaps this is what accompaniment asks of us as advisors: not to have every answer or solve every problem, but to know our students well enough to recognize when to step forward, when to step back, and when simply to stay alongside them.
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