SCT

Success College Team

Update

November 15, 2001

The purpose of this Update and subsequent monthly updates is to give the campus community a glimpse of what the various Success College teams are doing and to invite comments and participation.  The Update will be posted on the SACS Self Study homepage on the Internet as well as the Intranet.  That, by the way, is the first bit of news about Success College and the whole Self-Study: we have an Internet presence.  You can go from the BHC homepage to "S" on the menu and click on "SACS Self-Study" and you’ll find a page with links to the Self-Study proposal, the Self-Study Manual, and other documents and sites.  Thanks to Valli Viswanathan, Alice Swenson, and Monica Taliaferro for their efforts.

Team Activities

The main thrusts of Success College this fall have been handled by Threads III and IV.  Thread III is the one charged with looking broadly at student goal setting.  Thread IV has the task of examining College processes, services, and courses.

Thread III has focused on a questionnaire on "Education Goals" to be linked to the Student Success Information System (SSIS).  It will be administered this registration to all new-to-college students going through orientation.  The questionnaire is flexible and subject to tweaking but seems clear and easy to fill out and useful for advisors.

Next semester, in addition to working with results from the questionnaire, Team III will look in two new directions: goal setting for students and capturing student exit responses to help us see whether students are achieving their goals.

Thread IV has had a number of big projects this semester.  First came the Plus/Delta meetings on the registration process.  From those meetings came a questionnaire on the design of the printed registration schedule.  It is being administered to students, faculty, and staff.  Results of the questionnaire should lead to recommendations for improving the usefulness to students of the class schedule. 

In addition, Team IV has created a new questionnaire to be administered during registration to students to solicit comments on customer service for students concerning a wide range of offices.

Beginning soon, there will be a sub-team of Team IV to look at the faculty part of Success College.  This initiative is an opportunity for faculty to look at new ways of putting student success at the center of decisions about curriculum, scheduling, and instruction.

Thread V is looking at ways of communicating with students to enhance student success.  The team is looking in two directions: SSIS which is piloting this fall and the district IT Communications General Design Committee which Claude Caffee and Mike Hamm serve on.  It remains to be seen just what comes of both efforts, but there are likely to be a whole variety of ways of communicating with students with information related to student success, including using E-Campus.

Thread II is working on professional development.  The team has agreed that much of their work will spin off from other Thread Teams-helping design professional development activities to carry out recommendations from the other teams.  They will also begin working on professional development on goal setting-that is, helping faculty and staff work with students on goal setting

Success Conversations

We have begun a series of Conversations about Success.  The next one will come out soon.  Everyone is invited to participate in them by replying "to all." 

A New Paradigm

One topic which has come up in our conversations on the Success College Team is the natural sensitivity we all feel when our work is being examined.  Team IV will soon be looking at most of S-building with an eye toward improving the way we serve students.  It is the SCT’s job to be sensitive to how uncomfortable this kind of scrutiny makes all of us, and we’ll try to make the process productive and not threatening.

In a way, what is needed is a new paradigm (or model, if "paradigm" is too pretentious) for self-evaluation.  Rather than take the traditional view that evaluation is necessarily threatening and that the best response to being evaluated is to find ways of making ourselves look good, we need, I think, to see program and process evaluation as an opportunity to see things as they really are, to get help in figuring out how to do them better, and to gather support for making necessary changes.   Of course, I know it is easier for me to say that about your program than to accept it about my courses.  Some evaluation, to be sure, is threatening.  It seems natural to fend off the Coordinating Board and even SACS, but Success College is not that kind of enterprise.  No one is out to get anyone; no one’s livelihood is threatened.  Instead, the basis of the new paradigm is that we are all in this together: Brookhaven-the Success College-belongs to all of us.

In that spirit, let me invite everyone in the Brookhaven community to let the Success College Team know when we have overstepped a boundary or taken a misstep.  We might not like it, but we’ll deal with it.

Ed Garcia