My eyes were suddenly opened this afternoon by Jonathan to what may have been obvious to others, that we are building the new strategic plan. From the top down.
My first reaction was to wonder why were not starting with the old strategic plan as a starting point. It was a good plan, and hundreds of hours went into the plan. To start tabula rasa, from a blank slate, seemed to me to be "throwing out the baby with the bath water", reinventing the wheel. I had always thought we would start from the old to build the new. I suddenly wondered what happened in planning council and felt a sense of disinclusion.
That said, I also saw the wonderful work done by Danny Dumantey, where he took the goal, "have sufficient and well-managed fiscal resources that allows financial independence" and worked out very specific objectives to meet that target. Objectives were specific, operational, and measurable. At Alton Higashi has noted, some of the objectives that a small group of us cut and pasted from the Internet are simply not measurable, and some are simply off-topic.
Jonathan showed me a fist full of tactical plans, noting that only the academic units had yet to turn theirs in. Each was well done, and tied their goal to their specific objectives. I knew in an instant the academic side should be similar. I realized too, that goal one is probably not the right statement under which to run the whole academic wing of the college, but it is board approved and all we have to work with.
Bear in mind that under the old strategic plan, goals flowed into program level objectives very smoothly. We had strategic goals such as, "To provide a quality mathematical education for our students." We had dozens of these program level goals in our strategic plan, the academic wing was never reduced to serving a single goal.
The shift that I thought was supposed to occur was to convert goals such as, "To provide a quality mathematical education for our students" into a measurable student learning outcome format such as, "Students will be able to solve quantitative problems using mathematics." I thought we would move through the whole plan, update it, modify it, and convert all goals into measurable student learning outcomes.
Only this afternoon did I realize that the new goals for the new strategic plan are those approved by the board. I am too fond of being facetious, but the new goals do not mention any institutional commitment to reading, writing, or arithmetics. They make no direct or indirect reference to any academic subject. I feel strongly that our strategic plan should include academic subject area and skills goals.
And only this afternoon did I realize that our present approach will never flow into our program learning outcomes and that they ought to do so. That is, the idea was, I thought, that by having a system of course-program-institutional level learning outcomes, assessing at each level would generate information for feeding back into our strategic plan. There would be a cycle of planning-deploying-assessing where course level assessments would feed into program level assessments which would in turn feed into institutional assessments that would then be used to evaluate and modify the strategic plan.
I also realized that we were creating a new and parallel layer of assessment. We have yet to get a single program level assessment done, have written no institutional level student learning outcomes of which I am aware - let alone assessed them - and now we are writing a parallel set of objective which will have to be assessed.
What follows is solely my personal opinion. None of it is approved by anyone, it is meant as a sketch to illustrate what I think we should do with goal one, a path that I think of as a "grand unified theory" because it unifies our work on SLOs with the strategic plan effort. I am making up whole sections just as "filler" to try to illustrate what I think would create an assessable strategic plan that integrates with our program learning and course learning outcomes.
I am starting from the presumption that every academic program unit will have to "flow into" the strategic plan through goal one.
Thus, directly under goal one would be institutional learning outcomes. These do not, to the best of my knowledge exist, so I am inventing hypothetical ones off the top of my head to illustrate what I think we should do with goal one.
Goal one: Promote learning and teaching for student success and satisfaction.
| Objectives
(Institutional SLOs) |
Activities |
Who is
responsible |
Timeline |
Resources needed |
Assessment |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Students will
be able to communicate effectively in the English language through
writing and speaking. |
VPIA, Ac.
coodinators, division chairs |
||||
| Students will
be able to solve quantitative and logical problems. |
|||||
| Student will be
able to perform skills and operations useful to specific career tracks. |
|||||
| demonstrate knowledge of the history, culture, society, and politics of Micronesia |
The above objectives would then be mapped against program learning outcomes. Here again I am taking liberties and mapping only against selected program level outcomes.
| Students
will be able to: |
read accurately
and critically by asking pertinent questions about a text, by asking
assumptions and implications, and by evaluating ideas. |
demonstrate an
understanding of basic accounting principles by performing... |
demonstrate
delivery of the elementary school curriculum in English |
demonstrate
basic cultural literacy of the Micronesian region |
quantify and
analyze human life sciences and health problems |
| communicate
effectively in the English language through writing and speaking. |
• |
• | |||
| solve
quantitative and logical problems. |
• | ||||
| perform skills
and operations useful to specific career tracks. |
• | • | • | ||
| demonstrate
knowledge of the history, culture, society, and politics of Micronesia |
• |
Note that the last institutional level outcome might seem to be specific to the Micronesian studies program, but it is serviced by MS 150 for all students.
As we evaluate program level learning outcomes, we would, via the above matrix, also be evaluating institutional learning outcomes which would in turn evaluate the strategic goals of the college, or, apparently for us, evaluate goal one. This also makes more clear that the goals of the college are not just to promote learning and teaching, but for our students to be able to communicate, solve problems, think critically, and so forth.
This means that the "bottom end" or tactical sections of the academic areas of the strategic plan become the program learning outcomes. These program learning outcomes could in turn be gridded into an action grid, e.g.:
| Objectives
(Institutional SLOs) |
Activities |
Who is
primarily responsible |
Timeline |
Resources needed |
Assessment |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| read accurately and critically by asking pertinent questions about a text, by asking assumptions and implications, and by evaluating ideas. | Chair lang lit
in coordination with academic coordinators at state campuses |
||||
| demonstrate an understanding of basic accounting principles by performing... | Chair Business |
||||
| demonstrate delivery of the elementary school curriculum in English | Chair Education
in coordination with academic coordinators at state campuses |
||||
| quantify and analyze human life sciences and health problems | Chair natural
sciences and mathematics |
This structure would ensure that the strategic plan is aligned with the work being done on assessment and student learning outcomes. The strategic plan would be relevant to the day-to-work of the academic wing. And as the academic wing assesses their SLOs, then the strategic plan gets assessed all at the same time.
I feel rather strongly about the need to unify, because I see curriculum committee developing the following schizophrenic strategic plan implementation:
This is bound to dysfunction and collapse. The faculty will be assessing student learning, while curriculum and the institution will be looking for assessments of objectives that are not student learning outcomes. I would note that the fault is likely mine, I did not know that what we were doing was building out the strategic plan when I joined in the cut and paste effort in curriculum.
These ideas are my own. I personally would like to see curriculum work on building the connecting institutional learning outcomes that between goal one and the program learning outcomes. I am open to a suggested list of institutional student learning outcomes which would then become goal one's objectives.
I have to confess that I have lost all desire to work on the "cut and paste list" of eight objectives, I see any effort on it as creating yet another interesting piece of paper which will be deemed meaningless in a year or two. They are things everyone can agree are important, but it is rather unclear how to make some of them happen, how to assess them, and so forth. Some could be cleaned up and then listed under other goals. We have a goal "Invest in sufficient, qualified, and effective human resources." That goal could nicely accommodate "To support faculty with the necessary resources for professional development." Other objectives might find good homes under other goals.
- Dana
1 What I wrote to the smaller group, and have now moved on from in light of the above: Our objectives were selected via cut and paste. My "if I were a visiting commission team member" question would be, "How did you determine that these objectives were relevant to the goal? What data drove the decision? Are the targeted areas identified as institutional weaknesses by some institutional study?" The answer is we did not do any of the above. We cut and pasted things we found elsewhere. Call it a moment of hubris.
This concern that the objectives were irrelevant to the goal arose after looking at the graduation rate material. Clearly Jazmin and Mariana have programs that are succeeding wildly in terms of graduation rate. Therein lies data, information directly relevant to student success. For example, if we want to promote student success, then shouldn't we model on what Jazmin and Mariana have done?
Yet were any objectives modeled on these success stories? The objectives were just cut, paste, and select from the cut and paste list. I know I am probably being counterproductive, but we really have no proof that our objectives, if met, would somehow impact success rates as none are based in any extant facts. Wouldn't we need to know facts like why students aren't succeeding?
This is why objective's like #3 should be tossed - I see no evidence that those factors are impacting success rates. So "doing them better" will not necessarily improve success rates as they may never have been an impactor on success rates.
I am reminded that Ray left curriculum committee because he became convinced that the dormitory is a negative impact on learning and he wanted to join a committee that worked with the dormitory. He felt he could promote learning by improving the dormitories. Yet none of our objectives come anywhere near the dormitory issue.
I feel like that one scene in Spiderman where the scientist tells the general that the whole line should be taken back to scratch. For which the scientist gets killed by the administration. But our objectives should be driven by actual and not perceived needs.
Which then makes all the comments rather superfluous - just discussions held in a vacuum bottle without provable relevance to success.
Objective one notes that we need to strengthen support... but has a lack of support been identified as a problem? In developmental mathematics we have evidence of a gap between MS 098 and MS 100, and we have learned that MS 090 now almost completely overlaps and is redundant to MS 095, so we are meeting on Friday to try to resolve these two matters and thereby improve the math developmental program. No one, however, is citing a lack of support as a problem - or that student learning skills deficits are the heart of the problem.
Before we applied for SSSP, I had hoped that the grant would mark the start of a broad and inclusive tutoring program for all students at the college. I was personally saddened to see that it would only serve a limited number of students. Every term when midterm deficiencies come out some faculty bemoan the lack of a broadly based tutoring program. With 69% deficient this term, we need something that serves 620 students, not just the 100+ SSSP serves.
There are faculty who want to see more done with tutoring, and languages and literature has stepped up to the plate with the writing center. Maybe with additional personnel, for example, a math center could be developed, although finding the space might be problematic. Still, that might be an objective that makes data driven sense.