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 groups (transcript, advising, curriculum) that met at the end of our previous week. The notes below reflect the discussions that took place during Friday afternoon of the first week and Monday afternoon.

Joe reported for the TRANSCRIPT group. His group started from the assumption that the six expectations are a good reflection of what we want to be reflected in the transcript.

We finished our work today with six items on our “to do” list for week 2:

1)   Support opportunities for the faculty in general to read and reflect on transcripts.

2)   Work on model transcripts showing good practices, as well as “status quo transcripts” to use for faculty analysis and reflection.

3)   Articulate the differences between the “new format” transcript and the cumulative portfolio, including their different structures, audiences, uses and motivations.

4)   Collect ideas about how transcripts serve the needs of different campuses and programs, and of different kinds of students.

5)   Inform ourselves about current policies, practices and initiatives elsewhere at the college regarding transcripts/evaluations.

6)   Decide whether to recommend making specific transcript features mandatory (e.g. summative self-eval.)

We also need to share ideas with the Advising Working Group on ways to use improved advising to support student work on improved transcripts.

Here are additional details I noted about our discussion of each of these items:

1) Support opportunities for the faculty in general to read and reflect on transcripts.

Nancy Murray has already set aside time at the faculty retreat in Sept. for this, so we should collaborate with her in structuring and promoting this activity. We can anticipate some faculty resistance to the idea of reading and making judgments about (critiquing) one another’s evaluations, in spite of the fact that this is common practice in 5 year reviews, new faculty orientation, etc. We should prepare clear explanations about why student identities are so carefully protected while faculty identities are not.

2) Work on model transcripts showing good practices, as well as “status quo transcripts” to use for faculty analysis and reflection.

Model transcripts could illustrate faculty evaluations that focused on the Six Expectations, using the “anchor points” Laura C. developed. They could contain examples of summative, mid-career, and/or milestone evaluations, evaluations of “capstone” experiences or culminating projects, and “umbrella evaluations” for students who took multiple courses, modules or contracts during a particular quarter or year.  We should aim to demonstrate how shorter, well-structured transcripts with strong student voice and visible reflection of the Six Expectations could serve student and college purposed better than many current transcripts do.

Besides the currently used random and redacted transcripts, do we want to gather some transcripts from especially successful alums? Might we want to construct some composite transcripts to illustrate specific kinds of serious problems without compromising the identities of individual faculty or students?

We should look carefully at the model evaluations that are currently being used by Academic Advising and the Writing Center to coach students on writing self-evals.      We should also consult colleagues who have taught classes on writing summative evals.

3) Articulate the differences between the “new format” transcript and the cumulative portfolio, including their different structures, audiences, uses and motivations.

Recognizing that evaluations have been used to serve two conflicting roles—a) reflecting on and consolidating learning and b) communicating student performance to an external audience—we talked about having the transcript structured explicitly for the external audience while encouraging (requiring?) students to keep a portfolio with reflective writing, work samples, and other items, specifically geared to the ongoing task of “taking responsibility for their own learning.” The portfolio might contain their updated academic plan,  “shadow evaluations”, some kind of cover sheet with specific advising prompts (e.g. about culminating projects, internships, prerequisites, endorsements, as well as sequential academic skill building in different fields, and some “depth” and “breadth” markers).

4) Collect ideas about how transcripts serve the needs of different campuses and programs, and of different kinds of students.

In our discussions we have learned that needs and practices around transcripts vary among the different programs and campuses of Evergreen. In thinking about how to improve our transcripts we need to build in flexibility for accommodating these various needs and practices.

5) Inform ourselves about current policies, practices and initiatives elsewhere at the college regarding transcripts/evaluations.

We should review the report of the Narrative Evaluation DTF and learn from its recommendations and how it has been received and implemented (or not). We should meet with Andrea and/or Elaine from Registration to discuss current policies, practices and challenges with transcripts.

Some questions to address:

  • When and how can components of the transcript currently be changed?
  • How many of our graduates actually end up requesting transcripts?
  • What impact have the summative eval. classes and policy had?
  • Can students get “review copies” of their transcripts for advising purposes w/o paying a fee?
  • Will any of our suggestions cause problems for Registration?
  • What is the policy about self-evals (for transcripts vs. in-house)?

6) Decide whether to recommend making specific transcript features mandatory (e.g. summative self-eval.)

With each of these ideas there’s the challenge of getting buy-in. To what extent can these become part of the culture because people see their benefits, and to what extent do they need some “teeth” to get rolling?

One more task came up in the ensuing discussion—to explore alternate models of transcripts by “translating” an existing transcript into several other formats and evaluating their strengths and weaknesses. Some other questions that emerged: what are the factors discouraging students submitting self-evaluation and how can these be addressed?

The group had an extensive, fruitful discussion with Andrea Coker-Anderson in the afternoon. They shared many details about the policies and practices related to transcripts that helped them assess the practicality of their ideas. A few highlights. Faculty often give poor advice to students about transcripts because they don’t know the current policies and practices—we need to improve the education of faculty on this score. The registrar’s office is often placed in the position of assessing summative self-evaluations to determine whether they are actually summative. And…in response to a question about how evaluations have changed in the wake of the Narrative Evaluation DTF five years ago…Andrea reported that evaluations have gotten shorter but program descriptions have not (even though the DTF recommended that both elements get shorter).

Ulrike reported for the ADVISING group. After much discussion, we decided that being prescriptive in terms of advising was not going to work well at Evergreen. Instead, we thought that giving students, faculty, and staff various ways of meeting expectations would be best. An example of what this might look like can be seen below:

Problems/ opportunities solutions implementation
Transcript readability educating faculty on the curriculum Critical junctures
Communication Peer educators Funded internships
Meaningful student

autonomy

Designated faculty advisors in Pus (maybe the PUCs?)
Dissemination of information Integrate into curriculum/ winter academic planning
Required summative evaluation
Academic plan(ning)

The different opportunities open to students might include:

Options:

1. Taking a program that includes advising (explicitly stated in its program description)

2. Meet with advising staff

3. Non-program faculty sign-off

4. Peer advisor sign-off

5. 2-credit advising course

Kevin shared the key concerns discussed in CURRICULUM group.

1)   Breadth. How do we ensure that students get adequate breadth and integration of knowledge? And how do we want to define breadth in a way that satisfies our own pedagogical values and external parties (e.g. accreditors)? We were surprised by some of Laura Caughlin’s numbers about the low number of interdivisional programs based on the end-of-program reviews. (We plan to have a longer discussion with her about the numbers.)

2)   Individual Contracts. Too many poorly conceived contracts seem to happen as the result of poor planning and communication—e.g. student come with the impression that they can study and receive credit for anything, managerial problems result in too few seats in existing programs, etc.

3)   How do we make sure that our claims for what we accomplish with our curriculum and pedagogy resemble what we actually accomplish? Julie Suchanek raised this concern in the context of explaining Evergreen and lobbying for Evergreen in the legislature.

We met with the curriculum deans to hear about their concerns and to share our current thinking. We decided to focus on the following questions: How well does our curriculum work to help students meet the six expectations? (esp quantitative, qualitative, creative) Where does it work well? Where does it fall short? What are the ways that we can improve—in terms of (1) curricular design and planning (2) graduation requirements or required documentation of expectations. We also identified some key texts to improve our understanding of previous work at Evergreen on general education, curricular visions, and institutional history. We decided we want to…think seriously about graduation requirements; think seriously about systemic curricular planning (with or without requirements); and look at transcripts of students that we think meet the six expectations, and see whether there are patterns about the kind of courses/curriculum that they took to accomplish them.

At the end of the day, Elizabeth proposed that the “connective tissue” between the three focal points might be found in what we are calling “critical junctures”: i.e., designated points in each student’s academic career where some responsibility is taken by the student for their career. All related to the First Expectation: assuming responsibility for their work.