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 capstone projects; development of concrete  ways to integrate the 6 expectations of TESC  in our teaching and learning (remembering that not all programs have to address all expectations);  importance of  student completing summative self evaluations for their transcript; possibility of either or both a portfolio or eportfoliio (reservation based program eportfolio model was discussed); attention to faculty overload in whatever changes are suggested; importance of developing processes where faculty wide agreement to changes or discussions can happen;  importance of negotiating through possible tension that oftentimes comes from change;  discussion on how to enhance faculty evaluations with honest constructive feedback.

Concerns: Be careful that we do not create practices that are too rigid or mechanical.  Look at transcripts that we see have problems and develop methods on how to make them public to popularize lessons to learn not to expose or embarrass.  Also the importance of developing mechanisms on how and who we want to hear from about these problems: faculty, peers, deans, students?  Importance of communication and coherency in writing evaluations as examples of synthetic teaching; (some are 7 pages long).  Language in course equivalencies also needs to be examined.  What does “advanced” studies in blah blah blah really mean?  Should we emphasize that all students take at least one year of CSP?  Develop mechanisms to have quantitative reasoning and art across the curriculum grant possibilities to help in this effort.  How do we or should we have transcripts available for a variety of styles etc. so that the students and faculty will have examples etc. Concern for the possibility of faculty individualism and collaboration as rhetoric

Questions:  How is Evergreen innovative and what is our identity? Do we need a course/workshop on writing evaluations? What are our values? How and where does the college stand in relation to student and world?  What about processes that are innovative eg. Is seminar innovative?  What are our innovations and what maintains this characteristic? If we are innovative then do we need to constantly respond to the world.   What is a Liberal Arts education?

After lunch discussion on:
What do we value as an institution?  What is best for students? Reading for this session “Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities”

peace

gilda