Teaching & Learning Academy

Wallace State Teaching and Learning Academy Faculty Scholars Program 2014-15

Dear Faculty Scholar: Welcome to Wallace State Community College Teaching and Learning Academy Program 2014-15 cohort! This interprofessional faculty training program will provide you with the tools needed to enhance your teaching activities and familiarize yourself with the Wallace State family.

To complete the Teaching and Learning Academy, scholars must meet the following expectations: •

Attend all in-person sessions.

Careful planning was used to select various days for workshops. Consideration was placed on selection of various weekdays, so that a single course would not be affected.

Orientation: August 13 8:30-11:30 Workshop #1: Sept. 17 1:00-3:00 Workshop #2: Oct. 16 1:00-3:00 Workshop #3: Nov. 24 & 25 (time to follow later) Workshop #4: Jan. 28 2:00-4:00 Workshop #5: Feb. 16 1:00-3:00 Workshop #6: March 25 1:00-3:00

•

Identify and maintain regular communication with a mentor with a similar background/discipline.

The role of a mentor is to provide you with content expertise and guidance in your scholarly activities.

Each scholars respective Dean should provide a mentor. If you need help identifying a mentor contact Dr. Teresa Ray. (teresa.connell@wallacestate.edu)

•

Spend 8 hours in Wallace State’s advising center.

Advising is a crucial step in a student’s success. Learn what Wallace State means when we say ‘One stop advising’. Volunteer time slots will be made available early in the fall semester so that scholars can select the most convenient time. Lion’s Pride is also considered advising time.

•

Read assigned pamphlet The Cross Papers volume 17: Teaching with the Brain in Mind: What Neuroscience Can (and cannot) Tell Us about How Students Learn

•

Track your utilization or integration of content provided through the Teaching and Learning Academy.

Wallace State asks that your provide us with specific information to show the impact of the training you receive and how you use the materials from you Faculty Scholar experience. A tracking form will be provided to aid you in this endeavor.

•

Present your findings and utilization with real-world examples at upcoming professional development.

Sharing what you learned and implemented into your classrooms is instrumental to the growth of teaching and learning at Wallace State. Professional development days will set aside at the end of the school year for presentations.

We look forward to your participation and getting to know you.

ORIENTATION SESSION AGENDA Wednesday, August 13, 2014

8:30-9:00:

Welcome, Introduction and Overview– Teresa Ray

9:00-9:15:

Coaching – Christine Wiggins

9:15-9:45:

Learning Communities and Achieving the Dream – Michael Salerno

9:45-10:00:

Roadmap – Tad Parker

10:00-10:15:

QEP – Rebecca Reeves & Kathy Buckelew

10:15-10:30:

BREAK

10:30-11:30:

Dean Informational – Break out with Deans

11:30:

ADJOURNED

TABLE OF CONTENTS ESSENTIAL COMPETENCIES

1

COMPETENCY I: PROFESSIONAL COMMITMENT COLLEGE COMMITTEES AGSC COURSE APPROVAL GUIDELINES EMPLOYEE TRAVEL REQUESTS AND REIMBURSEMENTS

3 14 16

COMPETENCY II: TEACHING AND LEARNING ACCESS, SUCCESS, AND COMPLETION: O’BANION FOCUS ON LEARNING: O’BANION LEARNING STYLE: KOLB THE LAST ARTISANS: AAC&U REFLECTION BUILDS TWENTY-FIRST-CENTURY PROFESSIONALS: A NEW FRAMEWORK FOR EXCELLENCE: AAC&U

AAC&U

22 26 38 42 46 53

COMPETENCY III: EVIDENCE OF LEARNING ASSESSMENT IS MORE THAN KEEPING SCORE: COSGROVE & MCDANIEL ASSESSMENT PROCESS

73 80

COMPETENCY IV: ADVISING ADVISING ADVISOR’S RESPONSIBILITIES CORE VALUES ADVISING RESOURCE GUIDE

81 82 83 84

ESSENTIAL COMPETENCIES OF A WSCC FACULTY MEMBER Wallace State Community College-Hanceville educators will promote transformational learning opportunities through the pursuit of excellence in conduct, professional development, and student engagement.

Competency I: Professional Commitment •

Uphold and promote the Wallace State Honor Code The Wallace State of Mind is a belief in the inherent value in striving for excellence, a sense of honor and service that springs from mutual respect and extends to the way we conduct ourselves at college and away from it, and a notion of community that recognizes that for a system like ours to work, every person's best effort is vital to that success which sets us distinctively apart from other institutions.

• • • • • •

Stay abreast of current research in discipline/academics as well as participating in ongoing professional development Expand and develop connections to the wider community Collaborate with colleagues and staff members to promote progressive student learning outcomes Promote inclusion and diversity within the classroom and beyond Serve as an engaged and informed advisor of polices (both State Board and College) as well as the Personnel Handbook Be a team player, supporter, and builder for the betterment of the College and our students

Competency II: Teaching and Learning • • • • • • • •

Employ a variety of teaching pedagogies and assignments to deeply engage students to promote greater student learning Provide timely return of assignments as well as consistent feedback (via Blackboard, email, etc.)

Promote completion and student success Encourage reflective and critical thinking through a vast array of assignments Utilize a variety of assessment measures and techniques Be open to constructive critique and innovative ideas Demonstrate knowledge of current instructional pedagogy and learning theories Utilize cross-disciplinary activities and assignments

Essential Competencies

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• •

Employ formative feedback opportunities to keep students abreast of their success in a course Identify effective student learning and program outcomes, collect and analyze relevant data, and demonstrate the use of results to increase program effectiveness

Competency III: Providing Evidence of Learning • • •

Employ formative feedback opportunities to keep students abreast of their success in a course Utilize a variety of assessment measures and techniques (both formative and summative) Participate in a regular cycle of data collection, analysis, and reporting (enrollment, success rates, graduation, retention, DFWI)

Competency IV: Advising • • • • • • •

Assist students in making informed academic decisions as well as in assuming responsibility for their learning Demonstrate a genuine interest in student’s success by developing realistic goals and plans Be accessible and responsive Review and update student’s academic records Know the academic calendar and important deadlines Provide current information regarding certificate, graduation requirements, and/or transfer Demonstrate knowledge in course prerequisites, sequencing, offerings, and general information about course loads

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COMPETENCY I: PROFESSIONAL COMMITMENT COLLEGE COMMITTEES FOR 2013-14 Governance Structure The purpose of college committees is to study, advise, and recommend to appropriate administrative officers those findings within assigned areas of responsibility.

Executive Cabinet A. Duties: The Executive Cabinet serves as the Executive Leadership Team for the College. The Cabinet reviews recommendations for policies, procedures, plans, budgets, curriculum, programs, and other operational or strategic issues, and recommends action to the President.

B. Membership: Vicki P. Hawsey, President and Chair Tomesa Smith, Executive Vice President Beth Bownes-Johnson, Dean of Academic Affairs Lisa German, Dean of Health Sciences Jimmy Hodges, Dean of Applied Technologies Jason Morgan, Dean of Financial and Administrative Services Melinda Edwards, Dean of Institutional Outreach Johnny McMoy, College Dean Jennifer Hill, Assistant Dean for Enrollment Management Bruce Tenison, Director of eLearning and Technology Suzanne Harbin, Director of Advancement Kristen Holmes, Director of Communications and Marketing Wayne Manord, Director of Evening Programs Harriet Mayo, Recording Secretary C. Meetings: Weekly Administrative Council A. Duties: The Council serves as an advisory group for budget planning for the forthcoming year, ensuring that budget requests are intrinsically tied to the strategic goals and initiative of the College. Each term on Administrative Council is one year.

B. Membership: Johnny McMoy, College Dean and Chair Tomesa Smith, Executive Vice President Beth Bownes-Johnson, Dean of Academic Affairs Lisa German, Dean of Health Sciences Jimmy Hodges, Dean of Applied Technologies Jason Morgan, Dean of Financial and Administrative Services Melinda Edwards, Dean of Institutional Outreach Mattie Hudson Elected Representatives (elected annually by vote of peers) One (1) Academic Faculty Professional Commitment

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One (1) Health Faculty One (1) Technical Faculty Two (2) Support Staff (Schedule E) One (1) Professional Staff (Schedule C) C. Meetings: Each semester or as needed Admissions/Financial Aid Committee A. Duties: This committee reviews admission policies and hears appeals for student readmission. The committee will also rule on the eligibility of students with special admission problems.

B. Membership: Penny Aldridge, Connie Allen, LaDonna Allen, Melissa Arnold, Susan Brewer, Ron Burdette, Becky Graves, Anthony Hilliard, Darlene Huff, Theresa Mahler, John Meeks, Mike Sparks, and Wes Rakestraw Liaison: Tomesa Smith C. Meetings: Each semester and as needed Advising Committee A. Duties: To plan and implement an effective advising process.

B. Membership: Tammi Gattis-Chair, Mary Barnes, Chuck Davis, Donna Farmer, Sharon Harris, Joe Hendrix, Janet Money, Kristi Nyquist, Brenda Pruitt, Renee Quick, Donna Stanley, Jim Thompson, and Jan Young Liaison: Tomesa Smith C. Meetings: As needed Americans with Disabilities Act Committee A. Duties: To evaluate campus facilities, publications, and programs for compliance with the ADA Act. B. Membership: Lisa Smith-Chair, Mechelle Baker, Connie Briehn, Suhana Chikatla, Tim Grace, Babs Herfurth, Brenda Johnson, Allen Keener, Darlene McCombs, Billy Rose, Laura Smallwood, and Jan Young Liaison: Tomesa Smith C. Meetings: Annually and/or as needed Awards Committee A. Duties: This committee is responsible for developing criteria and making recommendations to the Executive Cabinet for recognition of outstanding employees and students. The committee is specifically charged with facilitating the selection process for the College’s annual Master Teacher, Chancellor’s Award nominees, Outstanding Employees, and the All-Alabama Academic Team nominees.

B. Membership: Terri McGriff-Waldrop-Chair, Connie Allen, S. F. Lovell, Diana Majerik, Gary McMinn, Mike Salerno, Tracy Smith, Susan Stephens, and Mary Thornton Liaison: Beth Bownes-Johnson and Jimmy Hodges Professional Commitment

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C. Meetings: As needed Banner Reporting Committee A. Duties: To review reports used by the College and ensure that they contribute to the overall effectiveness of the institution.

B. Membership: Penny Aldridge, Tonda Carter, Becky Graves, Sharon Harris, Darlene Huff, Mary Helen Ingram, Theresa Mahler, Harriet Mayo, Malinda Morton, Bill Moss, and Judy York Liaison: Johnny McMoy C. Meetings: Monthly or as needed Beta Team (Behavioral Evaluation and Threat Assessment Team) A. Duties: This committee responds to referrals from campus issues related to students and staff in crisis. The team will investigate, develop action plans, and make appropriate referrals or arrangements as warranted.

B. Membership: Bill Moss-Chair, Stacey Brunner, Shane Drake, Jennifer Dunkle, Darlene Huff, Teresa Gibbs, Greg Mayo, Susan O’Rear, Tyler Roden, Kelly Smith, and Courtney Walker Liaison: Tomesa Smith C. Meetings: As required.

Benevolent Fund Committee A. Duties: To develop and implement policies regarding benevolent activities for College employees.

B. Membership: Gail Hyatt-Chair, Dana Adams, Lance Boyd, Teresa Gibbs, Anthony Hilliard, Renee Quick, and Laura Smallwood Liaison: Melinda Edwards C. Meetings: Annually and as needed Calendar Committee A. Duties: This committee develops an annual calendar for recommendation to the Administrative Council, Executive Cabinet, and President.

B. Membership: Dana Adams, LaDonna Allen, Donna Conn, Todd Hardman, Mattie Hudson, Harriet Mayo, Renee Quick, Susan Quick, Kathy Sides, and Paul Taylor Liaison: Tomesa Smith C. Meetings: Annually and as needed College Assembly A. Duties: The Assembly meets to facilitate open and transparent communication pathways through the exchange of important information, ideas, plans, and concerns of all employees.

B. Membership: All full-time and permanent part-time college personnel Professional Commitment

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C. Meetings: Quarterly or as needed College Assessment Council (Formerly Learning Outcomes) A. Duties: The committee guides the assessment of the College’s stated learning and program outcomes and regularly reviews the utility and relevance of assessment information and data provided.

B. Membership: Teresa Ray-Connell-Chair, Mary Barnes, Carrie Bentley, Connie Briehn, Suhana Chikatla, Cheril Grimmett, Todd Hardman, Deborah Hoover, Sharon Horton, Allen Kenner, Gail Ledbetter, Jennifer Malcom, Renee Quick, Rebecca Reeves, and Jeremy Smith Liaison: Johnny McMoy C. Meetings: Twice per month or as needed College Catalog Committee A. Duties: To update and recommend ways of improving the College catalog.

B. Membership: Kristen Holmes-Chair, Emily Boaz, Beth Bownes-Johnson, Jennifer Eddleman, Tammi Gattis, Lisa German, Brian Hall, Jennifer Hill, Jimmy Hodges, Sharon Horton, Gail Hyatt, Gayle Ledbetter, Cindy Maddox, Deborah Spann, James Tidwell, and William Weaver Liaison: Melinda Edwards C. Meetings: As needed Common Read Committee A. Duties: This committee is responsible for reviewing and selecting texts and planning programs to enrich our Common Read Program.

B. Membership: Sally Warren-Chair, LaDonna Allen, Melissa Arnold, Mary Barnes, Carrie Bentley, Lauren Cantrell-Salerno, Leigh Ann Courington, Clay Cobb, Gayle Ledbetter, Diana Majerik, Schenaye Mauldin, Susan O’Rear, Tad Parker, Mike Salerno, Meg Smith, and Courtney Walker Liaison: Beth Bownes-Johnson C. Meetings: Monthly or as needed Curriculum Committee A. Duties: This committee is responsible for reviewing proposals to offer new courses or programs of study, or to substantially alter existing courses and recommending action to the Executive Cabinet. The committee will also initiate suggestions for the development, modification or deletion of curricula, programs or courses and refer such proposals to the Executive Cabinet.

B. Membership: Mary Barnes-Chair, Sharon Alley, Melissa Arnold, Susan Beck, Kristi Bain, Lance Boyd, Marsha Bradford, Tammi Gattis, Deborah Hoover, Lisa Hullett, Cindy Mallard, Jennifer McRae, Janet Money, Bill Moss, Jeremy Smith, Deborah Spann, William Weaver, and Beth Williams.

Liaison: Tomesa Smith Professional Commitment

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C. Meetings: Each semester and as needed Diversity Committee A. Duties: The purpose of the Diversity Committee is to develop professional development activities regarding diversity sensitivity and awareness for employees and students.

B. Membership: Stacey Brunner-Chair, Suhana Chikatla, Alyce M. Flanigan, Sabrina Flanigan, Kristen Holmes, Cindy Mallard, Schenaye Mauldin, Jonathan Minyard, Courtney Patterson, Adrian Scott, Laura Smallwood, Donna Speeker, Jon Wilbanks, and Aletta Williamson Liaison: Melinda Edwards C. Meetings: As needed E-Learning Committee A. Duties: This committee is responsible for developing the college’s plan for distance learning to include recommendations for faculty and student resources, policies and procedures, appropriate processes to address the needs of the distant learner for advising, registration, counseling and assessment and evaluating the success of distant learning initiative. The committee is also responsible for reviewing pedagogies and assessment measures and results for other alternative instructional delivery methods.

B. Membership: Bruce Tenison-Chair, Melissa Arnold, Terry Ayers, Brandon Brooks, Connie Briehn, Suhana Chikatla, Jesse Cobb, Glynice Crow, Ken Crow, Donna Farmer, Russell Gann, Joe Hendrix, Kelley Jones, Carol McKelvey, Christine O’Leary, Tara Richard, Susan Smith, Mike Sparks, Donna Speeker, William Weaver, and Christine Wiggins Liaison: Johnny McMoy C. Meetings: Each semester and as needed Enrollment Management Task Force A. Duties: This task force is responsible for developing and maintaining a comprehensive Enrollment Management Plan. The purpose of the Enrollment Management Plan is to maximize the College’s enrollment potential through a proactive and intentional approach to serving students in the pre-enrollment, matriculation, and post-enrollment stages. This task force serves in an advisory capacity to the President.

B. Membership: Jennifer Hill-Chair, LaDonna Allen, Ashley Brown, Kelley Jones, Becky Graves, Kristen Holmes, Cindy Maddox, Jennifer Malcom, Johnny McMoy, Whit Rice, Lisa Smith, and William Weaver Liaison: Tomesa Smith C. Meetings: Each semester and as needed First-Year Gateway Committee A. Duties: This committee is responsible for developing the College’s plan for students in transition.

This includes initiating innovative practices in gateway courses as well as in orientation planning and organization. The committee also evaluates the success of our first-year students and reviews assessment results.

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B. Membership: Dana Adams, Marsha Bradford, Ricky Burks, Lauren Cantrell-Salerno, Cheril Grimmett, Diana Majerik, Cindy Mallard, Rob Metcalf, Renee Quick, Wes Rakestraw, Rebecca Reeves, Whit Rice, Mike Salerno, Lisa Smith, Jill Strickland, James Tidwell, Sally Warren, Aletta Williamson, and Lance Yoshioka Liaison: Beth Bownes-Johnson C: Meetings: Monthly or as needed Graduation Committee A. Duties: To assist with preparation and implementation of the graduation ceremony.

B. Membership: Melinda Edwards and Tina Jones-Co-Chairs; Dana Adams, Marsha Bradford, Ricky Burks, Lisa Farnsworth, Suzanne Harbin, Jennifer Hill, Sharon Horton, Iman Humaideh, Diana Majerik, Jennifer Malcom, Wayne Manord, Elizabeth Moore, Whit Rice, and Jill Strickland Liaison: Melinda Edwards C. Meetings: As needed.

Green Team A. Duties: This committee is responsible for proposing and monitoring strategies to promote the College’s plan for a green environment.

B. Membership: Wendy Clayton and Ann Culpepper-Co-Chairs, Carrie Bentley, Stephen Bowen, Edwin Calvert, Randy Daniel, Tammi Gattis, Jenifer Hays, Marcy Manning, Greg Mayo, Russell Moore, Bill Moss, Tad Parker, Billy Rose, Donna Speeker, Kim Twitty, Sally Warren, Julie Welch, and SGA Representative(s) Liaison: Lisa German C. Meetings: As needed Healthy Campus Initiative Committee A. Duties: This committee is responsible for reviewing health indicators by the American College Health Association that reflect major public health concerns and making recommendations on how Wallace State might address some of those issues on campus.

B. Membership: Laura Chapman, Suhana Chikatla, Tammi Gattis, Jennie Gurley, Babs Herfurth, Donna Lee, Wayne Manord, Greg Mayo, Krysti Nyquist, Billy Rose, Stacey Sivley, Paul Taylor, Chris Villa, and Sally Warren Liaison: Lisa German C. Meetings: As needed Human Resources Committee A. Duties: This committee serves in an advisory capacity to the President, Deans, and Director of Human Resources. This committee examines E Salary Schedule placement and grade advancement-related issues and makes recommendations to the President.

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B. Membership: Mark Bolin-Chair, Jennifer Dunkle, Alyce M. Flanigan, Pat Freeman, and Gail Hyatt Liaison: Tomesa Smith C. Meetings: Annually and as needed Infection Control Committee A. Duties: Develop mandatory education on infectious diseases prevention. Develops policies for appropriate management of exposure to diseases.

B. Membership: Deborah Hoover-Chair, Connie Allen, Donna Attaway, Susan Brewer, Jayne Clem, Donna Conn, Tracie Fuqua, Glynda Hardin, Crystal Hines, Jennifer Hempfling, Jaime Kilpatrick, James Malone, Courtney Patterson, Brenda Pruitt, Billy Rose, Laura Smallwood, Jill Strickland, Lisa Tarvin, and Chris Villa Liaison: Lisa German C. Meetings: Annually and as needed Information Technology Security Committee A. Duties: This committee is responsible for governance and oversight of the College’s comprehensive information security program.

B. Membership: Judy York-Chair, Terry Ayers, Virginia Barber, Jesse Cobb, Alyce M. Flanigan, Ron Stallings, Bruce Tenison, and Jon Wilbanks, Liaison: Johnny McMoy C. Meetings: As needed Institutional Health, Safety and Security Committee A. Duties: This committee is responsible for the formulation of health, safety, and emergency security plans for the College. The committee is responsible for the periodic review of all policies and external requirements (local, state, and national). Revisions to maintain college policies in compliance with external requirements will be recommended to the Executive Committee. The committee is responsible for the formulation and maintenance of the College’s Health and Safety Manual and Emergency Response Manual.

B. Membership: Tyler Roden-Chair, Connie Allen, Marsha Bradford, Laura Chapman, Kathy Coy, Shane Drake, Michael Johnson, Bert Mackentepe, James Malone, Greg Mayo, Rosalyn Meadows, Pam Murff, Randy Putman, Shannon Quick, Lisa Smith, Tracy Smith, Ron Stallings, Phil Studdard, Jim Thompson, Karen Evans Walton, and Judy Wood Liaison: Lisa German C. Meetings: Annually and as needed Instructional Resources Committee A. Duties: This committee is responsible for reviewing all evaluative data generated for library and learning resources, reviewing the College’s Collection Development Policy, suggesting optimal ways to serve community users, and reviewing results of library surveys and recommending Professional Commitment

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responses as appropriate. The committee also serves to facilitate communication between the instructional resources personnel and faculty.

B. Membership: Lisa Hullett-Chair, Dana Adams, Carrie Bentley, Clay Cobb, Jonathan Minyard, Michael Salerno, and Student Representative Liaison: Johnny McMoy C. Meetings: Each semester and as needed Judicial Affairs Committee A. Duties: This committee is responsible for hearing student discipline referrals.

B. Membership: Tomesa Smith-Chair, Paul Bailey, Barbara Ebert, Thea Hall, Karen Johnson, Randy Moon, Bill Moss, Courtney Walker, Dan York, and Two SGA Representatives Liaison: Tomesa Smith C. Meetings: As needed Leadership Wallace State Team A. Duties: The Leadership Wallace State Team was established to identify, develop, and mentor emerging future leaders for the College. The team is responsible of program format, curriculum, syllabi, program speakers, selection process, and budget.

B. Membership: Lance Boyd, Kathy Buckelew, Suhana Chikatla, Glynice Crow, Melinda Edwards, Lisa German, Jennifer Hill, Jimmy Hodges, Kristen Holmes, Kelley Jones, Teresa Ray-Connell, Paul Taylor, (Former Alabama Community College Leadership Participants included) Liaison: Tomesa Smith and Beth Bownes-Johnson C. Meetings: As needed Orientation Program Committee (New Employees) A. Duties: This committee is responsible for developing and maintaining a program to welcome new employees, provide them with knowledge of policies and procedures, and to assist in completing all pertinent paperwork.

B. Membership: Alyce M. Flanigan-Chair, Connie Allen, Barbara Atchley, Joyce Cordes, Nicole Dame, Jennifer Dunkle, Cheril Grimmett, Kristen Holmes, Darlene Huff, Jennifer Malcom, Jonathan Minyard, Susan Quick, Brandon Smith, and Linda Wesley Liaison: Jimmy Hodges C. Meetings: As needed QEP Team A. Duties: Develop a plan for campus engagement and eventual implementation.

B. Membership: Kathy Buckelew and Rebecca Reeves-Co-Chairs, Alina Adams, Sharon Alley, Glynice Crow, Tammi Gattis, Cheril Grimmett, Jimmy Hodges, Sharon Horton, Lisa Hullett, Kim Professional Commitment

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Kahler, Diana Majerik, Shea Mobley, Whit Rice, Bruce Tenison, Courtney Walker, Lee Walton, Linda Wesley, Christine Wiggins, Beth Williams, and Aletta Williamson Liaison: Johnny McMoy C. Advisory Committee to QEP Team: Mary Barnes, Mattie Hudson, Cindy Mallard, and Stacey Sivley D. Meetings: As needed Personnel Handbook Committee A. Duties: The committee is responsible for annual review of the Personnel Handbook to determine any recommendations for revisions or additions.

B. Membership: Alyce M. Flanigan-Chair, Connie Allen, Pat Freeman, Sharon Harris, Mattie Hudson, Theresa Mahler, Harriet Mayo, Kathy Miller, Malinda Morton, and Alicia Strickland Liaison: Jason Morgan C. Meetings: Annually and as needed Policy and Procedure Committee A. Duties: To review and forward any request for adding, revising, or deleting college and/or departmental policies and procedures to the College President and Executive Cabinet for recommendation and approval.

B. Membership: Sharon Alley, Krystal Beasley, Steve Burgett, Jennifer Helton, Sharon Horton, Mattie Hudson, Lisa Hullett, Schenaye Mauldin, Carol McKelvey, Jennifer McRea, Brett Messersmith, Susan Quick, Gena Rice, Billy Rose, and Courtney Walker Liaison: Tomesa Smith C. Meetings: As needed Professional Development Committee A. Duties: This committee assesses needs, recommends, coordinates, documents, and tracks faculty and staff professional development activities. The committee recommends the format, scheduling, and content of workshops and other in-service activities and ensures that the range and scope of events are consistent with the College’s institutional goals and planning priorities.

An annual plan of professional development action is proposed to the Administrative Council in June.

B. Membership: Natalie Godwin-Chair, Alina Adams, Suhana Chikatla, Jennifer Dunkle, Alyce M. Flanigan, Michael Johnson, Donna Lee, Theresa Mahler, Harriet Mayo, Jonathan Minyard, Shelia Parker, Mike Salerno, William Weaver, Sally Warren, and Christine Wiggins Liaison: Johnny McMoy and Beth Bownes-Johnson C. Meetings: Twice a semester and as needed Scholars Bowl Standing Committee A. Duties: Planning and implementing the annual high school Scholars Bowl.

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B. Membership: Christine O’Leary-Chair, LaDonna Allen, Tania Ballard, Kathy Buckelew, Jonathan Cole, Leigh Ann Courington, Glynice Crow, Rosalyn Meadows, Renee Quick, Susan Smith, Donna Speeker, Susan Stephens, and Sally Warren Liaison: Beth Bownes-Johnson C. Meetings: Annually and as needed Scholarship Committee A. Duties: This committee reviews scholarship guidelines and applications and recommends scholarship recipients to the president.

B. Membership: Stacey Sivley-Chair, Dana Adams, Brandon Brooks, Jonathan Cole, Becky Graves, Keisha Miller, Jason Morgan, Rebecca Reeves, Lisa Smith, Deborah Spann, Kyli Terry, and Jim Thompson Liaison: Tomesa Smith C. Meetings: Each semester and as needed Sick Leave Bank Committee A. Duties: This committee has the exclusive responsibility for developing guidelines and administrative procedures for the institutional sick leave bank, including provisions for catastrophic leave. The committee will administer and operate the Sick Leave Bank in accordance with the policy and guidelines set forth by the Chancellor and the State Board of Education.

B. Membership: Vicki Hawsey-Chair, Mark Bolin, Lance Boyd, Sharon Horton, and Linda Lipsey.

Members (except Chair) are elected by members of the Sick Leave Bank once a year in September. Each member can serve more than one term, but not more than five terms).

C. Meetings: Annually and as needed Social Committee A. Duties: Plan and serve at all social events related to the College.

B. Membership: Melinda Edwards and Tina Jones-Co-Chairs, Paul Bailey, Mark Gamble, Jen Hays, Pat Horton, S.F. Lovell, Cindy Mallard, Wayne Manord, Gary McMinn, Shiela Mosley, Karan Smith, and Chris Villa Liaison: Melinda Edwards Alternates: (To be used when needed – do not have to attend meetings unless invited): Jayne Clem, Jennie Gurley, Rob Metcalf, Jim Milligan, Joan Moore, Stacey Sivley, Kristi Nyquist, Linda Wesley, and Debra Young C. Meetings: As needed Technology Committee A. Duties: This committee conducts needs assessments, develops a multi-year plan for recommendation to the President for the optimal use of technology for all administrative and academic areas, including the distance learning program. The committee is responsible for Professional Commitment

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conducting evaluation of technology utilization. The plan is proposed to the Administrative Council.

B. Membership: Bruce Tenison-Chair, Melissa Arnold, Terry Ayers, Laura Chapman, Glynice Crow, Donna Conn, Donna Farmer, Cheril Grimmett, Lisa Hullett, Matt Ingram, Kelley Jones, Kim Kahler, Misty Kennedy, Tad Parker, Katie Roper, Susan Smith, William Weaver, Jon Wilbanks, and Judy York Liaison: Johnny McMoy C. Meetings: Each semester and as needed

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AGSC Course Approval Guidelines READ FIRST...

The following guidelines have been established by the AGSC to provide institutions with the necessary information needed to submit courses for AGSC approval. Course should be submitted as outlined in the AGSC course proposal procedure. Courses submitted for AGSC approval must first be approved by the submitting institution for use in their own general studies program. Courses submitted that do not meet these requirements will be returned the submitting institution and will not be reviewed by the Academic Committee or the AGSC. Does the course being submitted meet the following criteria?

1. STEP ONE - Course Syllabus Requirements 2. STEP TWO - General Studies Course Requirements 3. STEP THREE - Discipline Specific Guidelines and Requirements

STEP ONE - Course Syllabus Requirements Does the course meet the established syllabus requirements?

Course proposals must have a syllabus that includes, at a minimum, the following elements: 1.

Course Alpha Listing, Number, and Title (e.g., HIS - World History); 2. Accurate Course Description; 3. Course Textbooks, Manuals, or Required Materials; 4.

Course Objectives; 5.

Course Outline of Topics 6.

ADA Information (Ms. Lisa Smith) 7.

Classroom Rules 8.

Communication Policy 9.

Attendance/Make-ups 10.

Evaluation/Grading 11.

Integrity and/or Honor Code 12.

Statement on Harassment 13.

Tutor Information 14.Instructor Information

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STEP TWO - General Studies Course Requirements Is the course being submitted currently being used by the institution to fulfill core or general studies requirements for their own native students?

Courses in the General Studies Curriculum are elements of an integrated system. Some courses provide essential skills in the communication of thought or in the manipulation of quantitative data while others develop aesthetic appreciation. Still others impart knowledge of history, language, literature, and the natural and social worlds. The General Studies Curriculum is designed to provide a foundation both for further study and for personal enrichment.

General guidelines and criteria for courses in the General Studies Curriculum are: 1. Courses must be collegiate-credit courses at the freshman or sophomore level (i.e., 100 or 200 level); 2. Courses must be broad in scope, present major intellectual or aesthetic ideas, and not be specialized or vocational in purpose; 3. Courses must present the essential characteristics and basic processes of inquiry and analysis in the discipline; 4. Courses must encourage the development of critical thinking skills and require students to analyze, synthesize, and evaluate knowledge; 5. Courses must consider the subject in its relation to other disciplines and its application to human concerns.

STEP THREE - Discipline Guidelines and Requirements Each of the General Studies Academic Committees (GSACs) has established broad guidelines and requirements for courses that appear in the general studies.

Does the course being submitted meet the specific discipline guidelines and requirements?

Detailed course guidelines and requirements can be found at http://stars.troy.edu/course_approval_guidelines.html.

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TRANSPORATION REMINDERS We would like to provide a couple of reminders regarding transportation procedures that are often confusing.

•

Every individual must complete a Travel and Vehicle Request even if you are to be travelling with a group.

•

All out-of-state trips must have paperwork signed by the President before the trip is approved and keys can be issued.

•

When planning a trip consider the time required for all of the approvals to be recorded and forwarded to the Auxiliary Office.

•

If we do have a campus vehicle available for your trip you will not receive your paperwork back until you pick up your keys. Feel free to contact the Auxiliary Office to check the status of your request.

•

If we do not have a campus vehicle available for your trip you will receive your paperwork back marked “vehicle not available”.

For further assistance or questions, please contact Crystal Hines at 256-352-8156.

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Revised: WSCC 12/18/13

WALLACE STATE COMMUNITY COLLEGE STATEMENT OF OFFICIAL TRAVEL (In-State)

Department or Agency

Pay From

Code Number

Division

Funds

Approved Division Dean Above Space for Name and Address of Employee

PURPOSE Month and Day

Points of Travel From To

Private Car Miles

Total Amount for Transportation

Fare of Travel

0

Hour of Departure A.M. P.M.

0

Detail miscellaneous expense and furnish receipts when required.

(Use the Tab "Misc. Expense" if this is not enough space)

Meal or Amount of Meal Per Diem Hour of Return to Allowance Claimed Base A.M. P.M.

Total Per Diem $ Mileage Total Misc. Expense Total This Expense Account

-

$ 0 $ $ $

I HEREBY CERTIFY that the travel and expense indicated hereon was accomplished in the performance of official duties pursuant to travel authority granted me.

Sub-Total Total from Attached Sheet Total for Miscellaneous Expenses

0.00 0.00 0.00

Signature of traveler

APPROVALS: Business Manager

Date

College President

Date

-

OUT-OF-STATE TRAVEL GUIDELINES Guidance received from Postsecondary, listed below, regarding out-of-state travel reimbursement limits. Please familiarize yourself with the rules and links listed below to use as your guide for any future out-of-state travel.

Good Morning, Recently, we have fielded questions concerning maximum meal allowances for out-of-state travel.

Travel policy in the ACCS Fiscal Procedures Manual indicates the colleges should follow the IRS guidelines for reimbursement of subsistence, lodging, etc., for out-of-state travel expenses. When I accessed the IRS guidelines, I was redirected to the U.S. General Services Administration at this web address: http://www.gsa.gov/portal/content/104877?utm_source=OGP&utm_medium=printradio&utm_term=perdiem&utm At this link, you are asked to enter the city and state of the destination whereupon it will provide the maximum allowance per meal. The State Comptroller’s website also provides the same calculation tool.

The calculation at each link appears to be the same. The comptroller link is: http://comptroller.alabama.gov/pages/MIE.aspx Guidance at both links also indicates the maximum daily rate for incidentals is $5.

Frequently asked questions: What is considered an incidental expense?

The Federal Travel Regulation, Chapter 300, Part 300-3 under Per Diem Allowance, describes incidental expenses as: Fees and tips given to porters, baggage carriers, hotel staff, and staff on ships.

Are taxes and gratuity (tips) included in the Meals and Incidental (M&IE) expense rate?

Yes, the meals and incidental expense (M&IE) rate does include taxes and tips in the rate, so travelers will not be reimbursed separately for those items.

Please adhere to the guidance provided in this email when approving and ultimately reimbursing employees for out-of-state travel expenses.

Thank you, Jason Morgan Dean of Financial & Administrative Services Wallace State Community College (256) 352-8225

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OUT-OF-STATE TRAVEL REQUEST Date:

Dr. Vicki P. Karolewics President Wallace State Community College P.O. Box 2000 Hanceville, AL 35077 Dear Dr. Karolewics: Request is respectfully made for authorization of travel for the purpose of

in the city of

, state of

.

Mode of Transportation Lodging (Specific hotel if known) Date of Departure Date of Return to Home Base ESTIMATED COSTS Transportation Conference Fee Registration Fee Room Meals In-City Transportation: Bus Passes Car Rental TOTAL

Signature Type or Print Name

Approved:

$ 0.00

Approved:

Expenses will be paid from: State Fund

Department Head President /Federal Fund

Charge to Fund (Name and Number) : Reviewed Treasurer

Budget Available

Yes

No

WALLACE STATE COMMUNITY COLLEGE

Revised: WSCC 12/18/13

STATEMENT OF OFFICIAL TRAVEL (Out-of-State)

Department

Code Number

Division

Funds

Name of Traveler

Official Station or Base

Address of Traveler (Including street, city, state, and zip code)

Purpose of Travel

The mileage and subsistence expense indicated in this expense account has been previously authorized and has been checked for compliance.

APROVED:

I Herby Certify That the Within Account in the Amount of $

Division Dean

-

is correct, due , and unpaid.

Signature of Payee

RECAPITULATION OF EXPENSES Amount Emergency and Necessary Expenses Incurred in Connection with Travel

Travel Expenses

Amount

Commercial Transportation (including rental car/gas)

$

-

Total other expenses such as postage, fax, telephone, parking, baggage

Mileage, private car (.56 mile private car) (Effective January 1, 2014)

$

-

handling, tolls, etc.

$

-

Meals and lodging

$

-

$

-

GRAND TOTAL TRAVEL EXPENSES

$

-

SUBTOTAL TRAVEL EXPENSES

ITEMIZED STATEMENT OF NECESSARY TRAVELING EXPENSES INCURRED FOR PERIOD Points of Travel Hour of Private Car Date mm/dd/yy

From City/State

To City/State

Depart/ Return

Miles / Fare Description

TOTALS

0.00

Commercial Fare Amount

TO Subsistence

Breakfast

Lunch

Supper

Total Meals 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0

0.00

Lodging

0.00

Total Meals & Lodging

Emergency & Necessary Expense

Detail

Amount

0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00

0.00

APPROVALS: Business Manager

Date

College President

Date

COMPETENCY II: TEACHING & LEARNING Summary of

Access, Success, and Completion Author: Terry O’Banion

Background The Open Door College. Community and technical colleges were founded on the premise of open access to education. Over the last 100 years, visionaries adopted an Access Agenda and founded community and technical colleges as community based organizations that made it geographically and financially possible for any student to acquire a postsecondary education in order to achieve economic and educational prosperity. The Open Door made postsecondary education available for anyone with a high school diploma or GED. Over the years, those visions have been reframed into conversations about student success, especially during the last two decades, as it became more apparent that far too many students begin college unprepared to face unintended barriers and subsequently stop-out or drop-out without completing a degree or certificate.

The Student Success Agenda was promoted as a means to assist students in meeting their individual education and career goals through policies, programs, and practices such as advising, financial aid, remediation, academic support, and academic transfer and terminal degree/certificate programs to meet the needs of majority nontraditional student populations.

Ultimately, the best definition of Student Success is that students finish what they start and community colleges have designed practices with that goal in mind.

Research conducted by Anthony Carnevale of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, however, has made it abundantly clear that the educational attainment rates in the United States have stagnated and are lagging far behind that of other countries, and the adequacy of the American workforce is also threatened in the new economy.

Consequently, the priorities placed on access and success have now shifted to college completion as national conversations have yielded the Completion Agenda, touted by the President and championed by legislators, foundations, policy analysts, business leaders and educators, to double the number of Americans with a postsecondary credential by 2020. The importance of America’s community colleges to achieving this ambitious goal has been repeatedly emphasized.

In his February 24, 2009, Address to a Joint Session of Congress, President Obama issued the following challenge: …half of the students who begin college never finish. This is a prescription for economic decline, because we know the countries that out-teach us today will outcompete us tomorrow. That is why it will be the goal of this administration to ensure that every child has access to a complete and competitive education from the day they are Teaching and Learning

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born to the day they begin a career…whatever the training may be, every American will need to get more than a high school diploma. And dropping out of high school is no longer an option. It’s not just quitting on yourself, it’s quitting on your country - and this country needs and values the talents of every American. That is why we will provide the support necessary for you to complete college and meet a new goal: by 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world (paras 6263).

In the 1983 report, A Nation at Risk, the National Commission on Excellence in Education warned “…the foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and as a people” (1983, p. 5). Once first in the world, America now ranks 16th in the percentage of young adults with a college degree.

The World Economic forum ranks the U.S.’s educational system 26th in the world. The case for the Completion Agenda as a major reform effort is based on the pocketbooks of individuals, business, and the state of federal government. College degrees equate to increased tax revenues, a decline in poverty, and increases in the middle class. The national imperative for the Completion Agenda is primarily economic, and the case was made by the U.S. Department of Education when it stated that more than half of all new jobs in the next decade will require a postsecondary certificate or degree.

The Community College Imperative As O’Banion stated, “Community colleges have been enormously successful in meeting the goals of the Student Access Agenda, but much less successful in meeting the goals of the Student Success Agenda” – where students finish what they start. The following facts are evidence: •

Fourteen percent of community college students do not complete a single credit in their first term.

• Almost 50 percent drop out by the second year.

• Thirty-three percent recommended for developmental studies never enroll in those courses.

The imperative to transform the community college is reflected in every major state and national report and is contained within the 2012 report from the 21st Century Commission on the Future of Community Colleges: …community colleges need to be redesigned for new times. What we find today are student success rates that are unacceptably low, employment preparation that is inadequately connected to job market needs, and disconnects in transitions between high schools, community colleges, and baccalaureate institutions.( p. viii) The Commission went further to frame the challenge for community colleges: …The American Dream is at risk. Because a highly educated population is fundamental to economic growth and a vibrant democracy, community colleges can help reclaim that dream. ..stepping up to this challenge will require dramatic redesign of these institutions, their mission, and most critically, their students’ educational experiences. (p.1)

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Frameworks for Institutional and Student Planning. O’Banion’s Access, Success, and Completion report recommends the Student Success Pathway as a model for institutional and student planning. The Student Success Pathway is a flexible model that can be applied to every sector and level of education, beginning in high school and including a series of components that reflect the steps students must take to goal completion, including college admission/intake, developmental education, first-term college level courses, continuing progress, and completion.

Using the Student Success Pathway as a framework for institutional planning forces college stakeholders to think about what they believe the college should be doing to improve and expand student learning. The model of the Student Success Pathway is deeply embedded in the culture and history of the community college, where career pathway models were first utilized by career and technical educators. Milestones and momentum are key concepts of the Student Success Pathway. Milestones are benchmarks or performance points colleges can use to gauge institutional and individual student progress. Milestones are determined by each college, but often include high school graduation, filing a plan to graduate, completion of a developmental sequence, passing gateway courses with a C or better, accumulating 15 or 30 college-level credits, securing a certificate or degree or transferring to a four-year college or university.

The Student Success Pathway also provides a visible and integrated roadmap for student planning and should be used as the framework for their individual educational plans.

Colleges need to help students to create a customized educational plan that will guide them through assessment, placement, orientation, career counseling, financial aid literacy and counseling, and academic advising. Ideally, the framework for student planning should be a design template that serves as a roadmap to help students navigate the college experience and represent a highway with off and on ramps so students can exit and re-enter when needed. The components need to be designed and treated as an integrated, cohesive, systemic, connected series of experiences the students and the college will use to map out the route students need to navigate to reach desired student and college goals and milestones.

Guidelines for the Student Success Agenda. As O’Banion states, “While there may not be a universal agreement on key guidelines for student success, there is an emerging consensus that such guidelines need to be created to support the goals of the Completion Agenda.” O’Banion suggests adopting Guidelines for Student Success that represent some of the core experiences that most community colleges agree are important to student success: 1. Students will make a significant connection with another person at the college as soon as possible.

2. Key intake programs including orientation, assessment, advisement, and placement will be integrated and mandatory for students.

3. Students will be placed in a program of study from day one; undecided students will be placed in a mandatory program of study designed to help them decide.

4. Students will be carefully monitored throughout the college experience – especially the first term – to ensure successful progress; the college will make interventions immediately to keep students on track.

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5. Students will engage in courses and experiences designed to broaden and deepen their learning.

6. Students will participate as full partners in navigating college services and the curriculum and will take primary responsibility for their own success.

O’Banion further suggests Guidelines for Institutional Success, noting that ScottClayton (2011) said, “Meaningful and lasting change may require more than tweaking around the edges; it may require overhauling the organization so that all aspects of the institution are aligned to promote student success.” These guidelines are suggested for beginning steps in overhauling the organization: 1. A leader or core of key leaders must champion the Student Success/Completion Agenda and be able to rally a critical mass of stakeholders to commit to the effort.

2. All decisions regarding policies, programs, practices, processes, and personnel will be based on evidence to the extent it is possible to do so.

3. Colleges will realign current resources and identify potential new resources – funding, personnel, facilities, and community backing – to support the goals of the Student Success/Completion Agenda.

4. Colleges will apply appropriate technological innovations to create, implement, and monitor the Student Success Pathway to optimize efficiency and effectiveness.

5. Colleges will create and implement guidelines for rapid, expansive scaling up of successful programs and practices.

6. Professional development for all college stakeholders will focus on student success and completion as the highest priority.

Finally, recognize that Teaching and Learning matter! As Vincent Tinto suggests, “If we are to substantially increase college completion, especially among low-income students, we must focus on improving success in the classroom, particularly during a student’s first year. We must be sensitive to the supports low-income students need to be successful in college, and lead efforts to dramatically improve their classroom experience.” (2011) Key Questions – 1) 2) 3) 4)

What is the completion agenda and why is it important?

How does the student success pathway help us frame the completion agenda?

What really works to help students succeed?

What Board action(s) would help promote student access, success and completion?

Excerpts from Access, Success, and Completion – A Primer for Community College Faculty, Administrators, Staff, and Trustees; Terry O’Banion. Published by the League for Innovation in the Community College with support from elumen.

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Focus on Learning: The Core Mission of Higher Education Terry O’Banion obanion@league.org A chapter from Focus on Learning: A Learning College Reader co-edited by Terry O'Banion and Cynthia Wilson and published by the League for Innovation in the spring of 2010. Copies available at www.league.org

Institutions of higher education in the United States have achieved world-wide recognition in pursuit of three key missions: research, teaching, and service—missions valued by their stakeholders primarily in that order. The great centers of university research have produced breakthroughs in every field of science that have made our universities the envy of the world. Because of their success, “research” has become embedded as one of the cardinal values and purposes of higher education. Leading fouryear colleges and community colleges have established “teaching” as a second cardinal value as many four-year colleges provide ideal residential communities for selected groups of students, and community colleges provide innovative approaches to assist great numbers of underprepared students in achieving success. All levels of institutions ascribe to “service” as an expression of their core values as they work to improve society at the local, state, national, and international level. Research, teaching, and service have provided a rich harvest from the higher education enterprise for American society and the world.

At the end of the 20th Century another key mission or purpose—a corollary of research, teaching, and service—began to sprout in the landscape of higher education. The new mission was not new at all, but it had not been as visible as research, teaching, and service in the policies, programs, and practices of institutions. Awakened from its dormancy, it began to claim territory that could establish it as more than a graft or a mutation of the historical missions rooted for decades. As the 21st Century got under way it became increasingly clear that “learning” had broken through the traditional hardpan of higher education and had established its own patch in the Groves of Academe. For some who toil in the vineyards of higher education “learning” will be no more than an upstart, an inconsequential sprout destined to wither and die. For others “learning” is the core business of all educational institutions—a transcendent value that arches over research, teaching, and service—providing a sharply focused perspective that will greatly enrich the work of the educational community.

As a newly-articulated mission of higher education “learning” has been cited by several leaders as part of the triumvirate of traditional missions. In a letter to the editor of Change magazine in May of 2000, James Bess, Professor of Higher Education at New York University said, “Institutions of higher education must maintain their unique roles in society—as extraordinary places where teaching, learning, and research (italics

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added) can unfold, unfettered by the crass, short-term expectations of profit” (p. 6). Two years later, in the lead article of the Association of Governing Board’s newsletter, Berberet and McMillin stated, “It doesn’t take a Ph.D. to know that a college or university fulfills its multiple missions—student learning, discovery of new knowledge, and community engagement (italics added)—chiefly through its faculty” (p. 1). Perhaps “learning” is being incorporated as a key mission of higher education, even supplanting some of the established missions, more rapidly than we realized.

The Emerging Focus on Learning “Learning” is, of course, the transcendent value that undergirds almost all educational activity. The purpose of research is to build on past learning to create new learning. The purpose of teaching is to improve and expand student learning. The purpose of service is to translate learning and provide learning to improve communities and citizens. All educators strongly value learning—as a continuing activity for themselves and as the outcome for others of their efforts. But “learning” has been more of an implied mission in higher education than a visible mission. It is the visible missions—research, teaching, and service—that determine the policies, practices, programs, and the uses of personnel in our institutions. And it is the visible missions on which all rewards are based.

One of the highest honors that can be bestowed on a university professor is that of Distinguished Research Chair. Ernest Boyer’s seminal work, Scholarship Reconsidered, was an attempt to right the balance that had tilted too far in the direction of traditional research over other forms of scholarship. Boyer hoped to establish “teaching” as an equal value to “research” in the reward systems of universities, but it is a purpose yet unrealized. In a review of teaching and learning practices in higher education between 1980 and 2000, cited by Berberet and McMillin, the authors concluded, “With few exceptions, teaching changes have not been tied to higher education’s incentive and reward system. Research remains the primary avenue to individual and institutional prestige” (p. 13).

Aping the university’s value system, community colleges, in the 1990s, created the concept of the Endowed Teaching Chair, identifying teachers for their teaching prowess rather than for their ability to help students learn. The following excerpts are cited from a description of an endowed teaching program at a leading community college: “The purpose of the endowed chair program is threefold: to recognize and promote teaching excellence at the college; to spotlight outstanding members of the college’s teaching faculty; and to provide the college with financial resources needed to support teaching excellence….The program enables the college to honor outstanding members of the teaching faculty and provide resources needed for the advancement of teaching….The criteria for selection of a faculty member for an endowed chair includes a faculty committee’s judgment of the candidate’s record of teaching excellence, contribution to the advancement of instruction within his or her field, and the degree of esteem expressed by his or her colleagues.” In this program teaching trumps learning at every turn.

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Even so, there is an emerging focus on learning at all levels of education and in an increasing number of other countries that suggests a possible transformation in core educational practice, and, perhaps, even in the traditional missions of higher education.

The Learning Revolution In the last fifteen years a Learning Revolution has spread rapidly across all levels of American higher education. In 1994, the cover of Business Week declared a Learning Revolution in progress; in 1995, a special section in TIME magazine announced the developing Learning Revolution. In 1996, the first national conference on “The Learning Paradigm” was held in San Diego, California, and the Association of Community College Trustees released a special issue of the Trustee Quarterly devoted entirely to The Learning Revolution: A Guide for Community College Trustees. In 1997, the American Council on Education and the American Association of Community Colleges jointly published A Learning College for the 21st Century by Terry O’Banion which, for the first time, outlined the principles and practices of a Learning College. In 1997 and 1998, the League for Innovation and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) sponsored three national teleconferences on the Learning Revolution and the Learning College. In a few short years, the Learning Revolution has taken American higher education by storm and has found community colleges to be particularly committed to implementing the Learning Revolution. In a 1998 survey by the League for Innovation in the Community College, 73% of the nation’s community college presidents indicated they had undertaken an initiative for their institutions to become more learning-centered community colleges.

From 2000 to 2010 the League for Innovation has continued to champion the Learning Revolution. The League coordinated two major million dollar grants at the beginning of the decade, one to create vanguard learning colleges and the other to create models of learning outcomes. In addition, the League launched a monthly series of Learning Abstracts and began to sponsor an annual Learning Summit. Now, in 2010, the League is publishing this Focus on Learning: A Learning College Reader as the Learning Revolution continues to impact and change higher education.

The Learning Revolution in education is part of a larger social transformation going on in the United States and in the world. Peter Drucker (1992), in Managing for the Future, succinctly captures this special period of change: “Every few hundred years throughout Western history, a sharp transformation has occurred. In a matter of decades, society altogether rearranges itself—its world view, its basic values, its social and political structures, its arts, its key institutions. Fifty years later a new world order exists. . . our age is such a period of transformation” (p. 95). The Learning Revolution, “in a matter of decades,” has the potential to fundamentally change the education enterprise in the United States and in Scotland, Australia, Jamaica, Turkey and other countries where it is taking hold.

A Revolution with a Purpose

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In a nutshell, the purpose of the Learning Revolution is to “place learning first” in every policy, program, and practice in higher education by overhauling the traditional architecture of education. In a seminal work, An American Imperative, the Wingspread Group on Higher Education in 1993 said “We must redesign all our learning systems to align our entire education enterprise for the personal, civic, and workplace needs of the twenty-first century” (p. 19). The Wingspread Group went a step further and indicated the challenge institutions of higher education will face if they are to implement the Learning Revolution: “Putting learning at the heart of the academic enterprise will mean overhauling the conceptual, procedural, curricular, and other architecture of postsecondary education on most campuses” (p.14).

While there seems to be a revolution or reform movement about every decade in American education, the Learning Revolution is quite different from reform efforts of the past. The Learning Revolution has two distinct goals that make it different: (1) to place learning first in every policy, program, and practice in higher education, and (2) to overhaul the traditional architecture of education.

Placing Learning First It is generally inferred that learning is the primary purpose of education; but policies, practices, and value statements often reflect other priorities.

Any student of education can cite the three primary missions most often articulated for American universities as noted earlier: research, teaching, and service. In many universities, however, the reward system places higher value on research over teaching and service. New tenure-track faculty are often warned by colleagues and mentors against investing too much energy and time in their teaching assignments. Universities have established distinguished research chairs as a clear designation of the primacy placed on research.

In contrast, the community college places such strong value on teaching that the institution is often referred to as “the teaching college.” For example, in community colleges, the value placed on teaching is clearly reflected in their mission statements.

Robert Barr, former director of institutional research and planning at Palomar College in California, says: “It is revealing that virtually every mission statement contained in the catalogs in California’s 107 community colleges fails to use the word learning in a statement of purpose. When it is used, it is almost always bundled in the phrase teaching and learning as if to say that, while learning may indeed have something to do with community colleges, it is only present as an aspect of teaching.”

One of the most significant documents ever written on the community college in the U. S., Building Communities (1988)—the report of the Commission on the Future of Community Colleges—repeatedly highlights the central value placed on teaching in the community college: “Building communities dedicated to teaching is the vision and inspiration of this report. Quality instruction should be the hallmark of the movement.

The community college should be the nation’s premier teaching institution.” Aping the

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universities propensity to place its highest value on research by establishing distinguished research chairs, the community college has established distinguished teaching chairs as a clear symbol of the primacy it places on teaching.

When research and teaching are the most visible values in an educational institution, the policies, practices, programs, and personnel in that institution are aligned to reflect those values. If learning is placed first to become the most important value, the policies, practices, programs, and personnel will be realigned to reflect the change in focus.

Recognition by key stakeholders in the institution that learning should be placed first as a key mission is the beginning of the Learning Revolution.

Overhauling the Traditional Architecture Every faculty member and administrator in education has been frustrated at some time or another with the traditional architecture of education that limits how they can teach or manage and how students can learn. Roger Moe, former majority leader of the Minnesota State Senate, has said "Higher education is a thousand years of tradition wrapped in a hundred years of bureaucracy.� The current system is time-bound, place-bound, efficiency-bound, and role-bound. These traditional limits on the architecture of education apply to American education but may differ in other countries depending on their educational history and the extent to which their leaders have implemented reforms in recent years.

The educational system in the U. S. is time-bound by credit hours and semester courses.

College students are learning in blocks of time that are artificial. Excellent teachers know that learning is not constrained to one-hour meetings held on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and they have been frustrated in teaching within these prescribed boundaries.

The system is place-bound. Learning is initiated, nurtured, monitored, and certified primarily by teachers in classrooms on a campus. We have experimented with distance education that takes courses off campus, but while it has increased student access, it retains the old model of education. Distance education, for the most part, is a nontraditional delivery system for traditional education. Work-based learning was supposed to break up that model, but it doesn't—it extends the model and is controlled by it because work-based learning is built around the current structure of the school. It still binds the student to a place.

The system is efficiency-bound. Our model of education reflects in great part the adjustment to an agricultural and industrial economy of an earlier era. Public school students are still dismissed early in the afternoon and in the summers so they can work on farms that no longer exist. Reflecting the industrial economy, education responded by creating a lock-step, put-them-in-boxes, factory model—the basis of American education today. Academic credit, based on time in class, makes learning appear orderly. This model creates an efficiency system to award credentials. Grades are collected and turned into credits, and these compilations are supposed to represent profound learning.

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Finally the system is role-bound, which may be its greatest weakness. In education, we make the assumption that one human being, the teacher, can ensure that thirty very different human beings, one hour a day, three days a week for sixteen weeks, can learn enough to become enlightened citizens, productive workers, and joyful lifelong learners.

Then we assume that this one human being can repeat this miracle three more times in the same sixteen-week period for ninety additional individuals. We provide little comfort and support when teachers fail to live up to this role-bound myth.

Reformers have been consistent in their criticism of the constraints on learning reflected in the industrial model of schooling in the United States. In 1962, John Dewey argued, “Nature has not adapted the young animal to the narrow desk, the crowded curriculum, the silent absorption of complicated facts.” More than 20 years ago, K. Patricia Cross, a leading advocate for educational reform throughout her career observed: “After some two decades of trying to find answers to the question of how to provide education for all the people, I have concluded that our commitment to the lock-step, time-defined structures of education stands in the way of lasting progress.” More recently, the Tofflers have noted that “America’s schools. . . still operate like factories, subjecting the raw material (children) to standardized instruction and routine inspection.”

Today, this inherited architecture of education places great limits on a system struggling to redefine itself. The school system, from kindergarten through graduate school, is timebound, place-bound, efficiency-bound, and role-bound.

The Learning College As the Learning Revolution spread throughout all levels of education in the United States innovators and reformers began to create programs and practices to reflect the emerging focus on learning. Learning Communities were being created everywhere, and research established their potency as an effective new program to retain students and improve their performance. Learning Outcomes became the coin of the realm for organizing and focusing what needed to be learned; the accrediting associations began to require learning outcomes of all institutions. Peter Senge’s Learning Organization captured the imaginations of scores of leaders who tried to transform their organizational structures and practices to reflect the new emphasis on learning. Studies on the brain were translated into educational practice to expand students’ potential for learning. Learning Portfolios were designed to capture the substance of what students were learning. And a host of learning-centered innovations flooded the journals and conference forums: Classroom Assessment Techniques, Project-Based Learning, Contextual Learning, WorkBased Learning, Authentic Learning, First-Year Experience, Service Learning, Active Learning, and Collaborative Learning are examples.

However, these innovations, programs, and practices tended to operate in a vacuum.

Many were quite effective, but they seldom unfolded as part of an overall strategy to place learning first and overhaul the traditional architecture of education. It was business as usual for American education—piecemeal reform. But, as reported in The Progress of Educational Reform (1995) “While piecemeal implementation of reforms may lead to

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progress, it will not be the same magnitude as a systemic strategy focused on student learning.” What was needed was an overall framework, a systemic design, of what a college would look like if it placed learning first and overhauled the traditional architecture of education. The Learning College was the first such effort to fill that bill.

The Learning College places learning first and provides educational experiences for learners anyway, anyplace, anytime. The model is based on the assumption that educational experiences are designed for the convenience of learners rather than for the convenience of institutions and their staffs. The term “The Learning College” is used as a generic reference for all educational institutions.

The Learning College is based on six key principles: • The Learning College creates substantive change in individual learners.

• The Learning College engages learners as full partners in the learning process with learners assuming primary responsibility for their own choices.

• The Learning College creates and offers as many options for learning as possible.

• The Learning College assists learners to form and participate in collaborative learning activities.

• The Learning College defines the roles of learning facilitators by the needs of the learners.

• The Learning College and its learning facilitators succeed only when improved and expanded learning can be documented for learners.

Principle I—The Learning College Creates Substantive Change in Individual Learners. The need for colleges to support this first principle is a self-evident, general truth, easily verifiable in personal experience. It is so elementary that it is often unstated and overlooked. This first principle must be stated and restated until it becomes an embedded value undergirding all other principles.

At its best, formal schooling is every society’s attempt to provide a powerful environment that can create substantive change in individuals. But formal schooling is no longer at its best in most societies. In the Learning College, this first principle must form the framework for all other activities. The learners and the learning facilitators in the Learning College must be aware of the awesome power that can be released when learning works well. Learning in the Learning College will not be business as usual.

Powerful processes will be at work; substantive change will be expected. Learners will be exploring and experimenting with new and expanded versions of what they can become. And it is important for educational leaders planning to initiate major change to become more learning centered to realize and to make visible to all of their stakeholders and constituents that what they are about to do will create substantive change in individual learners.

Principle II—The Learning College Engages Learners as Full Partners in the Learning Process, with Learners Assuming Primary Responsibility for Their Own Choices. At the point a learner chooses to engage the Learning College, a series of services will be initiated to prepare the learner for the experiences and opportunities to

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come. Until there is a seamless system of education across all sectors of education based on the principles of the Learning College, the services will be heavily focused on orienting the learner to the new experiences and expectations of the Learning College, which are not usually found in traditional schools. Two key expectations will be communicated to new learners at the first stage of engagement: (1) Learners are full partners in the creation and implementation of their learning experiences, and (2) Learners will assume primary responsibility for making their own choices about goals and options.

The services will include assessing the learner’s abilities, achievements, values, needs, goals, expectations, resources, and environmental/situational limitations. A personal profile will be constructed by the learner in consultation with an expert assessor to illustrate what this learner knows, wants to know, and needs to know. A personal learning plan will be constructed from this personal profile, and the learner will negotiate a contract that outlines responsibilities of both the learner and the Learning College.

The Learning College will also provide orientation and experimentation for learners who are unfamiliar with the new learning environment of the Learning College. Some learners will need training in using the technology, in developing collaborations, in locating resources, and in navigating learning systems. Specialists will monitor these services carefully and will be responsible for approving a learner’s readiness to fully engage the learning opportunities provided.

It will be the Learning College’s responsibility to provide clear and easily accessible information in a variety of formats. This information should include guidelines for making decisions about dates, workloads, resources, and learning options; details about processes and options new to the learner; and agreements regarding expectations and responsibilities. It will be the learner’s responsibility to review and provide information, experiment with processes and options, make choices, and commit to full engagement in the choices made.

Principle III—The Learning College Creates and Offers as Many Options for Learning as Possible. The learner will review and experiment with options regarding time, place, structure, and methodology. Entry vouchers will be exchanged for the selected options and exit vouchers will be held for completion.

Each learning option will include specific goals and competency levels needed for entry as well as specific outcome measures of competency levels achieved. Learning Colleges will constantly create additional learning options, including prescribed, preshrunk portable modules; stand-alone technological expert systems; opportunities for collaboration with other learners in small groups and through technological links; and tutor-led groups, individual reading programs, project-based activities, service learning opportunities, lectures, and laboratories. It is important that traditional options needed by some students be retained to provide for the multiple needs of students.

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A major goal of the Learning College will be to create as many learning options as possible in order to provide successful learning experiences for all learners. If the learner’s goal is to become competent in English as a second language, there should be four or five learning options available to achieve the goal. If the learner’s goal is to become competent in welding a joint, there should be four or five learning options available to achieve that goal.

To manage the activities and progress of thousands of learners engaged in hundreds of learning options at many different times, at many different levels, in many different locations, the Learning College will rely on expert systems using advanced technology.

Without these complex systems, the Learning College cannot function. These systems reflect the breakthrough that will free education from the time-bound, place bound, and role-bound systems that currently manage the educational enterprise.

Principle IV—The Learning College Assists Learners to Form and Participate in Collaborative Learning Activities. To transform a traditional institution into a Learning College is to turn the university ideal of a “community of scholars” into a new ideal of “communities of learners.” More than just cute word play, the focus on creating communities among all participants in the Learning College—including not just students but also the faculty and other learning specialists—on creating student cohorts, and developing social structures that support individual learning is a requirement of a Learning College.

It has become increasingly clear from research that learning is a social activity. The constructivists Abel, Cennamo and Chung, say “Learning is a social enterprise. Through social interaction, as well as through action on objects, learners make sense of the world.”

In the U. S., “Learning communities” is a specific term for a curricular intervention that enhances collaboration and expands learning, and these communities have taken hold in hundreds of institutions across the country. There are many other forms of collaborative learning including project-based learning, electronic forums (Twitter and Facebook, e.g.), and collaborative problem-solving activities that illustrate this principle.

In a Learning College, staff will form and recruit students into cohorts of common interest or circumstances. Process facilitators will orient individuals and form them into groups or communities of learners. Resource specialists will attend to the resource needs of both individuals and groups of learners. Learning facilitators will design experiences that build upon and use group strengths and other dynamics. Assessment specialists will design and implement authentic assessments that can occur both individually and in the context of collaborative learning. The Learning College will be designed not only around the unique needs of individual learners but also around their needs for association. The Learning College will foster and nourish learning communities as an integral part of its design.

Principle V—The Learning College Defines the Roles of Learning Facilitators by the Needs of the Learners. If learners have varied and individual needs that require special attention, then it follows that the personnel employed in this enterprise must be

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selected on the basis of what learners need. Everyone employed in the Learning College will be a learning facilitator. Every employee will be directly linked to learners in the exercise of his or her duties, although some activities, such as accounting, may be more indirectly related. The goal is to have every employed person thinking about how his or her work facilitates the learning process.

The Learning College will contract with many specialists to provide services to learners.

Specialists will be employed on a contractual basis to produce specific products or to deliver specific services; some will work full time, but many will work part time, often from their homes, linked to learners through technology. A number of specialists will be scattered around the world providing unique services and special expertise.

The Board of Regents for the State of Ohio calls for learning consultants who will be mentors, facilitators of inquiry, architects of connection, and managers of collaboration and integration. The ground work is already being prepared for the new role of the learning facilitator to support the goals and purposes of the Learning College.

Principle VI—The Learning College and Its Learning Facilitators Succeed only When Improved and Expanded Learning Can Be Documented for Learners. “What does this learner know?” and “What can this learner do?” provide the framework for documenting outcomes, both for the learner and for the learning facilitators. If the ultimate goal of the Learning College is to promote and expand learning, then this will be the yardstick by which the Learning College faculty and staff are evaluated.

Conventional information may be assembled for students (retention rates and achievement scores) and for faculty (service and observation by students, peers, and supervisors), but the goal will be to document what students know and what they can do and to use this information as the primary measure of success for the learning facilitators and the Learning College.

All learning options in the Learning College will include the competencies required for entrance and for exit. These competencies will reflect national and state standards when available, or they will be developed by specialists on staff or on special contract.

Assessing a learner’s readiness for a particular learning option will be a key part of the initial engagement process and thereafter a continuing process embedded in the culture of the institution.

Conclusion These six principles form the core of the Learning College. They refer primarily to process and structure, and are built on the basic philosophy that the student is central in all activities within the scope of the educational enterprise. There are certainly other principles that must be considered in creating a new paradigm of learning. The kind of content to be addressed, how colleges are funded, and how institutions are governed are examples of key issues that must be addressed and for which principles must be designed.

In these six principles, there is at least a beginning direction for those who wish to create a Learning College that places learning first and provides educational experiences for

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learners anyway, anyplace, anytime. Such a college is designed to help students make passionate connections to learning.

References Abel, S.K, Cennamo, K. S. & Chung, M. (1996) A “layers of negotiation” model for designing constructivist learning material. Educational Technology, 36 (4) 39-48.

Barr, R. (1994, February). A new paradigm for community colleges. The News. San Marcos, CA: Research and Planning Group of the California Community Colleges.

Berberet, J. & McMillin, L. (2002). The American professoriate in transition. AGB Priorities. Spring (18), 1-15. Washington, DC: Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges.

Boyer, E. (1990) Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professoriate. New York: Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

Commission on the Future of Community Colleges. (1988) Building communities: A vision for a new century. Washington, D. C.: American Association of Community Colleges.

Cross, K. P. (1976) Accent on learning: Improving instruction and reshaping the curriculum. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Dewey, J. & Dewey, E. (1962) Schools of tomorrow. New York: E.P. Dutton and Company, Inc. Drucker, P. T. ((1992) Managing for the future: The 1990s and beyond. New York: Penguin Books.

Moe, R. Cited in Armajani, Babak, et al (January 1994) A model for the reinvented higher education system: State policy and college learning. Denver: Education Commission of the States.

O’Banion, T. (1997). A learning college for the 21st century. Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press.

O’Banion, T. (1997) The learning revolution: A guide for community college trustees.

(Special Issue) Trustee Quarterly, 1.

Ohio Technology in Education Steering Committee. (March,1996) Technology in the learning communities of tomorrow: Beginning the transformation. Ohio Board of Regents.

Senge, P. (1990) The fifth discipline: The art and practice of the learning organization.

New York: Doubleday.

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Toffler, A. & Toffler, H. (March/April,1995) Getting set for the coming millennium. The Futurist.

Wingspread Group on Higher Education. (1993) An American imperative: Higher expectations for higher education. Racine, WI: The Johnson Foundation, Inc.

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ANALYSIS

The Last Artisans?

Traditional and Future Faculty Roles ▶ David Paris, vice president, Office of Integrative Liberal Learning and the Global Commons, AAC&U

T

he articles in this issue of Peer Review variously describe the changes in the role of faculty members in undergraduate education and the conditions under which they work. The traditional faculty situation of full-time employment in a department with a fairly well-defined career track that includes tenure and protection of academic freedom is disappearing. Tenure-track positions have declined, and the adjuncts, instructors, and other non-tenure-track faculty (NTTF) that now fill the faculty ranks are less secure and less well compensated. Moreover, many of the things faculty members used to do—course design, selection of materials, creation of assignments, and assessment—are increasingly being organized by administrators and specialists and then turned over to often peripatetic adjuncts. The faculty role, from terms and conditions of employment to the actual work of instruction, is, in current parlance, becoming “unbundled.”

Two obvious factors driving these changes are cost and technology. In all but a small minority of well-funded institutions, budgetary pressures, especially postrecession, make cutting personnel costs and even personnel an obvious, even necessary “managerial imperative” (Lazerson 2010, Ch. 4). The unbundling or elimination of the traditional faculty role is aided and abetted by technology that allows courses to be delivered more cheaply or even free as institutions increasingly go online and flirt with massive open online courses (MOOCs).

Those concerned about this brave new world have spent much energy and effort in trying to understand these changes and develop appropriate and effective responses to them. The work of the Delphi Project and the ongoing efforts of AAC&U are producing sound research and interesting possibilities. At the grass-roots level, efforts at unionizing adjuncts seem to be gaining some traction with good results. These admirable efforts nevertheless implicitly or explicitly recognize that we are unlikely, save in a few elite places, to see the traditional faculty role restored.

As we consider future possibilities, it might be of value to pause and remind ourselves of the traditional faculty role by looking at it where it still exists—the liberal arts college. The art and craft of faculty work practiced there might help us evaluate new ideas about the faculty role as it might be emerging under the pressures of cost and the possibilities of technology. It might also provide us with some perspective on, and responses to, emerging and potentially radical alternatives.

BUNDLING AND ARTISANSHIP

The liberal arts college is often thought to reflect what “college” is—Delbanco calls this ideal “our American pastoral”—despite the fact that these institutions serve a small fraction of American students (2012, 11). Residential campuses create a small community of traditional-age students and offer the promise of personalized attention from faculty and administrators in and out of class, as well as numerous cocurricular opportunities. Most students also point out that in the often-isolated residential setting, they learn as much from their peers as their instructors—and perhaps on a broader range of subjects. As a common banner in college dormitories in the nineteenth century cheekily put it, “Don’t let your studies interfere with your education!” (Thelin 2004, 163).

Faculty members in these institutions, the large majority of whom are tenured and tenure track (usually more of the former than the latter), typically define their formal role through the traditional trinity of teaching, scholarship, and service. However, in these institutions, unlike in many or even most universities, teaching is given far more weight in personnel considerations, and spending a fair amount of time in advising and governance is not only typical but expected. In these and other activities beyond the classroom, there is an important, more or less explicit understanding that faculty members, administrators, and students form SUMMER 2013 | PEER REVIEW | AAC&U 17

an intentional community. The expectation is that the constant academic and social interaction is an important part of what Delbanco calls “lateral learning” from peers and others in the community (2012, 54–57). Faculty members and others see themselves as mentors to, and friends of, their students. To be sure, these understandings are found at other institutions, but the particular situation of the small residential college facilitates and encourages these relationships.

With regard to teaching, faculty members individually have tremendous autonomy and nearly complete control over curricular materials and course content, pedagogical strategies and classroom tactics, and assessment. Although there may be some departmental or institutional requirements for offering certain courses or having certain assignments (e.g., in writing-intensive courses), the norm is for each faculty member to develop and teach courses according to his/her own best lights as part of a department’s disciplinary offerings. There are few specialists that assist faculty members in any aspect of this process, save perhaps for library assistance and technological support for a course management system. There are few if any design specialists for electronic materials, few or no assessment personnel, or technical staff to move courses into online platforms, etc.

Simply put, the idea of unbundling the faculty role, whether in terms and conditions of employment or in instruction, has not reached the shores of the small elite liberal arts colleges. Faculty members are fairly autonomous artisans who craft the process of learning in their own ways without much if any specialized help; the specialization and division of labor involved only pertains to their and their colleagues’ disciplinary training. Indeed, the faculty as a whole, like the disciplines/ graduate schools that produce them, operates something like a medieval guild that 18 AAC&U | PEER REVIEW | SUMMER 2013

provided entry to employment via apprenticeship, set craft standards, and resisted interference from authorities and potential competitors. Finally, the “bundled” role of faculty members at liberal arts colleges is dual, since it also extends to their broader role as community members relating to students in many ways beyond the classroom.

Does it work? If depth of belief and testimony are to be believed, these liberal arts colleges have a strong positive impact on their students (Chambliss forthcoming).

“High-impact practices” may not be a term of art at these institutions, but they are commonly practiced. Perhaps inevitably by dint of size and character, students report higher levels of engagement than are found at most institutions, a combination of intentionality and serendipity on a small residential campus. The key ingredient to making it work is immersion in an intellectual community with multiple opportunities for personal interaction, mentoring, and “lateral learning.” Students often “major in a professor” ( Jaschik 2013) and have many opportunities for oneon-one engagement and feedback. The sense of community developed among undergraduates extends beyond graduation. Maintaining connections with peers and with the faculty and the institution is common, including high rates of participation in annual giving, reflecting belief in the worth of the institution and program.

As ideal as these circumstances are, the model is not perfect. With a few notable exceptions, formal assessment of learning in these settings is rare, and it sometimes seems that such resistance correlates with elite status. Similarly, innovation in program or pedagogy is not necessarily an imperative, especially as mostly tenured faculty, with artisan-like confidence in their individual work and institutional role, often see little need to change what seems to work well. The success that is a product of both lavish resources and highly

personal kind of artisanship is enviable but probably not widely replicable; this kind of education is simply too costly to be offered widely. It works, but primarily in some limited and privileged precincts.

A FUTURE FACULTY DYSTOPIA

If the traditional role is being preserved at elite liberal arts colleges, cost and technology are driving experimentation and disruption elsewhere. Recently the University of Southern New Hampshire’s College for America received accreditation from the New England Association of Colleges and Universities for a two-year degree in liberal studies (Parry 2013). That action received a lot of attention, because the degree would be awarded on the basis of the achievement of competencies rather than the accumulation of credit hours.

Competency-based programs are certainly not new (Field 2013), but this is “the first university eligible to award federal aid for a program untethered from the credit hour, the time-based unit that underlies courses and degrees” (Parry et. al 2013). Specifically, the program does not involve faculty members doing instruction, as “it lacks courses and traditional professors” (Parry et. al 2013).

Students do self-paced work at various tasks, informed by online materials, tutorials, and problem sets presumably constructed by subject specialists and instructional designers. When students complete 120 tasks or sets of tasks that demonstrate competency the degree is awarded; there is no credit hour or time on task requirement. About the only recognizable direct faculty role in this process is in assessment of the performance of these tasks, though occasionally an individual “coach” might be in contact to help a student having difficulty. Otherwise the learning process is, so to speak, largely mechanized and routinized, the opposite of the more personal interaction in the artisanal process described above.

The appeal of this approach lies primarily in improved access and increased transparency. It improves access in two senses, cost and convenience. The degree costs as little as $2,500, which wouldn’t even pay for room and board at most residential colleges. Instruction is offered completely online, allowing the work to be done from almost anywhere. College for America has partnered with a number of corporations to support onsite locations where employees can pursue their degrees online after, and even sometimes during, work hours. The tasks and work involved in the degree should be transparent (although the lessons and tasks have yet to be made public) so that other educational institutions and future employers can see what the student has done. It is too early to answer the question of quality, “Does it work?” but the quality of the results should be able to be assessed.

For those concerned with the future faculty role, College for America might suggest a potential dystopian end point for the declining role of faculty members in undergraduate education. The faculty role is so “unbundled” in this case it all but disappears. Online resources are assembled and tasks constructed in cooperation with subject and other specialists. The resulting units are then offered widely, with the relatively limited personal contact just mentioned. Just as the artisans and guilds were replaced by more standard, mass, mechanized production, so too this kind of division of labor and use of technology could, if successful, further diminish the faculty role in undergraduate education Beyond the threat of supplanting the traditional faculty role, it might be objected that this approach, despite the virtues of access and transparency, has major overlapping pedagogical and social problems. Students may be able to complete the tasks using online materials, but there is little or no ongoing pedagogical process and no artisanship—the

mentoring that would support deeper, longer-lasting development of skills and knowledge. It seems doubtful that the level of engagement and immersion at a residential institution that achieves its results can be matched by simply doing online tasks (though the evidence remains to be seen). From a broader, equity perspective, the development of this kind of program and perhaps other technologydriven approaches, such as MOOCs, hold out a future in which a rich, deep, closely supervised education is enjoyed by some, typically the better off, and not afforded, in several senses, to others. Although the strategy of College for America offers broader access and therefore serves equity in one way, it also reinforces inequities in the kind of education available to students.

Whatever the merits of these objections, technological experimentation and innovation like College for America is here to stay. The question, then, is what the faculty role might be—a question that, not surprisingly, folds into the broader question of the role of technology in structuring and delivering (“disrupting”) undergraduate education.

NEGOTIATING A NEW FACULTY ROLE

Obviously there is a vast terrain that needs to be negotiated between the artisans in the liberal arts and the largely mechanized program of College for America. Initially, this question has been addressed as one of assessment—can online instruction in any of its many forms be as/more effective than face-to-face instruction? Like many social science questions, definite answers are hard to come by, but there is an emerging consensus that the best strategy may be a blended one that mixes online and face-to-face elements. This in turn has led to the more recent discussions about, and experiments with, “flipping the classroom,” in which materials and activities best delivered and completed

online are pushed out of the classroom, with class time reserved for those activities (coaching) best done in face-to-face setting (Bowen 2012).

The moving target then is which activities belong in which domain and how they may be best combined. That is, where and how can instruction be routinized, and what kind of role can and should faculty members play in a world in which many aspects of instruction can now be found and done online? While online and adaptive learning have made huge strides, there are still many instructional tasks that ideally involve or even require human judgment. As Levy and Murnane (2013) note more generally about the role of computers in the work force, in the areas of “solving unstructured problems” (i.e, a lawyer writing a convincing legal brief) and “working with new information for use in problem solving” (i.e., a motel manager deciding whether a new air conditioner represents a useful upgrade), human judgment is needed to do the task well.

In an instructional context the implications of this are two-fold. First, some of the critical aspects of the faculty role involving judgment (artisanship) cannot be routinized or done through technology. For example, coaching students in doing inquiry—framing a problem in an interesting way, developing a research strategy, interpreting results, and giving feedback—is a task not likely to be subject to technology-based rules and pattern recognition. Perhaps equally important, the aim of undergraduate education in the economic situation Murnane and Levy describe is precisely the development of the capacities to work with unscripted problems and new information. Again, it is doubtful these capacities will be best developed through technology-dominated programs and materials, but again that is a question that demands hard thinking and evidence. At least it seems now that faculty involvement—artisanship—is still needed.

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What this suggests is that faculty members need to negotiate their role on two related dimensions, the professional and the political. Professionally, faculty members are going to have to adopt and even embrace the idea of maximizing the potential of technology and the flipped classroom, even if the classroom itself is online. In training new faculty and retooling existing instructors, the way to serve both faculty and students is to develop and demonstrate the value of a combination of coaching and technology.

Faculty members’ artisanship should be brought to bear and practiced in the classroom or online as a functional equivalent or enhancement of the kind of work found in a residential liberal arts college.

What is most dismaying about the current trends and changes in the faculty role is that institutions and their leaders apparently do not see the desirability of actually developing and deploying faculty to effectively take advantage of the new pedagogical possibilities. Fascination with technology and cost savings seems to have distracted administrators from thinking about what students need and what technology (and faculty) can offer. There is little or no investment in creating faculty members who can maximize the incredible potential technology creates.

It may be then that the faculty’s professional work has a political component.

That is, in both advocating for and actually embracing the possibilities of the flipped classroom and similar instructional innovations, faculty members need to aggressively stake out what their professional role is and standards for it. To get institutions to respect this role, promote it, and create terms and conditions for work that allow it to occur will almost certainly require political organization of some sort, whether through existing professional mechanisms or nascent efforts at unionization.

When the guilds were overrun by 20 AAC&U | PEER REVIEW | SUMMER 2013

industrial production it took a very long time and a great deal of struggle for labor to organize and achieve some modicum of appropriate terms and conditions for work. And, as recent events have shown, progress in the interests of labor is not guaranteed. The difference in the case of faculty is that “management” and “labor” have a shared interest in having a capable, professional, and decently treated workforce that can take advantage of the new possibilities opened up by technology.

The “industrial” path we are treading and the treatment of faculty as piece workers in a quasi-industrial way serves our students, faculty, and society poorly.

Reframing and redefining the artisanship of the faculty in a new era in a way that embraces technology and innovation is imperative. §

REFERENCES Chambliss, D., and C. Takacs. Forthcoming. How College Works. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Delbanco, A. 2012. College: What it Was, Is, and Should Be. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Field, K. 2013.“Student Aid Can Be Awarded for ‘Competencies,’ Not Just Credit Hours, U.S. Says. Chronicle of Higher Education, April 18. http://chronicle.com/article/Student-Aid-CanBe Awarded-for/137991/.

Jaschik, S. 2013. “Majoring in a Professor.” Inside Higher Ed., August 12. http://www.insidehighered. com/news/2013/08/12/study-finds-choicemajor-most-influenced-quality-intro-professor.

Lazerson, M. 2010. Higher Education and the American Dream: Success and its Discontents. New York: CEU Press.

Levy, F. and R. Murnane. 2013. Dancing With Robots.

Washington, DC: Third Way. Parry, M. 2013. “Helping Colleges Move Beyond the Credit Hour.” Chronicle of Higher Education, April 29. http://chronicle.com/article/HelpingColleges-Move-Beyond/138805/.

Parry, M., K. Field, and B. Supiano. 2013. “The Gates Effect.” Chronicle of Higher Education, July 14. http://chronicle.com/article/The-GatesEffect/140323/.

Thelin, J. 2004. A History of American Higher Education. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

A AC &U MEE TINGS NETWORK MEETINGS GLOBAL LEARNING IN COLLEGE Asking Big Questions, Engaging Urgent Challenges October 3–5, 2013 Providence, Rhode Island

TRANSFORMING STEM EDUCATION Inquiry, Innovation, Inclusion, and Evidence October 31–November 2, 2013 San Diego, California

GENERAL EDUCATION AND ASSESSMENT Disruptions, Innovations, and Opportunities February 27–March 1, 2014 Portland, Oregon

DIVERSITY, LEARNING, AND STUDENT SUCCESS Policy, Practice, Privilege March 27–29, 2014 Chicago, Illinois

ANNUAL MEETING QUALITY, E-QUALITY, AND OPPORTUNITY How Educational Innovations Will Make—or Break—America’s Global Future January 22–25, 2014 Washington, DC

www.aacu.org/meetings

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Peer Review | Winter 2014 | Reflection Builds Twenty-First-Century Professionals

Winter 2014, Vol. 16, No. 1

Reflection Builds Twenty-First-Century Professionals By i Lllian A. Rafeldt, Three Rivers Community College (TRCC); Heather Jane Bader, Lawrence Memorial Hospital; Nancy Lesnick Czarzasty, Ellen Freeman, Edith Ouellet, and Judith M. Snayd; all of TRCC

Powerful educational experiences arouse interest and curiosity, encourage reflection, and promote learning and growth in people. To this end, educational reformer John Dewey suggests that activity with purposeful reflection in private, public, and in groups supports learning as a “moving force” toward positive change. Using e-portfolios, the Three Rivers Community College (TRCC) nursing program designed scaffolded reflective learning activities that link program learning outcomes with TRCC’s general education core values. Our e-portfolio practices guide students as they integrate the skills and dispositions of critical thinking, safe and competent practice, communication, caring, holism, and professionalism into their development as twentyfirst-century professionals.

The opportunity to fully integrate e-portfolio use across our professional degree program offers far-reaching benefits for students, faculty, and our entire college.

Weaving a series of reflective e-portfolio assignments into every course in our major, we seek to create a recursive learning sequence, one that gradually deepens students’ identities as successful learners and emerging nursing professionals. That same sequential integration also facilitates faculty learning in our programmatic outcomes assessment process; our e-portfolio-based assessment strategy links general education core values and program competencies and helps our faculty better understand what aspects of our curriculum are working well and what aspects need to be rethought. This active process of inquiry and reflection engages faculty, just as it engages students, and supports learning for both. And this year, the success of this process in nursing has encouraged the college as a whole to advance a similar process for general education and outcome assessment college-wide.

Background Located in Norwich, Connecticut, TRCC is a midsize commuter college with forty-eight academic degrees and forty-four certificate programs. Educational clusters focus on allied health, advanced manufacturing, energy, hospitality, and information technology.

The associate degree (AD) registered nursing (RN) program is one of six nursing programs in Connecticut. Approximately one hundred students are admitted to the program each year. While completing the four semesters of nursing, students have the opportunity to take liberal arts courses towards BSN degrees. TRCC is the only AD RN program in Southeastern Connecticut producing nurses consistently passing the NCLEX licensure exam at above the ninetieth percentile.

TRCCs’ e-portfolio project began in 2004 when we started working with the Connecticut Distance Learning Consortium (CTDLC) and Diane Goldsmith, the consortium’s visionary leader. We initially focused on using e-portfolios as a technology, exploring ways to use CTLDC’s platform. Beginning with one nursing faculty member collaborating with the dean of information technology and a librarian, we implemented e-portfolio use in one course each semester, refining learning activities to develop student abilities. E-portfolio implementation sparked conversations among students and faculty about the technology but also about nursing

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and reflection and how students develop as registered nurses.

In 2009, as our interest in reflective pedagogy grew, we joined the Connect to Learning’s Making Connections program led by LaGuardia Community College.

Monthly face-to-face professional development meetings guided TRCC faculty as we developed our e-portfolio pedagogy (Eynon, Gambino, and Török 2013). We found that the reflective, integrative, and social pedagogies discussed in Making Connections matched our practice-based discipline. When LaGuardia organized the Connect to Learning (C2L) online community of practice, linking Making Connections campuses with e-portfolio innovators nationwide, TRCC was eager to continue the collaboration.

As C2L participants we studied the work of multiple theorists, including John Dewey, and other C2L practitioners, applying new insights to our own practice. Dewey’s ideas resonate with e-portfolio practice as he connected experience as both a means and a goal of education. He stated, “We don’t learn from experience, we learn by reflecting on experience.” Building on Dewey’s ideas, Carol Rodgers (2002) expanded the concept of reflection with four descriptors: Reflection as Reflection as Reflection as Reflection as

integrative learning social pedagogy systematic and disciplined a process of guided personal change

We found that teaching students to reflect requires carefully crafted prompts and directed questions. We adapted Rogers’ insights to our setting and discipline, introducing TRCC students to e-portfolio technology and the skills and attitudes of selfobservation, interpretation, judgment, and planning. Using reflection, our students learn to Report own behaviors Identify own strengths and areas for improvement Connect performance to criteria Identify an approach to learning for new growth According to the Core Competencies of the nationally acclaimed Nurse of the Future program, twenty-first-century nurses are reflective in action, for action and on action (Nurses of the Future 2010). We marry these professional standards and our TRCC Core Values with the C2L design principles of inquiry, reflection, and integration (Eynon, Gambino, and Török 2014). The iterative process of reflection, formative assessment, revision, and integration helps our students develop the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed for safe and competent practice in a fast-moving and fastchanging health care workplace.

Reflection as a Systematic and Scaffolded Learning Process In the past two years, the TRCC nursing faculty refined and consolidated a sequential progression of reflections related to nursing program outcomes and general education core values and embedded them into each course of our curriculum. As we used eportfolios to help students develop professional identities, we also developed our own insights into our assignments, the nursing program, and how students learn. Through faculty inquiry and reflection, we developed an integrated, scaffolded strategy to deepen student learning.

In the first course in our curriculum, Introduction to Nursing Practice, students become familiar with the technology and process of weekly reflections tied to the core values.

The purpose is to develop reflective skills and the ability to listen to and incorporate feedback in a systematic and disciplined way. We introduce our beginning students to the concept of a reflective pause, and to rubrics for critical thinking, professionalism,

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Peer Review | Winter 2014 | Reflection Builds Twenty-First-Century Professionals

and communication. The day after each clinical experience, students use prompts such as this one to share personal reflections with the clinical instructor: How did you demonstrate critical thinking within the nursing profession today? What was the most difficult part of the nursing process for you?

What was the easiest and why? What parts of the implementation of care showed safe competent practice today? What will you do differently, what will you continue? Professionalism reflects integrity, life-long learning, legal, ethical principles, dress codes, timeliness, respect for peers, staff / faculty, joy within nursing and so much more. How do you see professionalism developing in you? Is it changing? How? In response, one of our students wrote “In the first weeks I wrote what professionalism meant to me: … arrive on time, wear a clean and wrinkle free uniform, ID, stethoscope, and watch.

At mid-semester I was questioning ‘Why do I want to b e a nurse, this is stressful?’ But after this week I am starting to again see the joy of nursing. I felt like I truly helped my patient. The fact that I am challenged and have to keep learning no matter what is thrown at me really makes me want to b e a nurse more and more each day, even if some days are tougher than others.”

Reading these reflections, nursing faculty provide feedback in writing, and in postclinical conferences. Our goal is to help students take a first step in a recursive process of meaning making, to begin developing the cognitive skills and affective dispositions needed for professionalism, communication and critical thinking.

In Family Health Nursing, a second semester course, students advance their use of eportfolios. Here the purpose of reflection is to help students connect theory to practice, classroom learning with clinical application, developing the skills of integrative learning: “I chose this patient to connect to the geriatric presentations for a few reasons. She ties into my group’s presentation of discharge planning and caregiver role strain as well as another group’s topic of polypharmacy…In completing the geriatric presentations, and watching the other groups present their topics, I was ab le to learn effectively ab out the care of the elderly. Caring for a geriatric patient in the hospital helped to reinforce this content since I feel that I learn b est b y actually seeing the situation in person.”

Through experience and reflection, students see the value of listening to others, connecting and applying their learning for integration into practice.

In our third semester course, Nursing Care of Individuals and Families I, our reflective e-portfolio pedagogy focuses students on personal growth. Students now use reflection as a personal guide, deepening their learning and getting them ready to practice as independent practitioners. At this stage, prompts ask students to draw on well-developed reflective skills to recognize the change in their behaviors.

How has your critical thinking changed and developed in regards to direct patient care at the b edside? Please provide two to three specific examples. Consider and reflect on an experience you had in clinical when you realized you applied your theoretical knowledge to your clinical practice.

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Peer Review | Winter 2014 | Reflection Builds Twenty-First-Century Professionals

“I had no idea how complex nursing would be or the level of responsibility it would entail. I remember the words ‘critical thinking’ in the first semester. I guess I knew what those words meant but I really had no idea how they would become an integral part of this new profession I was entering….

Since then things have progressed in terms of the complexity of the information as well as the conditions my patients are presenting with.

This semester has truly been transformative for me as a nurse. All of the pieces that I have learned over the semesters have finally started to come together for me as a whole.”

Throughout this course, using multiple practice stories, we persistently encourage deep learning, asking students to take ownership of their professional identities.

Sharing knowledge, skills, and new attitudes, our students develop a ‘professional voice.’ Through reflection, they test their ‘voice’ within a safe environment, gaining faculty feedback and a comfort level in sharing written reflections with peers.

In their final semester, in Nursing Care of Individuals and Families II, students record their perceptions and reflect on the effect perceptions have on care. Powerful stories and supportive discussions fill the semester.

“It made me feel sad when a client told me that it meant a lot to him that I treated him like a human b eing, not like a drug addict…Six years ago my b est friend and twenty-three year old b rother died of a drug overdose. It completely devastated me…so working with clients who are drug dependent b rings a lot of emotion in me. I guess you would call it counter-transference. I have witnessed first-hand the hold drugs can have on someone…. I try to give clients strength to resist so that mayb e I can make up for not b eing ab le to help my b rother.”

Self-awareness is critical for an effective practicing nurse. It allows the nurse to think critically without bias, remaining patient-centered. This and other reflective tools are powerful when shared with others. Students report they are freeing, and faculty report they provide a window into the students’ perceptions.

In their fourth semester, our senior students also prepare and share written reflections with our first-year students. Sequenced social pedagogy—using e-portfolios as a site for reflective interaction—informs all four semesters: we focus on connections to faculty and staff as resources in the first semester; sharing knowledge with peers in the second; identifying affective ‘ahas’ with ‘safe’ faculty and staff in the third; and, in the fourth, returning to connecting to self and sharing with peers as a graduate entering the profession. The power of this social pedagogy is seen in a first-year student’s statement: “I wasn’t sure why I was putting my reflections together in a tool and looking b ack through them until I read a senior’s reflection ab out what it felt like to b e new in nursing and what they could say now. It gave me hope that I would graduate…. I wrote my own reflections differently after that.”

In the same final semester, in Nursing Management and Trends, students’ reflections help them become colleagues, emerging nursing professionals. The first project asks them to demonstrate how they believe they have met the program outcomes. Students select and explain artifacts, including stories, reflections, clinical data forms, process recordings, nursing communication tools, and presentations.

Pick three of the program outcomes and describ e and reflect on how

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Peer Review | Winter 2014 | Reflection Builds Twenty-First-Century Professionals

you b elieve you have met the outcome and include one or multiple artifacts, stories and/or digital clips to support your discussion. In your reflection you might discuss how you’ve grown, connected your learning across semesters and to your life. Look at the Integrative Learning Rub ric as a guide. Send an invitation to a classmate, myself and another faculty memb er or advisor.

In this course, students create career e-portfolios that include a resume and “something that will entice a reviewer to interview you.” Students also create an eportfolio that could be submitted to an educational institution to advance their attainment of a BSN or MSN degree. It incorporates a practice-based research question with an annotated bibliography. One graduating student commented: “I have figured out what I want to study in my BSN program b ecause I see what I’ve chosen for articles and reflected on over time. I am seeing that this e-portfolio is more than my personal file cab inet…the works are telling me my story.”

Employing reflective and social pedagogy, our systematic, step-by-step e-portfolio assignments support growth and change from the initial semester to graduation, advancing the development of nursing professionals. Students are prepared for lifelong learning, ready to use the profession’s reflective cycle of learning to take intelligent action and learning to think from multiple perspectives and form multiple explanations. Scaffolding of weekly reflections and assignments weave the creation of a nurse who can reflect in a systematic, disciplined, social, integrative, and personal way.

Outcomes Assessment As we built reflective e-portfolio use into our nursing curriculum, we also began to examine student portfolios for course and programmatic assessment. Examining students’ artifacts, reflections, and e-portfolio designs, we found validation for our work —but also surprises. This important process added life and meaning to student learning and engaged faculty in the effort to deepen our curriculum and our teaching.

Our outcomes assessment process integrated general education core values and program outcomes. Using rubrics calibrated to our scaffolded assignments, we reviewed student work, assessing for critical thinking, information literacy, communication, professionalism, reflection, and integrative learning. This inquiry process supported faculty reflection that highlighted areas where change was needed, and helped develop integrative action plans. In one semester, for example, when we assessed the process recordings stored in student e-portfolios, we found the scores did not reach therapeutic communication levels. Meanwhile, in student reflections, we found that students had expressed discomfort with patient communication. Reflecting on these findings, we decided that students needed additional experiences to develop their communication skills. To “close the loop,” we implemented a set of interventions: faculty development related to process recordings, student exercises in class, and a new clinical experience in a senior center. Similarly, information literacy reviews led us to generate an online module for constructing annotated bibliographies.

Our C2L colleague, Gail Matthews-DeNatale of Northeastern University, has recently described the ways e-portfolio-based assessment helped her faculty collectively design a more integrative curriculum for their program: The first three to four courses in each concentration have been codesigned by faculty as an integrated suite that takes students through a ‘cognitive apprenticeship’ in the skills, understandings, and capabilities

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Peer Review | Winter 2014 | Reflection Builds Twenty-First-Century Professionals

of professionals within the field. They are designed to foster connected learning, in which each course builds upon and complements the rest, and the faculty have a clear understanding of how ‘their’ courses intersect with and reinforce other courses in the program. (2014) Describing the outcome, Matthews-DeNatale shows how each course has designated ‘a signature assignment,’ each one progressively different but linked—what she calls ‘variation within continuity.’ At TRCC, our experience is much the same; we use ‘signature work’ that varies within reflective continuity and core values to support deeper learning and student success. And our assessment process is deepening our understandings and our capacities to enact an integrative and reflective curriculum for our nursing program.

Broadening the Use of Integrative E-Portfolio Practice In the past year, the e-portfolio project at TRCC has catalyzed broader, institution-wide change, helping us progress as a learning-centered college. A confluence of events led to this shift. The nursing program’s successful use of e-portfolios as a tool and pedagogy, resulting in high student retention and NCLEX success rates, was shared with the broader institution. Parallel to this work, the college’s General Assessment Task Force identified an effective paper portfolio process of general education assessment. Our accrediting body, the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, praised the positive work done around general education assessment in some departments, but stressed the need for a broader institutional plan. In this process, it became clear that e-portfolios could serve as connectors between student learning and institutional assessment.

As TRCC develops an institutional assessment plan, we are building on our strengths as a college. E-portfolios serve as a catalyst in these efforts, opening discussions and renewing faculty engagement in outcomes assessment. Nursing faculty and staff enthusiastically share their work and their learning with their colleagues, facilitating forward movement in meeting the teaching, learning, and assessment needs of the college. The nursing program has a receptive and enthusiastic audience; reflective and social pedagogies are already in use in other college programs. In addition, members of the C2L leadership team and other “super users” of e-portfolios from outside of the college have visited, sharing their strategies for success with key TRCC stakeholders. Through an open dialogue with faculty, administrators, and students, we have reached a consensus: e-portfolios will now be used college-wide for general education and programmatic assessment of student learning.

Conclusion Full integration of an e-portfolio program for outcomes assessment promotes engagement of all stakeholders in teaching and learning. E-portfolio pedagogy links students, faculty, administrators, and the community to “TRCC’s mission as an accessible, affordable, and culturally diverse community college that meets varied educational needs by creating an environment that stimulates learning.” Our nursing students grow and develop as practitioners through a systematic, scaffolded, and recursive reflective process. It is through a similar reflective process, messy at times, that we, as nursing educators, built and continue to nourish our program’s scaffolded ‘signature assignments’ so that they are a foundation in teaching and learning. This process now serves as a model for TRCC’s general education initiative; we are beginning to build college-wide scaffolded assignments, a critical foundation in eportfolio programs. We look forward to an ongoing, college-wide process of reflection and change as we all grow and develop as twenty-first-century professionals.

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Peer Review | Winter 2014 | Reflection Builds Twenty-First-Century Professionals

NOTE For more on Connect to Learning, the inquiry–reflection–integration design principles, and other elements of the Catalyst framework, see the Catalyst for Learning: ePortfolio Research and Resources web site at: http://c2l.mcnrc.org.

REFERENCES Dewey, J. 1944. Democracy and Education. New York: New York Free Press.

Eynon, B., L. M. Gambino, and J. Török. 2013 “Connect To Learning: Using E-Portfolios in Hybrid Professional Development.” In To Improve The Academy32, edited by J. E. Groccia and L. Cruz. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Eynon, B., L. M. Gambino, and J. Török. 2014 “What Difference Can ePortfolio Make? A Field Report from the Connect to Learning Project.” International Journal of ePortfolio 4 (1).

Matthews-DeNatale, G. 2014. “Are We Who We Think We Are? ePortfolios as a Tool for Curriculum Redesign.” Journal of Asynchronous Learning Networks 17 (4).

Massachusetts Department of Higher Education Nursing Initiative. 2010. Nurse of the Future Core Competencies. Boston: Massachusetts Department of Higher Education.http://www.mass.edu/currentinit/documents/NursingCoreCompetencies.pdf.

Rodgers, C. 2002. “Defining Reflection: Another Look at John Dewey and Reflective Thinking.” Teachers College Record 104 (4): 842–866.

Three Rivers Community College Mission Statement.

2014.http://www.trcc.commnet.edu/President/about/mission.shtml.

Copyright of Peer Review is the property of Association of American Colleges & Universities and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.

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he aims and outcomes described as “essential� in part 1 of this report (see p. 12) call for students to become “intentional learners� who focus, across ascending levels of study, on achieving these learning outcomes. But to help students do this, educational communities will also have to become more intentional both about these essential outcomes and about effective educational practices that help students integrate their learning and apply it to complex questions.

The principles and recommendations presented here are intended to give impetus to this new intentionality about the aims and quality of college learning, and about the complementary roles of school and college in preparing graduates for twenty-ďŹ rst-century realities.

In shaping the principles, the National Leadership Council for Liberal Education and America’s Promise has drawn from many sources: active reform movements on many campuses and in a broad array of disciplines; recommendations from academic leaders; analyses from the business community; new standards in the accrediting communities; and dialogues held across the United States with campus, business, and community leaders.

The council believes that higher education can and should play a crucial role in fulďŹ lling America’s promise in this new global century: tapping potential, creating opportunity, fueling an innovative economy, reducing inequities, solving problems, and inspiring citizens to create a more just, humane, and sustainable world.

Toward these ends, the LEAP National Leadership Council calls for a new compact—between educators and American society—to adopt and enact the following seven Principles of Excellence.

4HIS NEW ERA CALLS ON HIGHER EDUCATION TO SET SIGNIĂźCANTLY HIGHER STANDARDS FOR STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT WHILE AVOIDING THE DISADVANTAGES OF STANDARDIZATION

Liberal Education & America’s Promise | AAC&U

Uif!Qsjodjqmft!pg!Fydfmmfodf Qsjodjqmf!Pof Aim High—and Make Excellence Inclusive Make the Essential Learning Outcomes a Framework for the Entire Educational Experience, Connecting School, College, Work, and Life

Qsjodjqmf!Uxp Give Students a Compass Focus Each Student’s Plan of Study on Achieving the Essential Learning Outcomes— and Assess Progress

Qsjodjqmf!Uisff Teach the Arts of Inquiry and Innovation Immerse All Students in Analysis, Discovery, Problem Solving, and Communication, Beginning in School and Advancing in College

Qsjodjqmf!Gpvs Engage the Big Questions Teach through the Curriculum to Far-Reaching Issues—Contemporary and Enduring— in Science and Society, Cultures and Values, Global Interdependence, the Changing Economy, and Human Dignity and Freedom

Qsjodjqmf!Gjwf Connect Knowledge with Choices and Action Prepare Students for Citizenship and Work through Engaged and Guided Learning on “Real-World” Problems

Qsjodjqmf!Tjy Foster Civic, Intercultural, and Ethical Learning Emphasize Personal and Social Responsibility, in Every Field of Study

Qsjodjqmf!Tfwfo Assess Students’ Ability to Apply Learning to Complex Problems Use Assessment to Deepen Learning and to Establish a Culture of Shared Purpose and Continuous Improvement

AAC&U | Part 3: A New Framework for Excellence

Principle One

Aim High—and Make Excellence Inclusive Make the Essential Learning Outcomes a Framework for the Entire Educational Experience, Connecting School, College, Work, and Life

Americans have entered a global century that presents “greater expectations” for knowledge in every area of life. This new era calls on higher education to set significantly higher standards for student achievement while avoiding the disadvantages of standardization. The essential learning outcomes (see p. 12) provide a common framework and a shared sense of direction for student accomplishment across school and college. These outcomes are not intended as a checklist of courses and requirements to—in the current campus vernacular—“get out of the way.” Nor do they dictate a particular set of courses that all students should take.

Rather, these aims and outcomes are intended to build students’ working understanding of the world and to foster capacities that will be practiced in school and used beyond school. The essential learning outcomes provide an inclusive framework for a contemporary liberal education by defining it not as a selected set of disciplines, but as a set of resources for all aspects of life: work, citizenship, and personal fulfillment.

Contemporary students compose their education across many different institutions and from many different academic fields and courses. Of those who complete a bachelor’s degree, nearly 60 percent take courses at more than one college or university and nearly 25 percent at more than two institutions.38 The essential learning outcomes set a common framework that provides a sense of purpose and direction to guide student progress across the many different parts of the academic system. The outcomes can be used for P–16 planning in the states, articulation between two-year and four-year colleges and universities, and accreditation standards for institutions and academic fields. At every level, a clear and constant focus on these essential outcomes can help systems, institutions, academic programs, and students themselves become more intentional.

These forms of learning can and should be fostered through many different curricular pathways. But to ensure their achievement, each institution and each program will need to be certain that students have multiple opportunities and appropriate academic support to work toward the intended outcomes. To reach high levels of success, each system, each institution, and each academic program will need to set standards and guidelines for the expected level of student accomplishment.

Within higher education, many will see these aims and outcomes as goals for the general education program alone. That is not the intention. General education plays a role in their fulfillment. But it is not feasible to assign to general education programs alone the breadth and scope of learning described in the essential learning outcomes. The majors also have a crucial role to play in fostering rich knowledge, strong intellectual and practical skills, an examined sense of personal

THE PRINCIPLES IN PRACTICE Aim High—and Make Excellence Inclusive 4HE 3TATE #OUNCIL OF (IGHER %DUCATION FOR 6IRGINIA (SCHEV) has identified a set of competencies that all students should achieve from their college studies. The competencies are similar to the “intellectual and practical skills” that the LEAP National Leadership Council defines as “essential.” SCHEV requires public institutions to submit “reports of institutional effectiveness” that include assessments of student learning in written communication, technology/information literacy, quantitative reasoning, scientific reasoning, critical thinking, and oral communication. Each individual campus defines the outcomes, establishes expected achievement levels, creates or chooses assessment methods, and reports on results. The SCHEV framework creates public and transparent reports of institutional learning outcomes while maintaining institutional autonomy to define and assess student learning outcomes in relation to institutional mission and priorities.

THE PRINCIPLES IN PRACTICE Aim High—and Make Excellence Inclusive Faculty at )NDIANA 5NIVERSITYp0URDUE 5NIVERSITY )NDIANAPOLIS (IUPUI) have agreed to six Principles of Undergraduate Learning that define important learning outcomes for each IUPUI student. These include communication and quantitative skills; critical thinking; intellectual depth, breadth, and adaptiveness; integration and application of knowledge; understanding society and culture; and values and ethics. These principles apply to the entire educational experience and to the departmental programs as well as general education courses. Most students take a first-year learning community that explores these core goals and helps students begin work on them. To document and assess students’ achievement, IUPUI faculty are developing e-portfolios that set standards for the outcomes and make the basis for their assessments visible. IUPUI has provided extensive support for faculty development as well as student orientation as it encourages this shift toward goals across the entire educational experience.

Liberal Education & America’s Promise | AAC&U

THE PRINCIPLES IN PRACTICE Aim High—and Make Excellence Inclusive -IAMI $ADE #OLLEGE is one of the nation’s largest and most diverse community colleges. In 2006, Miami Dade organized student focus groups to better understand college learning goals from students’ perspectives. The questions posed in these groups, adapted from a focus group discussion guide used in AAC&U’s student research for LEAP, asked students their reasons for attending college, what college outcomes would lead to a successful life, and how their education helps them achieve these outcomes. The responses of the focus group students indicate that liberal education is valued and that students view college as more than accrued vocational beneďŹ ts. Moreover, three-quarters of the focus group students reported that liberal education was important to their education and that liberal education provides the necessary preparation for today’s workforce.

and social responsibility, and the ability to integrate and apply knowledge from many different contexts. If the majors neglect these shared goals, students are unlikely to achieve them.

Recommendation 1 4HE .ATIONAL ,EADERSHIP #OUNCIL RECOMMENDS THAT A NATIONAL COM MITMENT BE MADE TO FOSTER THE AIMS AND OUTCOMES OF A TWENTY ĂźRST CENTURY LIBERAL EDUCATION FOR ALL COLLEGE STUDENTS NOT JUST THOSE ATTENDING ELITE INSTITUTIONS AND NOT JUST THOSE STUDYING IN WHAT TRADITIONALLY HAVE BEEN CALLED mARTS AND SCIENCES DISCIPLINES n

This call is extended to each college, community college, and university; to state systems; and to the ďŹ elds of study within colleges and universities. Every institution and system should develop for itself a vision of intended learning outcomes that addresses, in ways appropriate to mission, the multiple goals for college. This vision should be expressed in a public document that is accessible to everyone and frequently consulted by faculty, staff, and students alike. In state systems, the educational outcomes should become shared responsibilities, applicable across institutional boundaries.

Every ďŹ eld should be taught as part of liberal education, and every ďŹ eld should audit, clarify, and strengthen its own practices for fostering the knowledge and capacities identiďŹ ed as essential outcomes of a twenty-ďŹ rst-century education.

Recommendation 2 4HE .ATIONAL ,EADERSHIP #OUNCIL RECOMMENDS THAT TWO YEAR COLLEGES

TOGETHER WITH THE SENIOR INSTITUTIONS THAT SERVE LARGE NUMBERS OF TRANS FER STUDENTS FOCUS ON THE AIMS AND OUTCOMES OF A TWENTY ĂźRST CENTURY LIBERAL EDUCATION

Nearly half the nation’s college students, and the majority of students from low-income families, begin their studies in two-year institutions.39 It should be a national priority to ensure that these students, whatever their career choices and preparation, become richly prepared for a changing economy, for the option of further study, and for a lifetime of continuous learning—as employees and as citizens.

This recommendation neither requires nor anticipates that community college students should study only, or primarily, what are conventionally known as arts and sciences or “general educationâ€? courses. Rather, it calls on two-year and four-year institutions, in every state and region, to collaboratively remap the curriculum so that arts and sciences and professional or “careerâ€? courses can work together, from ďŹ rst to ďŹ nal years, to foster the broad knowledge, sophisticated skills, personal and social responsibility, and demonstrated achievement that every student needs and deserves.

Faculty and staff who teach remedial/developmental courses should take an active part in this remapping, so that these courses help students prepare successfully for the expectations and standards of the regular curriculum.

AAC&U | Part 3: A New Framework for Excellence

Principle Two

Give Students a Compass Focus Each Student’s Plan of Study on Achieving the Essential Learning Outcomes—and Assess Progress

American college students already know that they want a degree.

The challenge is to help students become highly intentional about the forms of learning and accomplishment that the degree should represent In today’s academy, many students are not following any comprehensive academic plan at all. Rather, many are working to cobble together a sufďŹ cient number of courses that will enable them to meet the required number of credits—typically 60 at the associate’s level and 120 at the bachelor’s level—necessary to earn a degree.

Setting goals for educational accomplishment based on the essential learning outcomes can change this haphazard approach to academic study. Each student will know what is expected, and each student can construct a plan of study that simultaneously addresses his or her own interests and assures achievement in the essential learning outcomes.

Students will know before they enter college, for example, that they are expected to bring their communication skills—written and oral—to a high level of demonstrated accomplishment. As they work with mentors to plan a course of study, they will learn to seek out, rather than avoid, courses in which extensive writing and/or oral presentations are required. The same principle applies to all the outcomes. By clarifying the intended forms of learning and their signiďŹ cance, and by helping students connect these broad outcomes with their own individual goals and areas of study, educators will help all students become more intentional about their learning and more likely to reach high levels of accomplishment.

THE PRINCIPLES IN PRACTICE Give Students a Compass 4HE #ALIFORNIA 3TATE 5NIVERSITY SYSTEM has begun educating high school students about the essential skills they are expected to bring to college. For the last six years, it has produced a “How to Get to College� poster and distributed it to middle and high schools in California.

This poster, available in English, Spanish, Vietnamese, Korean, and Chinese, gives students and their families a compass for essential learning outcomes needed for success in college as well as a roadmap for the application process.

With sections such as “What Classes Should I Take in High School?â€? and “Why Are These Classes Important?â€? the poster clariďŹ es important skills and their signiďŹ cance in college. To provide further guidance, the system also gives an early diagnostic test—keyed to its own placement standards in mathematics and English—to eleventh graders.

Recommendation 3 4HE .ATIONAL ,EADERSHIP #OUNCIL RECOMMENDS THAT THE ESSENTIAL LEARNING OUTCOMES BE USED TO GUIDE EACH STUDENTlS PLAN OF STUDY AND CUMULATIVE LEARNING AND FURTHER THAT THEIR ACHIEVEMENT BE THE SHARED FOCUS OF BOTH SCHOOL AND COLLEGE

Students should begin intensive work in each of these areas of learning—knowledge, skills, responsibilities, and integrative learning —as early as middle school. And they should understand that they will be expected—wherever they enroll, whatever their intended career, and no matter how far they go in college—to attain progressively higher levels of competence in each of these key areas.Teachers, faculty members, and student life professionals should work together to help students understand why these outcomes are important, and how they are applied in work settings, civil society, and students’ own lives.

m3ETTING GOALS FOR EDUCATIONAL ACCOMPLISHMENT BASED ON THE ESSENTIAL LEARNING OUTCOMES CAN CHANGE THIS HAPHAZARD APPROACH TO ACADEMIC STUDY n

Liberal Education & America’s Promise | AAC&U

Recommendation 4 THE PRINCIPLES IN PRACTICE Give Students a Compass The curriculum at "ARD #OLLEGE is designed to encourage students to play an active and intentional role in shaping their education. Rather than selecting from traditional departmental majors, students at Bard major in programs that cross disciplinary boundaries. This program-based approach is combined with core curricular experiences that develop broad capacities and allow for milestone assessments of learning.

New students begin their studies with the Workshop in Language and Thinking, an intensive summer program that serves as an introduction to college-level learning, and continue in the ďŹ rst-year seminar, where they explore many of the intellectual ideas that will form the basis of their subsequent study. In the second semester of the sophomore year, students undertake “moderation,â€? a process that requires them to reect on their academic experiences, assess their performance, and plan in consultation with faculty advisers the work they will pursue in their major ďŹ eld.

This culminates with the senior project, which serves as the capstone to a Bard education. Together, these elements of the college’s curriculum help students to integrate their learning and follow a purposeful course of study as they chart a path through their undergraduate education.

AAC&U | Part 3: A New Framework for Excellence

4HE .ATIONAL ,EADERSHIP #OUNCIL RECOMMENDS THAT TEACHERS AND FACULTY SET HIGH AND EXPLICIT STANDARDS FOR STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT THAT THE CURRICULUM BE ORGANIZED TO PROVIDE STUDENTS WITH AMPLE OPPORTUNI TIES TO MEET THE STANDARDS AND THAT STUDENTS BE PROVIDED WITH REGULAR FEEDBACK ON THEIR PROGRESS

The expected standards should be made public, and should periodically be reviewed by external experts to ensure appropriate quality. While in high school, students should receive periodic feedback about their progress, as well as guidance on the connections between the expected outcomes and future success in both work and college. Diagnostic assessments in the ďŹ rst year of college, and milestone assessments upon completion of community college and/or the second year of college, can help students evaluate their own achievement to date and identify areas of needed improvement. Each student’s plan of study—informed by the assessments—should clearly connect expected outcomes to the institution’s required studies, students’ major ďŹ eld(s), and their elective choices. Where today’s students frequently see curricular requirements as a set of obstacles to get “behind themâ€? as early as possible, the students of tomorrow will know that learning is cumulative and that continuous progress is both expected and supported.

Principle Three

Teach the Arts of Inquiry and Innovation Immerse All Students in Analysis, Discovery, Problem Solving, and Communication, Beginning in School and Advancing in College

In a complex world, there is no way that students can master everything they “need to know.� The scope is too broad, and the frontiers of knowledge are expanding far too rapidly. The key to educational excellence, therefore, lies not in the memorization of vast amounts of information, but rather in fostering habits of mind that enable students to continue their learning, engage new questions, and reach informed judgments. Helping students master analytical capacities has been one of the most enduring commitments of a liberal education.

Since this nation was founded, American leaders have emphasized the value of these capacities to a free society; today, we see their value for an innovation-fueled economy as well.

Given their importance, the foundations for inquiry, investigation, and discovery should be laid early and reinforced across the educational system. A good education should provide multiple opportunities for students to engage in “inquiry-based learning,â€? both independently and in collaborative teams. Through inquiry projects, students should learn how to ďŹ nd and evaluate evidence, how to consider and assess competing interpretations, how to form and test their own analyses and interpretations, how to solve problems, and how to communicate persuasively.

Fifty years ago, it would not have been feasible to emphasize

inquiry and discovery in many ďŹ elds and institutions. Today, however, the advent of new technologies has created unprecedented opportunities for students to take part in collaborative inquiry, creative projects, and research.The need and the opportunity are there.Yet most schools and colleges have barely tested the waters. Faculty members who supervise student research and/or teach “capstoneâ€? courses to advanced college students frequently are frustrated by students’ poor preparation for tackling complex inquiry and creative projects. That is because few departments and institutions have developed curricula and pedagogies that incrementally foster and assess students’ skills in inquiry and innovation as they advance through a course of study.

Fundamental change is needed, at all levels of education, to help students develop the intellectual and practical skills basic to inquiry, innovation, and effective communication.

Recommendation 5 4HE .ATIONAL ,EADERSHIP #OUNCIL RECOMMENDS THAT THE POWER OF NEW TECHNOLOGIES BE HARNESSED IN ORDER TO GIVE ALL STUDENTS EXTENSIVE EXPE RIENCE IN RESEARCH EXPERIMENTATION PROBLEM BASED LEARNING AND OTHER FORMS OF CREATIVE WORK ESPECIALLY BUT NOT ONLY IN THEIR MAJOR ĂźELDS

Undergraduates today, even ďŹ rst-year students, can learn how to use tools of research, analysis, design, and creation that are more powerful than those available to professionals a generation ago.Whether the challenge is studying classical Greece, designing semiconductors, analyzing elections, or extending access to the arts, the technological tools available to students are extraordinary. The Internet and other communications technologies also make it possible for students to take part in creative problem solving with partners outside of the classroom—community agencies, arts organizations, corporations, schools, and people in other parts of the world. Technology-assisted inquiry should be carefully woven into the expected academic experience and emphasized in the college majors.

THE PRINCIPLES IN PRACTICE Teach the Arts of Inquiry and Innovation With the support of a Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation grant, the 5NI VERSITY OF 2OCHESTER is striving to make entrepreneurship—and the skills that accompany it such as problem solving, continuous learning, and innovation— a basic component of undergraduate education by infusing it into all academic disciplines. The University of Rochester has created the Center for Entrepreneurship (CFE), which brings together faculty, students, and community members from a variety of academic disciplines to encourage and enhance the culture of entrepreneurship at the university and within the Rochester community.

As a result, there are now courses at the University of Rochester available for students wishing to focus speciďŹ cally on entrepreneurship as it relates to any major, and the CFE holds a variety of workshops, seminars, and conferences for faculty as well. The University of Rochester is one of several dozen liberal arts colleges and research universities that are connecting entrepreneurship with teaching, learning, and research in arts and sciences disciplines.

Recommendation 6 4HE .ATIONAL ,EADERSHIP #OUNCIL RECOMMENDS THAT COLLEGES AND UNIVERSITIES WORK WITH THE SCHOOLS TO RAISE THE LEVEL OF INQUIRY AND PROJECT BASED LEARNING IN PRECOLLEGIATE EDUCATION AND TAKE VIGOROUS STEPS TO BUILD THESE SKILLS FURTHER ONCE STUDENTS ENTER COLLEGE

The best public and private schools and many of the most successful charter schools have long made analysis and inquiry central to their programs of high school preparation and learning. But in many schools, students write very little and receive no preparation in critical inquiry and research skills. When this foundation is lacking, colleges must play catch-up when it should be their primary task to move students’ skills in analysis and application to a much higher level. New emphasis on the skills essential to inquiry and innovation is needed • in the preparation of teachers and faculty; • in the design of curriculum and assessments in the schools;

m4HE KEY TO EDUCATIONAL EXCELLENCE LIES NOT IN THE MEMORIZATION OF VAST AMOUNTS OF INFORMATION BUT RATHER IN FOSTERING HABITS OF MIND THAT ENABLE STUDENTS TO CONTINUE THEIR LEARNING ENGAGE NEW QUESTIONS AND REACH INFORMED JUDGMENTS n

Liberal Education & America’s Promise | AAC&U

THE PRINCIPLES IN PRACTICE TEACH THE ARTS OF INQUIRY AND INNOVATION Curricular strategy

Transparency

Classroom practices

Example

3TEP In high school, students enroll in a themebased academy of three or four linked courses that promote synthesis through projects.

Advisers and teachers stress the goals of answering questions and justifying the answers, framing new questions, and relating raw data to the questions.

Teachers provide guiding questions, prompts, models, frameworks, and suggested sites for information. They use direct observation, case studies, simulations, and role playing.

3IR &RANCIS $RAKE (IGH 3CHOOL 3AN !NSELMO #ALIFORNIA Students study the election process by creating video campaign ads for candidates or issues in an upcoming election. They also make “process�

Web sites that lead them to reect upon their learning and thinking.

3TEP In college, ďŹ rst-year seminars and selected courses in general education introduce inquiry and analysis through speciďŹ c problems/ projects/assignments.

Professors make explicit the outcomes of further developing powers of observation, synthesis, and problem posing as well as expectations in reection and analysis. Critical thinking is stressed as a goal of the ďŹ rst-year seminars/ courses and of the entire institution.

Writing assignments and/or oral presentations ask students to identify a problem/issue and devise ways to resolve it. Professors provide guidelines and format. Techniques might include journals, brainstorming, teamwork, or demonstrations.

)NDIANA 5NIVERSITYp0URDUE 5NIVER SITY )NDIANAPOLIS A ďŹ rst-year learning community for students in engineering includes an investigation of reverse engineering, instruction on creating a Web page, an introduction to engineering careers, and a look at professional organizations. It also includes a group research paper, teamwork topics, and a PowerPoint presentation.

3TEP Across the college curriculum, problem-based learning occurs in disciplinary courses as students begin their majors.

Professors discuss critical observation, problem posing and problem solving, analysis, synthesis, and interpretation of complex issues in the discipline.

At the institutional level, facilities support problem-based learning and inquiry is stressed as an institutional priority for all majors.

Projects based on complex issues/problems of the ďŹ eld ask students to draw on their speciďŹ c content knowledge as well as on their developing powers of analysis, synthesis, and interpretation. Students pose their own questions and devise ways of answering them. Active, hands-on learning could alternate with lectures that provide “just-in-timeâ€? information that students can apply immediately.

3AMFORD 5NIVERSITY "IRMINGHAM

!LABAMA A junior-year, foundational nursing course includes a problem-based learning model for each key concept.

Progressing through the course involves advancing from simple to complex concepts. A module, which might last from several days to one month, could focus, for example, on nutrition and hygiene issues in nursing patients from diverse cultural and religious traditions. Students form groups early in the course to work through the problems posed.

3TEP At the senior level, a capstone project or thesis in the major (or in general education) culminates the inquiry approach to learning by asking students to draw on the knowledge and skills acquired in the major, general education, electives, and cocurricular experiences.

Course catalogs and departmental information about the senior capstone experience clearly state that the capstone requires advanced critical analysis, evidence, synthesis, conceptualization, interpretation, and evaluation.

Formative assessments during the experience provide reminders of the need for insightful use of data, logic, and diverse resources.

Under faculty guidance, students or teams choose a signiďŹ cant problem/ project to research/carry out over a semester or two. The professor could provide guiding questions but the emphasis is on student initiative. The work could be made public through publishing an article or presenting it to community and industry experts.

3OUTHERN )LLINOIS 5NIVERSITY %DWARDSVILLE All seniors must complete a capstone that, for computer science majors, consists of a team project that spans two semesters. Ideas for real programming needs are solicited from the university and local community. Students are responsible for all aspects, from establishing initial requirements to implementation and deployment; they need to ďŹ gure out how to interact with and design products for non-specialist users.

Adapted from Andrea Leskes and Ross Miller, 0URPOSEFUL 0ATHWAYS (ELPING 3TUDENTS !CHIEVE +EY ,EARNING /UTCOMES (Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges and Universities, 2006), 37.

• as students progress from year to year; • in the college admissions process, which ought to attend more closely to student experience in inquiry- and project-based learning; • in the careful design of ďŹ rst-year and second-year experiences geared to students’ differing levels of preparation and skill; • in the careful design of advanced studies that emphasize inquiry, analysis, and the application of knowledge to complex problems.

In recalibrating school and college curricula, and the connections between them, educators need to ensure that every student experiences the excitement and intellectual growth that follows from working to solve real problems. In doing so, they will also provide students with the forms of preparation they need both for a dynamic and innovative economy and for a vibrant democracy.

Principle Four

Engage the Big Questions Teach through the Curriculum to Far-Reaching Issues—Contemporary and Enduring—in Science and Society, Cultures and Values, Global Interdependence, the Changing Economy, and Human Dignity and Freedom

Study in the arts and sciences remains an essential and integral part of a twenty-ďŹ rst-century liberal education. But it is time to challenge the idea—tacitly but solidly established in American education—that simply taking a prescribed number of courses in liberal arts and sciences ďŹ elds is sufďŹ cient. Rather, new steps must be taken to ensure that study in these core disciplines prepares students to engage with the “big questions,â€? both contemporary and enduring. Study in the arts and sciences should provide students with opportunities to explore the enduring issues, questions, and problems they confront as human beings—questions of meaning, purpose, and moral integrity.

These studies should also teach students to look beyond themselves, by considering their obligations to others, and to look beyond the classroom, by applying their analytical skills and learning to signiďŹ cant issues and problems in the world around them.

The research on this point is compelling. All students—including those least prepared—learn best when they can see the point of what they are doing. Illuminating real-world implications can help students discover the excitement and the beneďŹ ts of powerful learning.40 By engaging students with complex issues, questions, and problems where there are real consequences at stake, and by teaching students how to draw and assess knowledge from many sources, this problemcentered approach to liberal education will prepare students both for the challenges of a dynamic global economy and for the responsibilities of citizenship.

To achieve this vision, it will be necessary to revisit the chaotic and redundant practices that currently subvert powerful learning in both school and college. Millions of college students are presently repeat-

THE PRINCIPLES IN PRACTICE Engage the Big Questions In addition to core general education requirements, 3AN *OSE 3TATE 5NIVER SITY (SJSU) has implemented SJSU Studies, which are intended to foster students’ advanced, integrative learning as citizens and thoughtful people.

Each SJSU undergraduate must take one upper-level class in each of four topic areas—Earth and Environment; Self, Society, and Equality in the United States; Culture, Civilization, and Global Understanding; and Written Communication. These courses connect the curriculum to larger, complex issues in society as a way of preparing students to become better global citizens and educated adults. Like many campuses in the California State University system, San Jose State University serves many transfer students who have taken all or many of their core general education requirements at other institutions. By framing distinctive upper-level goals for general education, SJSU afďŹ rms its commitment—ofďŹ cially endorsed by the Faculty Senate—to liberal education for all students. It also creates its own “signatureâ€? approach to that goal.

)T IS TIME TO CHALLENGE THE IDEA THAT SIMPLY TAKING A PRESCRIBED NUMBER OF COURSES IN LIBERAL ARTS AND SCIENCES ĂźELDS IS SUFĂźCIENT

Liberal Education & America’s Promise | AAC&U

m)LLUMINATING REAL WORLD IMPLICATIONS CAN HELP STUDENTS DISCOVER THE EXCITEMENT AND THE BENEĂźTS OF POWERFUL LEARNING n

THE PRINCIPLES IN PRACTICE Engage the Big Questions One of seven colleges in the Dallas County Community College system, 2ICHLAND #OLLEGE serves nearly twenty thousand students who collectively speak seventy-nine different ďŹ rst languages. Richland’s several academic enrichment programs reinforce the college’s emphasis on educating students to build sustainable communities, both at home and abroad. The Global Studies program, for example, challenges students to search for solutions to issues such as “peace, ecological balance, social and economic justice, intercultural understanding, democratic participation, and the impact of technology.â€? By design, Global Studies intersects with other academic enrichment programs, including Richland’s campuswide service-learning program, learning communities (two courses that address a common topic from different disciplinary perspectives), peace studies, and several ethnic studies programs. To earn a Global Studies CertiďŹ cate—which complements other majors—students take ďŹ fteen hours of Global Studies courses, including a learning community, and also complete an academically based service-learning project. Students who take one year of a second language and earn honors grades are named Global Studies Scholars. With a strong emphasis on integrative planning and continuous educational improvement, Richland College became in 2006 the ďŹ rst community college to win the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the nation’s highest presidential recognition for quality and organizational excellence.

AAC&U | Part 3: A New Framework for Excellence

ing work they should have accomplished in high school, and paying college tuition to do so. At the same time, three million students are now taking “early college coursesâ€? that give them a leg up on college-level requirements, especially in arts and sciences ďŹ elds.41 Often, however, students can use these early college credits to avoid further learning in core disciplines—such as science, mathematics, history, or languages—once they are enrolled in college. With the demand for advanced knowledge expanding exponentially, it is self-defeating to let today’s college students opt out of key disciplines before they even begin their higher education. It is equally self-defeating to cover essentially the same content in both high school and college survey courses.

Therefore, a coordinated effort is needed to ensure that all Americans reach high levels of knowledge and skill—begun in school and advanced in college—in the following areas of twenty-ďŹ rst-century learning: • science, mathematics, and technology—including a solid grasp of the methods by which scientiďŹ c knowledge is tested, validated, and revised • cultural and humanistic literacy—including knowledge of the world’s histories, American history, philosophical traditions, major religions, diverse cultural legacies, and contested questions • global knowledge and competence—including an understanding of economic forces, other cultures, interdependence, and political dynamics, as well as second-language competence and direct experience with cultural traditions other than one’s own • civic knowledge and engagement—including a rich understanding of the values and struggles that have established democratic institutions and expanded human freedom and justice, and direct experience in addressing the needs of the larger community • inquiry- and project-based learning—including multiple opportunities to work, independently and collaboratively, on projects that require the integration of knowledge with skills in analysis, discovery, problem solving, and communication This is not a menu of course categories. Rather, it is a proposal to move beyond the fragmented modular curriculum that students already take in the arts and sciences, in both school and college (see p. 20, ďŹ g. 6). The list above speciďŹ es core areas of twentyďŹ rst-century learning and invites fresh consideration of the way study within and across different disciplines—from school through college—can be organized to develop deep knowledge and strong competence in each of them.

Self-evidently, four years of study is not enough time to achieve such breadth and depth of knowledge. But students are spending at least sixteen years—if they complete a bachelor’s degree—in the combination of school and college. If educators map goals for learning in these core areas across this extended sequence of study, the goals become attainable.

Recommendation 7 4HE .ATIONAL ,EADERSHIP #OUNCIL RECOMMENDS THAT FACULTY AND TEACHERS IN ALL THE RELEVANT DISCIPLINES BE INVOLVED IN NEW NATIONAL EFFORTS TO IDENTIFY THE GOALS FOR COLLEGE LEVEL ACHIEVEMENT IN EACH OF THESE CORE AREAS OF TWENTY ĂźRST CENTURY LEARNING AND TO CREATE PURPOSEFUL CURRICU LAR PATHWAYS FROM HIGH SCHOOL THROUGH COLLEGE THAT ENSURE STUDENTSl CUMULATIVE LEARNING IN THESE CORE AREAS

The task goes well beyond identifying needed knowledge in such basic disciplines as literature, history, or biology. Rather, educators should revisit the overarching goals for student learning in the arts and sciences, and create disciplinary and cross-disciplinary patterns of learning that build deep understanding of the world in which students live and work. Because these broad areas of learning illuminate the context for students’ specialized interests, the core areas should be addressed across the several years of college, and not just in the ďŹ rst two years.

Recommendation 8 4HE .ATIONAL ,EADERSHIP #OUNCIL RECOMMENDS THAT NEW EFFORTS BE MADE TO RAISE THE LEVEL OF STUDENT ENGAGEMENT AND ACCOMPLISHMENT IN THESE CORE AREAS OF LEARNING IN BOTH THE ĂźNAL YEARS OF HIGH SCHOOL AND THE INI TIAL PHASE OF COLLEGE

The transition from school to college should be the joint responsibility of schools and higher education, and should be carefully planned to ensure that students meet high standards in each of the core areas of expected learning. Standards should be set for needed levels of achievement in these essential areas of learning at the point of college entrance, and the ďŹ nal years of high school should be designed to ensure that students meet the expected entrance standards.

Colleges should provide diagnostic feedback to their students on their actual level of preparation and achievement in these expected areas of twenty-ďŹ rst-century learning, and on what they need to accomplish further to meet the institution’s own expectations for graduation-level knowledge and competence. At all points along the way, educators should work with external partners to help students understand why and how these core areas of learning are important to success in the economy and to the responsibilities of citizenship.

Principle Five

Connect Knowledge with Choices and Action Prepare Students for Citizenship and Work through Engaged and Guided Learning on “Real-World� Problems

Both democracy and the economy depend on creative problem solving, bold experimentation, and the capacity to learn from the results of experimentation. As they move through their studies, students should have multiple opportunities to grapple with and prepare for these “real-worldâ€? demands. Assignments should compel them to deďŹ ne the task, explain its signiďŹ cance, test alternative

THE PRINCIPLES IN PRACTICE Connect Knowledge with Choices and Action The “practical liberal artsâ€? are deeply embedded in 7AGNER #OLLEGE’s prizewinning college curriculum. The Wagner Plan requires students to complete issue-centered integrative learning communities (LCs) during the ďŹ rst year, the intermediate years, and the senior year. The LCs are organized around a big theme or problem and include experiential as well as academic learning. In the ďŹ rst year, students take two courses from different disciplines related to the overarching theme and complete an experiential ďŹ eld placement related to the LC theme in the New York metropolitan area. Students also complete a “reective tutorialâ€? which emphasizes writing and teaches them to evaluate and integrate their learning from different disciplines and from the ďŹ eld placement. A senior-year LC is linked to the student’s major and acts as a capstone course, connecting knowledge from the major with practical applications in the student’s chosen ďŹ eld. At graduation, Wagner students are already practiced in integrating knowledge learned inside and outside the classroom in the context of real-world problems and settings.

Liberal Education & America’s Promise | AAC&U

THE PRINCIPLES IN PRACTICE Connect Knowledge with Choices and Action Long a pioneer in education for women, 3MITH #OLLEGE has recently become a pioneer once again in integrating engineering education within a liberal arts education. Smith College’s Picker Engineering Program encourages students to set their engineering studies in a larger social and global context.

It also teaches the social, ethical, and professional responsibilities essential to successful practice in the field. The program’s stated outcomes include the fundamentals of engineering disciplines, but also prioritize the ability to collaborate and communicate effectively with diverse audiences, lifelong learning, and the value a contemporary and historical perspective can give to science. A senior design project challenges students to address broad societal aspects of their work as well as technical skills. The Picker Program tells students that, “as critical thinkers and socially responsible decision makers, they will help engineer a sustainable future for our global community.”

AAC&U | Part 3: A New Framework for Excellence

solutions, and take actions based on their own judgment. Some of these learning experiences can take the form of independent study; others should be carefully designed experiences in collaborative learning with diverse partners. Every student should prepare for both life and citizenship by working frequently on unscripted problems, and by building capacities to function as part of an effective team. Fostering this kind of informed practical judgment should be a priority for every academic field.

Students today have many opportunities for “learning in the field,” including service-learning courses, internships, cooperative education, and community-based research. Some majors routinely include apprenticeship assignments, such as student teaching. Many students do projects with diverse communities and/or in other parts of the world as part of their formal study. And 90 percent of college students work while they are in school.42 While all these experiences present rich opportunities for connecting knowledge with choices and action, too many are essentially “add-ons” in which students are left to their own devices for any insights gained. Students perform service on their own time; they find jobs and even internships independently of their academic studies.

Study abroad, another form of experiential learning, is powerful for students, but any educational “debriefing” on what they learned by living in another culture frequently goes on quite apart from their home institutions and departments. Work—especially off-campus employment—is too often considered a distraction rather than a potentially rich venue for applying what one is learning in the academic program.

To build students’ preparation for both work and citizenship, higher education needs to give new emphasis to fostering practical judgment and problem solving “in the field.” Community-based learning should be integrated into the curriculum, and efforts to strengthen the quality of students’ learning from such experiences should become an integral part of a contemporary liberal education.

In fostering these kinds of practical judgment and problem solving, there is much to be learned from the professional fields and from the performing arts. As Lee Shulman and his colleagues at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching have demonstrated, many of the signature practices of professional education are designed to help individuals develop their capacities for effective judgment in contexts where the right course of action is uncertain.43 They do this by making the learner’s thinking and assumptions public in the presence of knowledgeable mentors and peers and by subjecting these to intense discussion and challenge. Similarly, both in the professions and in the performing arts, the learner’s performance itself is public, and students work closely with mentors on ways to improve the quality of their work. Learning to give and receive feedback is already part of both professional and artistic development; it ought to become expected practice in all fields of study.

To apply knowledge productively in field-based settings, all

students should experience in-depth questioning from faculty, staff, and other mentors about their assumptions, analyses, conclusions, and actions. Learners also need both guidance and feedback, from mentors and peers, as they probe the facets of a complex issue and test their own insights against both theory and the experiences of others.

And to prepare for the world’s diversity, all students need frequent opportunities to engage in collaborative interaction with people whose assumptions and life experiences are different from their own.

Recommendation 9 4HE .ATIONAL ,EADERSHIP #OUNCIL RECOMMENDS THAT EVERY STUDENT ENGAGE IN SOME FORM OF ĂźELD BASED LEARNING AND THAT FACULTY AND STAFF CREATE OPPORTUNITIES REÄŒECTIVE FORUMS FOR STUDENTS TO LEARN COLLABORA TIVELY AND SYSTEMATICALLY FROM THEIR ĂźELD BASED EXPERIENCES

These opportunities can take many different forms to serve different educational ďŹ elds and student learning goals. Models for good practice in experiential learning have already been developed in many professional and performing arts ďŹ elds, in the service-learning community, and in some global studies programs. These models should be more widely studied and adopted. Each institution and program should review and strengthen its standards for supervising, supporting, and evaluating students’ ďŹ eld-based learning.

Recommendation 10 4HE .ATIONAL ,EADERSHIP #OUNCIL RECOMMENDS THAT PARTNERSHIPS BETWEEN FACULTY AND STUDENT LIFE PROFESSIONALS BE STRENGTHENED IN ORDER TO INTEGRATE AND DOCUMENT THE LEARNING STUDENTS GAIN FROM INVOLVEMENT WITH A CAMPUS COMMUNITY

Some of the most powerful learning in college occurs in activities undertaken as part of the cocurriculum, both on campus and through campus outreach to community partners. The essential learning outcomes can be fostered through intentional integration of students’ in-class and out-of-class activities.There should be far more systematic attention paid to fostering these opportunities for guided experiential learning and to documenting, through expanded forms of assessment, the gains students make on the essential learning outcomes through these cocurricular experiences.

THE PRINCIPLES IN PRACTICE Foster Civic, Intercultural, and Ethical Learning In 1994, 0ORTLAND 3TATE 5NIVERSITY faculty adopted University Studies, a four-year general education program for all students. The program is organized around four broad goals: inquiry and critical thinking, communication, the diversity of human experience, and ethics and social responsibility. The culminating senior experience is a community-based learning course designed to provide interdisciplinary teams of students with the opportunity to apply what they have learned in their major and in their other University Studies courses to a real challenge emanating from the metropolitan community. These partnerships—designed to engage diverse communities for common purposes— are mutually beneďŹ cial ventures, as the organizations help students place their academic learning in a real-world context, and students assist organizations in meaningful projects such as grant writing, designing curriculum and educational materials, and serving as advocates for underserved populations and issues. Assessments show that the community work helps students become more aware of their own biases and prejudices and deepens students’ understanding of sociopolitical issues.

Students also develop a better understanding of how to make a difference in their own communities.

Principle Six

Foster Civic, Intercultural, and Ethical Learning Emphasize Personal and Social Responsibility, in Every Field of Study

Since the founding of the United States, Americans have recognized the close connections between education and the sustainability of our democratic experiment. Traditionally, however, the role of producing an educated citizenry was assigned to the public schools, which enrolled almost everyone, rather than to higher education, which until recently served only a small fraction of the population.

Liberal Education & America’s Promise | AAC&U

THE PRINCIPLES IN PRACTICE Foster Civic, Intercultural, and Ethical Learning "OWLING 'REEN 3TATE 5NIVERSITY places strong emphasis on educating graduates who demonstrate ethical integrity, reflective thinking, and social responsibility. To introduce these goals, the university has developed the BGeXperience (BGeX), a program designed to ease the transition from high school to college while, at the same time, engaging firstyear students with the core values that inform the university’s vision statement.

BGeX begins with a three-day orientation and continues into the first semester with a “values” course—a class that provides conventional instruction in a discipline and also encourages students to reflect upon values questions in that field. An introductory course in geology, for example, covers the essential content of a geology survey but also considers how values shape debates about global warming and the theory of evolution. By asking students to think critically about values questions without prescribing a specific set of conclusions, BGeX aspires to educate more ethically aware and thoughtful citizens. Those who are interested can also pursue service learning, take upper-division courses that explore values in the disciplines, and even become BGeX peer facilitators later in their undergraduate careers.

AAC&U | Part 3: A New Framework for Excellence

Reflecting this inherited division of labor, higher education is poised ambivalently between the past and the future concerning its appropriate role in fostering democratic values and responsibilities.

Mission statements proclaim education for citizenship as central.They testify to the role of the academy in fostering personal and social responsibility, at home and abroad; in preparing graduates to contribute to the community; and more recently, in building communities that acknowledge and value difference.44 But the faculty members who actually teach students rarely are asked to think deeply about their own responsibilities for educating engaged and ethical citizens.

In practice, many assume that teaching students to think critically is the academy’s main contribution to the public good.

During the last two decades, higher education has embarked on new efforts to foster civic engagement. A “service-learning movement” has gained strong traction on all kinds of campuses—large and small, two-year and four-year. Simultaneously, many faculty members have worked to make diversity studies and intercultural learning a new basic for student learning in college. Both service learning and experiences with diversity are powerful catalysts for deeper engagement and insight. They teach students to engage, respect, and learn from people with worldviews that are very different from their own. They involve students with many of society’s most urgent unsolved problems. They challenge individuals to consider, at a deep level, the responsibilities of a democratic society to its citizens, and their own responsibilities as human beings and citizens. And these forms of learning have significant effects on students’ ethical awareness, challenging learners to confront alternative beliefs and values, and to think more deeply about their own. Research studies show that service and diversity experiences have positive effects both on students’ civic commitments and on their overall cognitive development.45 As with so many other “high-impact” educational innovations, these efforts to prepare students for active citizenship in diverse communities still hover on the margins of the mainstream academy.

Some students participate and benefit; large numbers do not. Less than half of college seniors report that their college experience significantly influenced their capacity to contribute to their communities; only half report significant gains in learning about people from different backgrounds.46 Moreover, there is searing evidence that study in many majors actually depresses students’ interest in active citizenship.47 This is a warning note indeed for a democracy that depends on civic responsibility and commitment.

The higher education community needs to match its commitment to educating responsible and ethical citizens with learning practices, in both the curriculum and cocurriculum, that help all college students engage their responsibilities to self and others. Further, vigorous efforts are needed to build new understanding that civic development—in all the forms described here—is an essential rather than an elective outcome of college.

Recommendation 11 4HE .ATIONAL ,EADERSHIP #OUNCIL RECOMMENDS THAT STUDENTS BE PROVIDED WITH RECURRING OPPORTUNITIES TO EXPLORE ISSUES OF CIVIC INTERCULTURAL AND ETHICAL RESPONSIBILITY IN THE CONTEXT OF THEIR BROAD STUDIES OF SCIENCE

CULTURES AND SOCIETY AND FURTHER THAT THESE TOPICS BE CONNECTED TO DEMOCRACY AND GLOBAL INTERDEPENDENCE

Questions about the relationship between individuals and societies, about major developments in human histories, and about cross-cultural encounters are classic themes for the shared curriculum, whether in a ďŹ rst-year experience, or a general education sequence, or in advanced capstone courses that provide a larger context for students’ specialized studies. First-year and general education courses should intentionally help students grapple with the kinds of “big questionsâ€? they will inevitably face both as human beings and as citizens—about science and society, cultures and values, global interdependence, the changing economy, and human dignity and freedom. The general education curriculum is also a place where students can explore the values, institutions, and aspirations that are basic to democracy, examining these complex questions through multiple and cross-disciplinary lenses: philosophical, empirical, historical, cross-cultural.

The foundations for such studies need to be laid in the schools, through a course of study that builds rich understandings both of world histories and of American history, and of the relationships between them (see recommendation 7). Building on these precollegiate experiences, college courses can help students explore the difďŹ cult issues of our world, the ones where both the nature of the problem and the range of solutions are actively contested. Equally important, college forums can model and teach the kinds of respectful deliberation—across difďŹ cult differences—that are crucially important to a sustainable democracy.

THE PRINCIPLES IN PRACTICE Foster Civic, Intercultural, and Ethical Learning Hundreds of colleges, community colleges, and universities now encourage students to take part in community service. But in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, 4ULANE 5NIVERSITY has taken service learning and civic engagement to another level. Tulane requires all students to make public service an integral part of their college studies, both in the core curriculum and in their advanced studies. To meet the public service graduation requirement, students must take one service-learning class during their ďŹ rst two years.

During this time, students also create and maintain an e-portfolio that charts their progress and reects on their service learning. In their later college years, students choose a second public service experience. This may be another service-learning course, a service-learning internship, a public service research project or honors thesis project, a service-based study abroad program, or a capstone experience that includes a public service component. The Center for Public Service sustains partnerships with community organizations that provide a context for students’ public service commitments.

Recommendation 12 4HE .ATIONAL ,EADERSHIP #OUNCIL RECOMMENDS THAT STUDENTS BE PROVID ED WITH GUIDED OPPORTUNITIES TO EXPLORE CIVIC ETHICAL AND INTERCULTURAL ISSUES IN THE CONTEXT OF THEIR CHOSEN ĂźELDS

Every ďŹ eld of study, no matter how “technical,â€? is a community of practice. For this reason, no ďŹ eld is “value-free.â€? Every community of practice is framed by communal values and ethical responsibilities; these expectations need to be made explicit and fully explored among students and faculty. Similarly, every ďŹ eld is rife with contested questions whose resolution may have far-reaching human consequences. In every community of practice, there are some people with power and others who lack and/or seek power. Often, questions of power are further complicated by legacies of racial, ethnic, gender, and other disparities.When students choose a ďŹ eld of study, they need and deserve the opportunity to explore openly all of the issues basic to their community with their fellow students and with guidance from mentors. They should have many occasions to clarify and apply their own sense of ethical, professional, and civic responsibilities as they move forward in their chosen course of study.

Liberal Education & America’s Promise | AAC&U

Principle Seven THE PRINCIPLES IN PRACTICE Assess Students’ Ability to Apply Learning to Complex Problems 0ACE 5NIVERSITY, a large multi-campus metropolitan university in New York, has made a comprehensive commitment to assessment as a way of strengthening both teaching and learning. Pace works to provide evidence of students’ actual learning over time as a counter to rankings that look mainly at reputation and resources. One strand in its approach is a strong emphasis on senior capstone courses and projects designed to integrate and evaluate students’ learning in the major. Over 70 percent of the senior class completes capstones, and Pace wants to make this requirement universal. Balancing locally designed assessments with national measures, Pace also uses the Collegiate Learning Assessment, which assesses students’ critical thinking, analytic reasoning, and written communication abilities using performance tasks and writing rather than multiple-choice questions.

m4HE RIGHT STANDARD FOR BOTH ASSESSMENT AND ACCOUNTABILITY AT THE COLLEGE LEVEL IS STUDENTSl DEMONSTRATED ABILITY TO APPLY THEIR LEARNING TO COMPLEX

UNSCRIPTED PROBLEMS n

AAC&U | Part 3: A New Framework for Excellence

Assess Students’ Ability to Apply Learning to Complex Problems Use Assessment to Deepen Learning and to Establish a Culture of Shared Purpose and Continuous Improvement

As afďŹ rmed throughout this report, the essential learning outcomes provide a shared framework for both intentionality and accountability, across the entire educational system, within the various sectors of higher education, and in students’ own educational planning. Recommendation 4 calls on educators to create diagnostic, interim, and capstone assessments in order to give individual students feedback on their progress in achieving the expected outcomes in the context of their chosen course of study.

Especially in light of the high-stakes-testing movement in the schools, many will want to act immediately to identify standardized tests that can be used to establish how well students are doing on the recommended learning outcomes. The 2006 report from the federal Commission on the Future of Higher Education took this tack, recommending that every campus measure students’ learning with standardized tests, and that the states aggregate and compare the results of various standardized measures.48 For two reasons, a rush to adopt standardized testing for higher education would prove to be a “low-yieldâ€? strategy.49 First, the essential learning outcomes can be described in common, easily accessible language (see p. 12), but they are—in practice—complex capacities that are fostered and expressed quite differently in different ďŹ elds. For example, both a teacher and a chemist will need skills in inquiry, information literacy, and writing, but their competence in applying these skills will be manifested in different ways. Thus, general tests of the recommended learning outcomes will not provide evidence about students’ ďŹ eld-related achievement and competence. Field-speciďŹ c tests, while available in many disciplines, do not generally assess students’ mastery of higher-level intellectual, problem-solving, collaborative, and integrative abilities. The broad area of assessing civic, intercultural, and ethical capacities languishes even farther behind in terms of test development.50 Yet we cannot afford to neglect these essential outcomes just because there are no standardized measures to assess them.

Second, standardized tests that stand outside the regular curriculum are, at best, a weak prompt to needed improvement in teaching, learning, and curriculum. Tests can, perhaps, signal a problem, but the test scores themselves do not necessarily point to where or why the problem exists or offer particulars as to solutions. In practice, it takes a combination of valid, reliable instruments and local, grassroots assessments, across a broad array of curricular, pedagogical, and campus activities, to determine the precursors and particulars of academic shortfalls and to determine whether intended interventions are achieving real results.

The right standard for both assessment and accountability at the

college level is students’ demonstrated ability to apply their learning to complex, unscripted problems in the context of their advanced studies. Far-reaching change is needed to ensure that students work consistently over time on the kinds of higher-order learning— analytical and applied—that prepare them to meet this standard. The best possible way to foster that needed change is to design “milestone� and culminating assessments within the expected curriculum that help students and faculty focus together on the intended level of accomplishment and on what students need to do to improve. These milestone assessments can be designed in ways that check students’ intellectual and practical skills as well as their knowledge in a given area. And they can also include dimensions that address social and ethical attentiveness.

Curriculum-embedded assessment, when carefully done, is itself a potential “high-yield� educational reform because, by design, it focuses both faculty and student attention on students’ cumulative progress and actual level of attainment. Many campuses already are experimenting with locally designed assignments that show whether students are developing the expected knowledge and skills, and especially, whether they can apply their knowledge to complex problems.

This grassroots approach is the most promising way to focus student effort, to engage faculty with evidence about students’ cumulative progress, and to inform institutional decisions about needed change.

Standardized tests, administered periodically, can supplement such grassroots approaches. They can, for example, provide useful warning signals when a campus is setting its sights too low. But standardized assessments—especially those that stand outside the curriculum and that rely on a sample of students only—are much too distant from student and faculty attention to serve by themselves as a forceful catalyst for signiďŹ cant educational change.

THE PRINCIPLES IN PRACTICE Assess Students’ Ability to Apply Learning to Complex Problems Every student at 3OUTHERN )LLINOIS 5NI VERSITY %DWARDSVILLE completes a senior assignment in the major. The projects vary across different academic ďŹ elds, but each is designed to ensure that all students have mastered the skills required for their discipline as well as key liberal education outcomes—such as critical thinking, effective writing, and problem solving—that all graduates should possess. Designed by department faculty to “make visibleâ€? the learning required for the degree— whether it occurs in the major program or in general education—the capstone projects are assessed using rubrics aligned with the intended learning outcomes and probed for several different kinds of evidence. Individual students receive feedback on their accomplishments while faculty review the assessment evidence at the program level to shape curricular and pedagogical improvements. Over time, the process of collectively designing and scoring senior assignments has encouraged a culture of faculty collaboration.

Recommendation 13 4HE .ATIONAL ,EADERSHIP #OUNCIL RECOMMENDS THAT ASSESSMENTS BE LINKED TO THE ESSENTIAL LEARNING OUTCOMES IDENTIĂźED IN THIS REPORT THAT ASSESSMENTS BE EMBEDDED AT MILESTONE POINTS IN THE CURRICULUMq INCLUDING WITHIN STUDENTSl MAJOR ĂźELDSqAND THAT ASSESSMENTS BE MADE PART OF THE OVERALL GRADUATION REQUIREMENT

Students should know from the time they enter college that they will be expected to complete milestone and culminating projects— “authentic performancesâ€?—to demonstrate both their progress in relation to the essential outcomes and their ability to use the learning outcomes in the context of their chosen ďŹ elds.These assessments may consist of portfolios showing a range of student work, or they may center on required student experiences—such as a senior project or supervised student teaching—that are integral to their chosen area of focus.They may include comprehensive examinations in the students’ chosen major.

However the assessments are constructed—and this will vary, appropriately, across different ďŹ elds—the framework for accountabil-

Liberal Education & America’s Promise | AAC&U

THE PRINCIPLES IN PRACTICE Assess Students’ Ability to Apply Learning to Complex Problems #ARLETON #OLLEGE uses writing portfolios to ensure that undergraduates can write competently in a range of styles and contexts. By encouraging students to reect on—and revise—their writing, the portfolios themselves constitute an important educational experience.

To meet the portfolio requirement, students at the end of their sophomore year must submit three to ďŹ ve papers demonstrating their ability to write effectively in different rhetorical and disciplinary contexts; each portfolio must represent at least two of the college’s four curricular divisions (Arts and Literature, Humanities, Social Sciences, and Mathematics/Natural Sciences) and must include at least one paper from the “writing requirementâ€? course. Instructors then certify that the papers were written for their classes and indicate if they have since been revised. Finally, students write reective essays about their writing to introduce the portfolios. Together, the papers must demonstrate mastery of each of several key writing skills—the ability to report on observation, to analyze complex information, to provide interpretation, to use and document sources, and to articulate and support a thesis-driven argument. The writing portfolios have led Carleton faculty to talk about using the portfolios to assess other liberal education outcomes such as quantitative literacy and critical thinking.

AAC&U | Part 3: A New Framework for Excellence

ity should be students’ demonstrated ability to apply their learning to complex problems. Standards for students’ expected level of achievement also will vary by ďŹ eld, but they should all include speciďŹ c attention to the quality of the students’ knowledge, their mastery of key skills, their attentiveness to issues of ethical and social responsibility, and their facility in integrating different parts of their learning.

The National Survey of Student Engagement reports that 60 percent of graduating seniors do some kind of culminating work in college.51 These culminating activities—whether courses or projects—already are embedded in the expected curriculum; they already are part of the teaching and learning budget. These activities can be structured to show how well students can integrate their knowledge and apply it to complex problems, and students’ level of performance on them can be aggregated and made public.

Making students’ actual performance the framework for accountability would require, of course, new attention to the 40 percent of college students who do not do culminating work and who earn their degrees by passing the requisite number of courses. But if the intention is to raise the level of students’ preparation for twenty-ďŹ rstcentury challenges, there is no better place to begin.

Recommendation 14 4HE .ATIONAL ,EADERSHIP #OUNCIL RECOMMENDS THAT EACH CAMPUS ANA LYZE ITS ASSESSMENT ĂźNDINGS TO ENSURE THAT ALL GROUPS OF STUDENTS ARE PROGRESSING SUCCESSFULLY TOWARD THE EXPECTED LEARNING GOALS

This report calls for a new approach to fostering and promoting student success. But in moving toward this needed shift, it is important to attend to lessons already learned with existing metrics of student achievement. Almost everywhere, “college successâ€? is currently documented through reports on enrollment, persistence, degree completion, and sometimes, grades. Probed in more detail, these metrics for success make it indisputably clear that college attainment is stratiďŹ ed by income level, and that there are also signiďŹ cant disparities in attainment between white students and speciďŹ c groups of racial and ethnic minorities: African Americans, Latinos, and American Indians/ Alaskan Natives. Asian American students run the gamut, with some subgroups forging ahead on the traditional measures of success, and others clearly lagging.

As they devise more educationally productive ways of deďŹ ning and assessing student achievement, educators also need to study closely how different groups of students are progressing within these new standards for success. This will require two levels of analysis. First, each campus can study whether different groups of students are participating equitably in programs and practices—such as ďŹ rst-year experiences, writing-intensive courses, learning communities, and capstone experiences—that have been designed to enrich and strengthen students’ academic achievement. On many campuses, such programs disproportionately serve students from more advantaged backgrounds.

By studying the data, campuses can move toward more equitable participation in what they determine to be their most effective educational practices.

Second, as assessments focus more centrally on students’ milestone and culminating performances, faculty and staff should also ask whether all groups of students are reaching the expected level of attainment on the essential learning outcomes. By disaggregating emerging data, colleges and universities can hone in on the patterns and likely causes of achievement problems and do a much better job of identifying needed changes in curriculum, teaching quality, academic support, and the larger educational environment.

Recommendation 15 4HE .ATIONAL ,EADERSHIP #OUNCIL RECOMMENDS THAT BROAD BASED LEADERSHIP BE DEVELOPED IN ORDER TO CREATE CAMPUS CULTURES MARKED BY AN UNWAVERING FOCUS ON THE QUALITY OF STUDENT LEARNING

BY AN ETHIC OF CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT AND BY STRUCTURES AND REWARDS THAT SUPPORT FACULTY AND STAFF LEADERSHIP ON THESE ISSUES

Faculty and staff on hundreds of campuses are already implementing elements of the Principles of Excellence outlined above. But too often their work touches limited numbers of students or is concentrated in a few areas of the curriculum. Those experimenting with innovative, engaging pedagogical practices are often isolated from one another, unaware that there are kindred spirits just around the corner. Existing reward systems—geared almost exclusively to faculty scholarship and the quality of individual teaching—are incompatible with the scope of collaborative change and organizational learning that will be needed to raise the quality of all students’ educational achievement.

A contemporary framework for educational excellence and its assessment requires new leadership structures and incentives to advance the intended changes. In particular, new organizational practices are needed to both support and reward faculty and staff efforts to foster students’ cumulative progress across different parts and levels of the college experience.

Drawing from work by Pat Hutchings and Mary Huber of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching,52 we propose that each campus create its own version of a “Teaching and Learning Commonsâ€? where faculty, administrators, and student life professionals can come together—across disciplinary lines—to create a culture of shared purposes, to audit the extent to which the educational environment is successfully advancing the expected learning for all groups of students, and to beneďŹ t from existing and new efforts to foster student engagement and high achievement.

To foster shared purposes, each campus needs to develop its own vision of the expected learning outcomes (see recommendation 1).

By making good use of assessment evidence from many sources, by building widely shared knowledge about successful educational innovations within the community, and by creating a culture of continuous attention to these matters, the Teaching and Learning

Liberal Education & America’s Promise | AAC&U

Commons can probe the relations between what is intended and what is actually happening. The commons also can serve as a continuing catalyst for effective practices and far-reaching change. In addition, participation in this commons can become an important way of helping new faculty and staff translate the broad aims described in the essential learning outcomes to their particular disciplines and roles.

The commons, in short, can play a far-reaching role, creating a culture that consistently “aims high” and that steadfastly focuses—across divisional lines—on campus progress toward making excellence inclusive.

AAC&U | Part 3: A New Framework for Excellence

COMPETENCY III: EVIDENCE OF LEARNING

Assessment Is More Than Keeping Score: Moving From Inquiry, Through Interpretation, To Action February 2009, Volume 12, Number 2

John Cosgrove and Lawrence J. McDaniel "You can't fatten a pig by weighing it." "Keeping Score Isn't Winning!" "Data don't drive." At St. Louis Community College (STLCC), we recognize and attempt to follow such wise advice. However, few of the many "wise" resources consulted while constructing and implementing a mission-based model of assessment at STLCC have resonated so clearly and directly as Alicia C. Dowd's Lumina Research Report, Data Don't Drive: Building a Practitioner-Driven Culture of Inquiry to Assess Community College Performance (December, 2005). Of course, acquiring the relevant data by itself cannot affect the Institutional dynamics required to improve teaching and learning. As the Lumina report says, to generate change, college faculty, staff, and administrators must, "Work to identify and address problems by purposefully analyzing data about student learning and progress. Engage in sustained professional development and dialogue about the barriers to student achievement. Have the capacity for insightful questioning of evidence and informed interpretation of results."

The assessment choir at STLCC responded to these statements with a resounding, “Amen," affirming a belief that had long been self-evident. Those who had built and then remodeled STLCC's mission-based assessment approach were acutely aware of what is needed to create and sustain a culture of Inquiry, as is apparent in STLCC's assessment vision: St. Louis Community College collects and uses assessment data to improve student learning, academic achievement, and overall institutional effectiveness. When combined with thoughtful interpretation by faculty and staff, assessment supports the overall decision making needs of the college and the specific decision-making needs of individual units and programs.

A Mission-Based Model of Assessment. STLCC's mission-based model (described previously in "St. Louis Community College: A Mission-Based Approach to Using Assessment to Improve Student Learning Outcomes and Institutional Effectiveness," Leadership Abstracts, October 2006,Volume 19,Number 10) has provided the framework and to some extent the motivation needed to support assessment.

Assessment at STLCC is not a bureaucratic exercise that takes place separate from the work we do every day in our classrooms and offices. Rather it is a critical component of how we think about our work with students and their learning outcomes associated with our mission. In this context, assessment can be viewed as a simple, powerful tool to help us make sure we are keeping our promise to the community.

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Our mission-based model and its various groups are centered around the Assessment Council, a group of more than 30 faculty, staff, and administrators. The Assessment Council serves as a meeting p l a c e where faculty, staff and administrators from the college's campuses and centers come together and exchange ideas and information related to the impact of our assessment efforts.

STLCC's Assessment Council consists of seven mission-based groups: Career and Technical Education; Workforce and Community Development; Developmental Education; General Education; Institutional Support Services; Student Affairs; and Transfer Education. Each group is made up of faculty and staff with expertise i n a particular mission area and is charged with continuous assessment of the college's programs and services related to that area.

It is vital for the college to use its assessment practices to act on information to improve student learning outcome and institutional effectiveness. To accomplish this task, the college must ensure that assessment results are shared and have the support of faculty and staff, and that the model is continually examined. To aid in this task, three assessment committees were added to the Assessment Council: the Divisions and Departments Assessment Committee ensures that data necessary to assess student learning is accessible and coordinates collection of assessment plans from each division; the Governance Committee works closely with the Assessment Council to ensure that assessment processes, results, and strategies for improvements are shared and discussed within the college's governance processes; and the Internal and External Communication Committee designs and implements communication strategies to share assessment results and document outcomes associated with the mission.

STLCC's mission-based model is not a hierarchical model; the Assessment Council is no more important than any mission-based group, and no group reports to any other group. The model, under the general direction of the Vice Chancellor for Education, encourages the entire college community to work collaboratively to enhance teaching, learning, and institutional effectiveness. By directly linking assessment processes to its mission, the college has created a central, unifying theme for assessment.

Because the mission is everyone's business, assessment becomes everyone's business. The college's mission-based assessment process has become a shared enterprise in which faculty and staff across departments and locations engage in thoughtful interpretation to develop and design assessment activities; analyze data/information; make recommendations to improve teaching, student learning outcomes, and student support services; and advance institutional effectiveness.

Tying assessment to mission is the fundamental, replicable action that has cleared the seemingly cluttered path to institutional accountability and greater effectiveness. This move to mission-based assessment has allowed us to see that change at a large, urban community college may be both timely and possible.

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It's Not (Just) About Keeping Score. Nevertheless, there’s more to it than keeping score. As an earlier League for Innovation white paper asserts, “While the need for assessment is clear, an implementation gap often exists between the desired end result and how one gets there" (An Assessment Framework for the Community College: Measuring Student Learning an d Achievement as a Means of Demonstrating Institutional Effectiveness). Assessment is the process that takes us from ideas, opinions, and, at times, confusion to understanding in a manner that is precise, predictive, valid, and reliable. Through assessment we gain a better understanding not only of what works, but also of why it worked and how it can be repeated. The desired end of assessment should be action - action that sustains what is working or improves what is not. And such action requires the participation of the entire college, the whole congregation and not just an assessment choir.

STLCC's mission-based assessment approach h a s proven successful because it is grounded in the following six key components: • The model focuses assessment on what the college claims to do.

• Within each mission area, faculty and staff identify the most important aspects for assessment.

• Faculty and staff are provided with consistent, user-friendly, self-service access to data/information through decision support tools.

• The model establishes assessment as a shared enterprise an d creates a non-punitive environment for thoughtful interpretation of data/information by the faculty and staff who work with students.

• The model is linked to the college’s strategic planning process and creates an environment for action.

• The model assesses how we assess as well as what we assess.

It's Also About Act ion. During 2007-2008, faculty and staff from across the college worked collaboratively to identify, explore, and develop actions steps to improve s t u d e n t engagement and learning outcomes associated with assessment issues. Among these were the following projects: • The degree to which speaking and writing intensive courses increase student engagement, not only in selected courses but also in the student's overall college experience.

• Identification of key factors which affect the retention of career and technical education majors.

• The effectiveness of the new tuition payment plan and student satisfaction with the plan.

• The degree of student engagement in continuing education and workforce/community development courses, and the extent to which such engagement impacts student learning outcomes.

• Upon graduation, the successful completion of key student learning outcomes related to selected workforce skills.

• Exploration of student engagement and related student learning outcomes for students involved i n TRIO efforts.

• Exploration of student engagement f or first-time college students enrolled in key allied health courses and programs.

• The degree to which students acquire key skills and knowledge related to valuing and global education competencies.

• Examination of student engagement in selected business, accounting, and information systems courses with special attention directed toward the impact of writing and service learning.

• Examination of how faculty can better identify strengths and weaknesses in writing for ESL students so that such students are better prepared for English 101.

• The degree to which students are successfully completing course objectives related to Communications101.

• Using Bloom's Taxonomy, assessment of the acquisition and use of higher order thinking skills in a variety o f general education courses.

• Exploration of the extent to which adjunct faculty are aware of and using classroom assessment techniques to improve instruction and student learning outcomes.

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These capsules illustrate the range of assessment projects pursued in a given academic cycle. Below are a few specific treatments that will provide a more animated portrait of how mission-based assessment is done.

Developmental Education Assessment Project. Developmental education is a key mission component. The following description relates current assessment efforts in this area and outlines how STLCC is using assessment to move from inquiry through interpretation to action.

In 2007-2008, the Developmental Education Assessment Committee conducted research on how well students transfer skills developed in developmental reading courses to their college-level coursework. Its inquiry considered the extent to which grades earned in the first course in the reading series (RD030) determined future success (grade point aver age) and persistence. In addition, the committee g a t h e r e d student and faculty perceptions of reading and learning characteristics that predict or hinder academic success in specific content-area courses. Finally, using a locally developed exit test, the study compared the reading/study skill levels of successful completers of RDG030 with those of non-RDG030 students beginning freshman-level courses.

Based on its findings, the committee made the following recommendations: • Members of the committee should meet with the departments used in this study during Service Week in August 2008 to report the results of this study in order to serve as a means of evoking reflective discussions among instructors within their areas of expertise.

• The reading departments may want to revisit paired reading/content area courses, with the difference from our failed attempts being that both teachers must be in the classroom simultaneously (and paid appropriately for being there). Perhaps a third teacher (for college orientation) might be an added component. The most important consideration will be to ensure that advisers and counselors are on board to encourage students to sign up for paired classes.

• RDG 030 completers might benefit from refreshers to which other students could be invited.

• Based on the discussion with content area faculty, establishment of a college wide reading-acrossthe-curriculum program and/or enrichment workshop series to enable faculty across disciplines to promote and use reading and learning strategies for student success may be in order. This position should be funded with released time or appropriate compensation for the organizer or committee.

Another concrete action resulting from this project would seem to recycle as well as close the loop.

Having done much of the work required, the committee proposed that developmental reading and related units should do the self-study prescribed for NADE certifications, which in turn has become the assessment project for 2008-2009.

Transfer Education Assessment Project. Transfer education is another key mission component of St. Louis Community College. Every fall, STLCC sends nearly 2,000 transfer students to a Missouri four-year college/university. The Transfer Education Assessment Committee recognizes that mission and the resulting reality. Consequently, the committee seeks to "assess selected Transfer Education program outcomes" and "as needed, help develop strategies for improving student learning as well as record results."

The analysis of student movement is certainly a key component of transfer assessment. Using a dataexchange system developed by a cooperating institution - one to which most of our students’ transfer - STLCC discovered that its transfer students, as measured by GPA and grade ranges, performed as well as the university's native students. In addition, the data showed that 81percent of STLCC-transfer students received a grade of A to C in their upper division courses, while 83 percent of the native students received a grade of A to C in their upper division courses. Data also revealed that only 25 percent of the STLCC transfers completed the associate's degree, while 17 percent transferred less than 30 hours.

Approximately one-third transferred 30 to 59 hours, while 25 percent transferred 60 or more hours but no associate's degree. Thus, the committee concluded that although this contingent of STLCC transfer students was well prepared for transfer, students tended to transfer without completing the associate's degree.

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Provided with this quantitative profile of STLCC transfers in 2006-2007, the Transfer Education Assessment committee decided to expand its search for information about students' transfer process in 2007-2008. This project was much more aggressive in gathering input from students with the stated charge that, "The committee will focus on the degree to which students are using advisors, counselors, and teachers to help them make the transition."

The transfer education assessment group designed a set of focus group research questions. The focus groups were composed of former STLCC students who had transferred. Three cohorts of students were defined: (1) recent transfer students, with less than 30 credit hours at the transfer institution; (2) established tr ans f er students, with 30 to 45 or more credit hours; and (3) graduating transfer students, within one semester of graduation. Working with and through the transfer department at the cooperating university, the committee invited students from each cohort to participate in a focus group session. Fifty students (20 recent transfers, 20 established transfers, and 10 graduating transfers) participated in this project and were asked to respond to a series of scripted questions.

The Transfer Education Assessment Committee examined the compiled transcripts and came to some conclusions. First, in general, many students do not use advising services as much as STLCC would like, but a good portion of those who transferred had sought advice at both the community college and at the university. Second, transfer students perceive themselves to be just as prepared, if not better prepared, than native students, a finding w hich is consistent with the previous year's assessment of GPAs. It was also noted that students who perceive themselves as having a successful transfer are by nature selfmotivated to facilitate the process. Some students reported that though they might have heard differing stories about what would and would not transfer, even from the same department, they still found their way. Some students reported that articulation agreements are not honored for our transfer students, a factor contributing to the committee's finding that the student who transfers successfully is persistent, self-motivated, and interested in making the process work as much as is possible.

Finally, interpretation of the assembled data enabled the committee to generate a list of steps to help students make a more efficient and less stressful transition to their chosen institutions: • Using advising, and thus increasing the chance of eventual transfer, has to be a part of every firsttime, degree-seeking student's orientation.

• Require each first-time, degree-seeking student to see an advisor in the first semester or perhaps twice in the first year.

• Seeing an advisor as a component of the college orientation course, “Orientation and Study Skills," was suggested.

• Perhaps, require that all first-time, degree-seeking students attend an orientation ceremony or speech.

• Perhaps, establish a mentoring program in which students who have successfully transferred help or advise new community college students.

Information regarding all these issues is readily available on the STLCC website. Therefore, the committee proposed to bring thes e services to the foreground of every student’s mind, and not just those who are highly self-motivated. It was clear that better publicity was the key, and that requiring students to use advising services at least once would help all students understand and begin early to make plans to transfer. Perhaps the most significant action coming out of the concerns is that this spring, former STLCC transfers will participate in panel discussions at each campus on the perils and possibilities connected with transfer.

Linking Mission-Based Assessment Action to Continuous Improvement and Strategic Planning. In its most recent Higher Learning Commission (HLC) self-study, STLCC received a full, tenyear accreditation result using HLC's Program to Evaluate and Advance Quality (PEAQ) approach. Rather than rest on its laurels, STLCC is now using its mission-based assessment process as a catalyst to initiate steps to move STLCC to HLC's Academic Quality Improvement Program (AQIP). We believe that by using our mission based assessment pr oc es s to create not only a culture of inquiry but also a culture of action, we have laid the appropriate groundwork for a web of common values related to the 10 Evidence of Learning

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AQIP principles: mission focus, involvement, leadership, learning, people, collaboration, agility, foresight, information, and integrity.

Consistent with its belief that assessment is more than keeping score and that the true value of assessment lies in the development of actions to improve student learning and institutional effectiveness, STLCC made the conscious decision to link its mission-based assessment process to its strategic planning process. STLCC has used an extensive assessment of internal and external information to develop strategic directions, choices, and key performance indicators.

The link between assessment and planning can be illustrated in the points below, which outline how the college's mission-based goal of improving student learning is articulated in its strategic planning statement.

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Strategic Planning Direction: Improving the Academic Achievements and Student Learning Outcomes of Our Students Strategic Choice 1: Increase degree and certificate completion rates, while enhancing the learning outcomes of graduates.

Key Performance Indicators • Number of fall, first-time students who re-enroll for the next spring term and the number who re-enroll for the next fall term • Number of degree and certificate completers by program • 3, 4, 5 year graduation rates for first-time, full-time, degree-seeking, college-ready (non-developmental in any area) students • Number of students who completed 24 or more credit hours, transfer to a Missouri four-year college/university, and remain in good academic standing at their four-year institution after 24 credit hours • Number of graduates who meet general education and program competencies based on college· approved assessments Strategic Choice 2: Create an effective developmental education program aimed at the development of skills necessary to complete college-level coursework.

Key Performance Indicators • Number of fall, first-time developmental students by subject area (math, English, reading) who· re-enroll for the next spring term, and the number who re-enroll for the next fall term • Number of developmental students who complete ENG030 with a C or better who then successfully complete ENG101 with a C or better • Number of developmental students who complete MTH140 with a C or better who then successfully complete MTH160 with a C or better • Number of developmental students who successfully complete RDG020 or RDG030 with a C or better who then complete 24 hours of college-level work with STLCC and maintain a GPA of 2.0 or higher • Number of graduates who started with STLCC as a developmental student as defined by STLCC • 3, 4, 5 year graduation rates for first-time, full-time, degree-seeking, developmental students • Number of students who started with STLCC as a developmental student and then completed 24 or more credit hours, transferred to a Missouri four-year college/university, and remained in good academic standing at their four-year institution after 14 credit hours • Number of graduates who began as developmental students who meet general education and program competencies based on college-approved assessments By carefully linking our self-study, mission-based assessment, and strategic planning processes, the college has created an organizational culture that values c o nt i nu o us improvement. Faculty, staff, and administrators Involved in these processes continue to stress not only what works well at St. Louis Community College, but also what we can do to improve student learning outcomes and more fully develop the social and economic fabric of our community.

Whether the game is assessment of student engagement and learning outcomes, accreditation, or strategic planning, it certainly involves more than just keeping score. Data alone will not drive these critical elements of any community college. But when data is combined with thoughtful interpretation by faculty, staff, and administrators to support the overall decision-making needs of the college and the specific decision-making needs of individual units and programs, assessment scoring can reveal the positive changes that result from data-based and mission-based action.

Evidence of Learning

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COMPETENCY IV: ADVISING WALLACE STATE COMMUNITY COLLEGE’S PHILOSOPHY AND GUIDELINES FOR ACADEMIC ADVISING “Academic advising is the second-most important function in the community college. If it is not conducted with the utmost efficiency and effectiveness, the most important function—instruction—will fail to ensure that students navigate the curriculum to completion.” – Terry O’Banion PREFACE Academic advising is an integral part of the learning process because it is a collective effort that encourages students to develop clear educational plans and choose realistic life/career goals. In order to assist students in realizing their full potential, faculty and staff advisors embrace the following beliefs about academic advising: • Students are often unaware of the demands and expectations of the college and, therefore, need to learn the culture of higher education. Academic advising plays a key role in their understanding of the collegiate environment.

• Academic advising is not an isolated event but an ongoing communication between the student and advisor in which mutual trust and respect must and should be established.

• At the heart of all academic advising is the development of an educational plan that will enhance each student’s intellectual and personal growth, including selections of classes to satisfy degree requirements in an efficient and effective manner. While advisors help define educational goals, the primary responsibility for decision-making rest with the student.

PRIMARY GOALS AND OBJECTIVES OF ACADEMIC ADVISING Students need to become familiar with and utilize WSCC resources that support educational development and assist in developing a strong understanding of WSCC policies, procedures, and requirements. They should be referred to the catalog, Degree Works, and our STARS guide.

The desired outcome of academic advising is that students learn to make informed decisions about their educational plans and become proactive in their education.

Advising

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ADVISOR’S RESPONSIBILITIES IN THE ADVISING PROCESS • • • •

• • • • • •

Advising

Demonstrate a genuine interest in students’ success by helping them develop realistic education goals.

Be accessible and responsible to a student’s needs.

Review and update each student’s academic record during the advisement session.

Be knowledgeable about WSCC policies, procedures, and all academic requirements related to the major as well as articulation agreements in selected programs and graduation requirements.

Know the academic calendar and be fully aware of important deadlines.

Know how to access student records by use of Internet Native Banner System.

Assist students with academic planning by explaining information about their degree plans and other degree requirements.

Advisors should make students aware of prerequisites, course sequencing, and general information about course load and offerings.

Share resources and support services available to students and make referrals when deemed necessary.

Participate in college sponsored professional development sessions for advisors as need to stay current with policies, procedures, and requirements.

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CORE VALUES OF ACADEMIC ADVISING Students deserve dependable, accurate, respectful, honest, friendly, and professional service.

In order to serve ours students well, academic advisors understand that they are responsible to many constituents who comprise our academic communities. This is the foundation on which the following Core Values rest.

Academic Advisors are responsible to the students and individuals they serve. The cooperative efforts of all who advise help to deliver quality programs and services to our students. These services include, but are not limited to, giving accurate information, maintaining office hours, and keeping appointments.

Advisors help students develop a perception of themselves and their future relationship.

Advisors introduce students into the academic environment by encouraging them to value the services available to them, putting the college experience into perspective become more responsible, and set priorities as well as realistic education goals.

Advisors encourage self-reliance by helping students make informed and responsible decisions and set realistic goals. Advisors work with students to help them achieve their education objectives that they have established for themselves. Advisors encourage students to be responsible for their own success and progress.

Advisors seek resolution that is in the interest of both parties when the needs of the students and the policies and procedures of WSCC are in conflict.

Advisors are knowledgeable about federal, state, and WSCC policies and procedures such as the privacy of student information, equal treatment, equal access, and equal opportunity.

Advisors respect the right of students to have information about themselves kept confidential.

Advisors share information with others about students and their programs only when both advisor and student believe that information is relevant and will result in increased information or assistance.

Advisors gain access to and use computerized information about students only when that information is relevant to the advisement process with that particular student. Advisors place comments in student’s records only when legitimately authorized to do so.

Advisors document advising contacts adequately to aid subsequent advising sessions.

Advisors develop ties with other departments who assist students in other areas such as admissions, financial aid, testing, orientation, career development, as well as graduation.

Advisors are facilitators and mediators. Responsible academic advisors recognize their limitations and use their specialized knowledge effectively.

Advising

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ADVISING RESOURCE GUIDE FOR COMPASS 1

PILOT PROGRAM - 2014

Resource Guide

INTRODUCTION This resource guide is to be used in conjunction with advising materials to aid in the implementation of the COMPASS Pilot Program for Transitional students in 2014. This pilot emphasizes the importance of the holistic interpretation of a student that may be embarking on the college experience at Wallace State Community College for the first time. This student may be just completing high school, transferring from another college or entering college for the first time after years of life experience. In each instance and many other variables associated with each situation, students may or may not be prepared for college coursework. If a student places into a transitional course via placement testing, then advisors should take the time to learn as much as possible about the student’s background. This may include high school coursework, obtaining a GED, high school or college GPAs, scores on standardized tests, such as the ACT or SAT, and the completion of milestones in life, such as supervisory positions in the workplace, military service or other factors. As advisors discuss these possibilities, students should be encouraged to complete his/her goal and to be successful by making good choices.

This handbook for advisors outlines the options and procedures for students who may have scores placing them into transitional coursework but have the ability and desire to take college-level courses at WSCC. It corresponds with the COMPASS Pilot Program that was given approval by Chancellor Heinrich in 2014 to help WSCC students become more successful. Thanks for your assistance in improving student success, retention and completion!

COMPASS PLACEMENT TESTING WSCC students not scoring a 20 or higher on the individual Math and English sections of the ACT Test, are required to utilize COMPASS Placement testing per State Board Policy 802.01. With this type of assessment, students are given an overview of the test via a video introduction and are given the option to wait and take the test on another day if they do not feel prepared. If the student has chosen prior to the test experience or once being exposed to the information in the video to seek study materials before testing, the option is available through the WSCC website and with the WSCC Testing Center.

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Once students take the COMPASS Placement Test, the results are immediately available to them for review. COMPASS Placement Chart with cutoff scores is in included with this resource guide) With this review, students will be given a level of placement in math, reading and English. If this proves to be a transitional course (first digit of the three is 0), then that student has three options.  Student can retake the Placement Test as SBP 802.01 allows up to two times in a three-year period.  Take the recommended Transitional courses  Complete basic skills coursework through Adult Education Department for possibility of improving one level of coursework  If actual placement score is within a 10-point range of the cutoff, then the student has the option to meet with an advisor in LionCentral, a Transitional faculty member, or a faculty member in the math or English Departments for a discussion of previous attributes, current situation, test scores, occupational milestones, and previous coursework to complete an agreement for successful completion.

RETEST COMPASS OPTION Students can use study materials to brush up on basic skills and then retest on the COMPASS Placement Test. SBP 802.01 GL 3c specifies that students can only retest one time after the original test within as three-year period and that the assessment scores are valid for a three-year period. The highest score is kept valid so if students do retest and make higher scores, then they can utilize those for placement instead of the original.

TRANSITONAL COURSEWORK OPTION Students taking this option will sign up for MTH 090, MTH 098, RDG 083, ENG 092, or ENG 093 coursework. Advisors will encourage students to utilize campus resources as they complete their coursework.

ADULT EDUCATION OPTION Students choosing to take coursework through Adult Education, will be directed to the 4th floor of Bailey Center to speak with an Adult Education staff member to 2

potentially enroll in a College Prep course to brush up on basic skills of math, English, or reading. These enrolled students will need to place 12.9 on the Level A TABE in order to be eligible for a transitional course override. If so, the Adult Education staff will complete a Verification Form (included in this resource guide) and the student will turn this form into LionCentral for a preapproved override to be processed.

10-POINT OPTION Students placing within ten points of the standard COMPASS cutoff score have the option to meet with a specified advisor and discuss the possibility of advancing to additional level of coursework. The discussion for advancement should center around past experiences, such as employment, high school coursework, length of time since high school, high school GPA (2.7 or higher on a 4.0 scale suggested), previous college experiences, standardized test scores, such as ACT or SAT, major, time constraints or other factors. With these, the student will be advised on the difficulties of college coursework and what resources are available as study aids. A flyer for Advisors that emphasizes the various campus resources available for students if they utilize this option is included with this resource guide.

If the student chooses to utilize this option to advance, the Advisor and student will sign a Course Advancement Form, also included in this resource guide, and the student will commit to complete. This Course Advancement Form should be turned in to LionCentral for a pre-approved override to be conducted on the student account. (Pre-approved override directions for Banner is included in this resource guide).

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WSCC Comparable Cut Scores for ACT*, ASSET, & ACT COMPASS ACADEMIC, CAREER TECHNICAL, HEALTH and AAS

ACT SCORES

COMPASS SCORES

ASSET SCORES Numerical Skills 23-37

PreAlgebra 0-25 26-35 36-99 Algebra 0-25

38-55 Elementary Algebra 23-36 ACT math Score 20-22

37-45 Intermediate Algebra

MATHEMATICS

MTH 090 and ORI 103 See Advisor for possible advancement MTH 098, 116, or MAH 101 MTH 098, 116, or MAH 101

26-35

See Advisor for possible advancement

36-65

MTH 100, MTH 103

23-30 ACT math Score 21-22 ACT math Score 23-25

COURSE(S) RECOMMENDED

MTH 098

31-45

36-65

MTH 100

46-55

66-99

MTH 110, 112, or 265

College Algebra 23-30 ACT math Score 23-25 ACT math Score 26-27

MTH 100

31-42

0-45

MTH 110, 112, or 265

46-99

MTH 113, 120

43-55

MTH 125 Trigonometry

ACT math Score 26-27 ACT math Score 28-36

0-43

MTH 113, 120

44-99

MTH 125

0-54

RDG 083 and ORI 103

55-64

See Advisor for possible advancement

36-53

65-99

No Reading Required

23-35

0-18

ENG 092 and ORI 103

19-28

See Advisor for possible advancement

29-51

ENG 093 and ORI 103

52-61

See Advisor for possible advancement

62-99

ENG 101

23-35 READING

36-41

WRITING

CAREER TECHNICAL Certificate Programs WRITING

ACT English Score 20

42-54

ACT SCORES

ASSET SCORES

COMPASS SCORES

COURSE(S) RECOMMENDED

0-37

0-37

ENG 092 and ORI 103

38-99

38-99

COM 100 for Technical Certificate Programs

* NOTE: ACT scores of less than 20 on Mathematics and English may not substitute for Placement tests. These concordances are for advising students having only ACT scores and expect correlations for Placement testing.

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Wallace State Community College College Prep Completion Verification *Must be taken to Advising for course override*

STUDENT: _______________________________________________________________ Student ID #:___________________________

DATE: ____________________

COURSE OVERRIDE: _____ MTH 090

_____ MTH 098

_____ ENG 092

_____ ENG 093

COURSE TO ENTER: __________________________________________________ Supporting scores: __________________________

________________________

__________________

Comments:

______________________________________ Adult Education Director

Date: ________________

______________________________________ Overriding Advisor

Date: ________________

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SSS Tutoring JBC 8th Floor

COURSE ADVANCEMENT

Monday— Tuesday 8:00 a.m. —6:00 p.m.

Wednesday -Thurs day 8:00 a.m. —4:00 p.m.

Contact: 256.352.8073

College Prep JBC 4th Floor Monday & Wednes day 8:00 a.m. —8:00 p.m.

Contact:256.352.8 078

SLA Tutoring

 Math Dept SL A

Harlan G. Allen Math Bldg. #25 Monday, Tuesday, Thursday 8:30 a.m. —1:00 p.m.

Friday 9:00 a.m. —1:00 p.m.

 English Dept. SL A

Computer Science #105

Wallace State Community College recognizes that learning occurs in a variety of ways. Individuals can develop mastery of course competencies through experiences, prior training or prior coursework that sometimes are not demonstrated through standardized testing. Due to this difference in backgrounds, students scoring within ten attainable points on the COMPASS placement test are given the option to register for the course they were within ten points of achieving via a Course Advancement Request Form and an advisor recommendation as part of a Student Success Pilot Program on campus. So that students do not enter a course behind, this request can only be granted during regular registration or before a class has met for the first time. Students are urged to utilize free campus tutoring, Adult Education brush-up classes or departmental tutoring by Student Learning Assistants (as available) to be successful in the requested course advancement. Advisors will consult with students and provide options for tutoring if the Course Advancement is requested. Students wanting to pursue this will complete a Course Advancement Form and have an advisor to sign. Advisors will complete the form and additionally complete a pre-approved override for the semester and course requested by the student. By signing the form, students take responsibility for pursuing course advancement above recommended placement test scores.

Monday-Wednesda y 8:00 a.m. — Noon Thursday

These Services are at No

8:00 a.m. —2:00 p.m.

Cost to WSCC Students

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Course Advancement Request Form Wallace State Community College recognizes that learning occurs in a variety of ways. Individuals can develop mastery of course competencies through experiences, prior training or prior coursework that sometimes are not demonstrated through standardized testing. Due to this difference in backgrounds, students scoring within ten points on the COMPASS placement test are given the option to register for the course they were within ten points of achieving via this form and an advisor recommendation as part of a Student Success Pilot Program on campus. So that students do not enter a course after it has begun and potentially be behind in coursework, this request can only be granted during regular registration or before a class has met for the first time. Students are urged to utilize free campus tutoring, adult education brush-up classes or departmental tutoring by Student Learning Assistants (as available) to be successful in the requested course advancement.

Student’s Name

Date

Student Number

Phone #

Requested Course

Semester Requested

Short narrative stating reason for requesting this advancement:

Note: Advisor, please check the following as they are identified:

Admissions Application on File

Transcripts on File

Testing Results on File Short narrative stating reason for approving this advancement:

Student’s Signature

Date

Advisor’s Signature

Date

This completed form should be submitted to Lion Central in the Lobby of the James C. Bailey Building for processing (valid only for the semester listed on this form).

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Banner INB Pre-Approved Override

SFASRPO-Student Registration Permit-Override   

Enter Student ID Enter Term Next Block

 

Click on the drop down box labeled Permit and choose what code you are overriding Enter CRN of course you are completing the Override for or you can just select Subject and Course Number; you will need to enter this again if the class is offered in internet format o Example: ENG 093 ENG 093I Subject, Course Number, and Section will populate Next block Save

  

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Student Registration Permit-Override Form (SFASRPO) Use this form to assign specific permit-override codes to individual students on a term and course or section basis. When a code is assigned to a student for a specific term, the CRN, Subject, Course, and Section fields are available to specify when assigning the specific permit-override code.

At a minimum, a subject and course number must be designated when assigning a code.

If a subject and course number are specified, the permit-override registration error checking will apply to any section of that subject and course number when the student registers. If a specific CRN is entered, the subject, course number, and section number will default. If a subject, course number, and section number are entered, the CRN will default. Multiple permit-override codes can be assigned to the same subject and course number combination, or the same CRN. Warning: Caution should be exercised when assigning permit-override codes. If a permit-override code is assigned to a subject and course number combination that is not associated with a CRN, and a different permit-override code (with a different set of registration error overrides allowed) is assigned to a specific CRN that has the same subject and course number, the logic in the permit-override checking will “combine” the rules in the sense that all of the Y(es) overrides for registration error checking will be combined from both rules. This will not be a problem if the Y(es) overrides permitted for the specific CRN are the same, or include more Y(es) overrides than the rule associated with the same subject and course number combination. This will be a problem if the Y(es) overrides permitted for the specific CRN are fewer and/or different from the overrides permitted for the same subject and course number combination.

Please see the “Procedures” section of this chapter for examples illustrating the effects of combining overrides when the same subject and course number are specified in more than one permit-override rules.

Permit-Override codes are assigned in the Student Registration Permit-Overrides section of the form. Permit-override types can be assigned only when they have been authorized for the term in the Key Block using the Registration Permit-Overrides Control Form (SFAROVR).

The ID that assigned the override-permit code is stored and displayed on the form, as well as the activity date associated with the most recent change.

Student schedule information is also displayed on the form. The information displayed is the same as that in the Student Schedule section of the Registration Section Query Form (SFQSECM).

The key sequence number of the study path is displayed for the CRN when study paths are enabled.

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Faculty Self-Service Banner Override Instructions How to access MyWallaceState 1.

Go to www.wallacestate.edu and click on the MyWallaceState link.

2. Login

3.Click on myWallaceState

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4.

On the MyWallaceState log in screen, you will enter your “W” number and your six-digit date of birth (MMDDYY) will be your initial pin.

“W” Number (case sensitive) 6 Digit D.O.B.

5.

Next, Click “Login” Once you have successfully logged in, you will be able to access the secure area.

In the event that you should need to have your password reset, please contact Judy York at extension 8181 or email at judy.york@wallacestate.edu .

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Click on this tab to enter the Faculty Services Area

6.

Under the Faculty Services tab, you will be able to access information related to students as well as the classes that you are scheduled to teach. The menu below outlines what is available under each tab. Select Registration Override

Look at student transcripts, test scores, contact info, etc.

Email class, add syllabus, etc.

Look at more detailed class list information here.

Look at class rosters here

Access the registration module here.

Click here to look up any classes in the schedule.

Enter final grades here.

Click Here

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Complete overrides

7.

Select Term for Override

Select Term and Submit

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8.

Enter either Student Number or Select to find Student

If you have the student’s “W” number, enter it here.

If you don’t have the student’s “W” number, enter their name.

Keep “All” selected in order to ensure an accurate query.

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9.

Verify selected student

Confirm Student

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10.

Select from Drop Down Box item to be overridden and CRN

Override Special Approval Override Student Attribute Override Enrollment Capacity Override Co-Requisite Override Pre-Requisite Override Time Conflict

List of CRN’s for faculty

This will not complete the student registration in the class(es) The student will still be required to register.

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