Kelly in Kansas

The debate continues - how to effective implement assessment of student learning. This Chronicle of Higher Ed news item explains explains another "new call" for assessment at the college and university levels. Although outgoing Secretary of Education Spellings (and, apparently maybe sooner rather than later) tried to issue this call, there was enough "movement" from the usual crowds to go around it - at least for now.

Ultimately, the accountability measurements (data, data, data) that was first utilized in the business world will be inside our house and not just on our doorsteps. As I asked our dean earlier this semester, "So, isn't all the data and analysis that is downstairs (we're in the main administration building) in the institutional research office something we can no longer ignore and something we will have to start dealing with more effectively?"

I think it surprised my dean that I was this aware. On the other hand, I'm not sure how many of my colleagues understood what I really meant. More than one has spent a career fighting _against_ anything from outside the department (and sometimes within :-) ).

If you follow the comments on the first Chronicle article above, you'll see the usual back and forth between administrator view and faculty view. The reality is somewhere in the middle. And, as I've believed for over a decade, if we as faculty do not get a handle on this, we will be told what handle to hang on to as we go along for the ride to meet the demands of more accountability to the outside world. Sadly, some of our colleagues at institutions with the resources to actually accomplish this, continue in large part to ignore it given their major emphasis on discipline research and not on the larger world of our responsibility to taxpayers, parents, and students. And, some of what happens in the world of teacher education is workable but not necessarily all of it.

Of course, more thoughts are brewing but it's time to get some grading done.

Labels: administrators, assessment, faculty, politics, student learning

Dean Dad has an interesting question about what students expect from faculty and faculty's other demands. My response which is just the tip of the iceberg of a longer post follows:

As a faculty member who's been involved in both North Central re-accreditation and NCATE (teacher ed) re-accreditation, I have seen it so overwhelm faculty that it prevents them from doing the other parts of their job while it is going on. Depending on how often that is determines whether it is a good or bad thing.

The most challenging aspect was the resentment of other faculty who didn't want anything to do with it toward those who believed it was part of what they had to do - esp. to keep a particular program viable in the age of budget cuts. There are still too many within higher education (primarily faculty) who think, "I have tenure, I know what I need to do" without understanding we do need to at least keep some binoculars handy to keep an eye on what is going on in the rest of the world - esp. the world we are preparing students to enter that is much different than the world in which we were students.

Sherm makes an excellent point about accountability and it would be interesting if another read can place current events within the historical framework for us.

There's also another interesting point - in some cases (and definitely not in others), having Grad Student or Adjunct X teach a course gets more actual teaching done than is automatically done by a group of professors - esp. those who see teaching as the least of their responsibilities. As usual, a whole multitude of issues in the question asked

Labels: accreditation, Dean Dad, faculty, NCA, NCATE, North Central, teacher education, teaching