An Eye to the Future

Joe Tougas, Kevin Francis, Ulrike Krotscheck After a week-long break, Nancy Murray presented her plan for the second week—to work in the groups we established at the end of the first week to develop specific proposals that address some of the problems that emerged in our discussions. We began with reports from each of the […]

I’ll only add a few clarifying details to Elizabeth’s excellent summary of Friday’s work. The key task we accomplished, of course, was the formation of three working groups: Advising, Curriculum, and Transcripts. That structural division was framed to reflect many of the ideas and perspectives we had been seeing together earlier in the week: -The […]

We began the Friday session with a report from Nancy Murray on her adventures with downed trees and power outages — clearly the gods are telling Nancy to stop taking work home with her. Citing some members’ concerns about the amount of processing that took place during days 1-4, Nancy  reassured us that we would […]

Well, it’s not really a manifesto- just a forceful statement of observation. I may retract this whole evaluation later. You never know. I didn’t really get to state these opinions in our meetings today- I was figuring it out all day and finally managed to put it together in the car on the ride home. […]

Mr. Pickles?! The mystery of the image, the story, the punch line: a student did not receive academic credit simply for coming to class. When she complained that she deserved credit simply because she attended each day, she was told that showing up isn’t enough. To emphasize the point, the faculty told her that Mr. […]

Our first day of meeting began with discussion of procedure and the creation of the blog. We then read two documents, the M&M II Manifesto and Youtz’s piece. We reconvened and discussed the documents in small groups. I found it interesting that some issues identified as problems in these early documents are still problems. A […]

This is what I noticed about day two: On day two of the institute, we started with a review of the findings by the transcript-reading institute conducted earlier this summer. That institute used the Six Expectations of an Evergreen Graduate as the foundation to develop a coding rubric for the assessment of transcripts from the […]

Day 3 started with a continuation of report back from groups synthesizing what we found important and what we thought needed changes (structural or otherwise) or enhancements of old practices and fairly new practices. Ideas, questions and discussion topics include: Need to  allocate time for faculty advising students; importance of students focus and development of […]

At nearly the end of the first week, it seemed appropriate to revisit why we are here. If you look back at the first day, we came here with a variety of ideas as to what we were going to do (to say the least!). The first week we hope that bubbling up to the […]