College Guide
Blog
(4) At the same time, demand from each chancellor, also within a year, the quality assurance program his campus will implement that leads his whole campus to continuous increase in student learning. Not the teaching practices he will urge faculty to use; not hiring staff teaching coaches; not doubling up on student teaching evaluations: a quality assurance program that a middle manager at, say, Toyota would recognize. Quality assurance means watching each other work, looking at our product (student learning) from a few different angles, trying different ways of doing the job, and talking about what we see. Quality assurance is not done to the production workers by a quality czar or consultants: it has to be done by the faculty and pervasively (of course expert coaching can add a lot of value).
Have a statewide annual conference, open to press and public, in which the chancellors (not their ‘deputy assistant vice provosts for teaching quality’!) present their respective QA programs’ current evolutionary state, and demand from each of them within two months the three best ideas he has found in the other campuses’ programs that he will incorporate in his own going forward.
(5) Use all the discretionary funds at your disposal to enforce and encourage these initiatives. Kick butt. And make it clear that (2) and (4) are not projects but programs: ongoing, permanent parts of campus management. You cannot persuasively advocate for us until we can show that we are actively getting better and better at what we do, and that we understand that what we do has to be justified not by our own evaluation, but by the value it creates for the citizens who pay us to do it.
[Cross-posted at The Reality-based Community]
Facebook
Twitter
Comments
(You may use HTML tags for style)
comments powered by Disqus