Improving teaching and learning through shared governance: Creating a culture of inquiry, collaboration, and collegiality

This roundtable discussion will engage participants in a case study analysis of two liberal arts institutions where the faculty governance committee responsibly for student outcomes assessment and disciplinary program review has effectively worked with the Provost and the Director of Academic Assessment to dramatically improve the policies, procedures, and practices of continuously improving pedagogy and curricula. Participants will be guided through discussions and exercises to consider how they can bring lessons learned back to their respective campuses to improve shared governance and, consequently, their teaching and learning process

Strengthening the Culture of Assessment through Faculty Development and Shared Governance

This 75-minute interactive workshop engages participants in a case study of two colleges and their efforts to expand and strengthen faculty assessment activities. A grant from the Teagle Foundation and on-campus conversations between faculty members and the administration have lead to dramatic improvements in the policies, procedures, and practices of assessment

Creating a Cadre of Assessment Gurus (at Your Institution)

This article is a case study based on the efforts of two colleges to expand and strengthen faculty and staff assessment activities; it is also a road map for you and your institution to create a cadre of assessment gurus. Although we received a grant from the Teagle Foundation that led to a series of formal on-campus Assessment 101 workshops for faculty and staff, we suggest that your institution can create similar, highly successful assessment training workshops that are budget sensitive. At the end of this training, your newly minted assessment gurus will help themselves and their colleagues use assessment evidence to improve teaching and learning both inside and outside the classroom

Indicators of faculty quality and the relationships of personal and environmental attributes upon teaching, scholarship, research, and service.

Two challenges that currently face higher education are the need to identify appropriate indicators of quality that can differentiate teaching dominated institutions and the need to better understand how personal and environmental attributes affect individual faculty performance. Liberal arts and comprehensive colleges were used in this study. A set of scales capturing major activities faculty engage in when performing their research, pedagogical, and service roles was constructed. These scales were included in the 1988 Faculty at Work survey conducted by the National Center for Research to Improve Postsecondary Teaching and Learning. Scales were related to current external institutional measures of quality. Regression analyses were run to identify personal and environmental predictors of performance. The liberal arts and comprehensive colleges could be differentiated by research scores, not by teaching measures. This finding reaffirms the research on indicators of quality in the higher education literature. It suggests teaching is a universal role even if emphases and rewards are different. Descriptive differences between high and low groups were established between beliefs, valued attributes, views about instruction, and effort given to professorial activities and teaching. However, in regard to teaching, z-tests identified few significant differences between the groups. Using regression analyses, the identification of isolated teaching predictors for both the liberal arts and the comprehensive colleges' populations was minimally successful. The identification of scholarship and research predictors for both populations was more successful. Scholarship/research skills characteristic of the respondents of both the high and low groups using both types of institutions is the factor that best predicts scholarship and research scores. This common finding implies that self-competence is a significant predictor of scholarship and research regardless of the type of institutional affiliation. A small difference between types of institutions was detected in regard to the number of significant personal and environmental predictors. In the liberal arts colleges' groups, the results support both viewpoints in the higher education literature (Tuckman and McKeachie); in the comprehensive colleges, there is more support for McKeachie's theory that faculty performance is motivated by intrinsic reasons.Ph.D.University of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/103094/1/9303761.pdfDescription of 9303761.pdf : Restricted to UM users only

SJU Class of 2015 Commencement Celebration

May 10, 2015 One-Hundred and Fifty-Eighth Year Abbey & University Church Saint John\u27s University Dr. Robert H. Dumonceaux was the guest speaker and Luke Newgaard was the student speaker

SJU Class of 2005 Comencement Celebration

May 8, 2005 One-Hundred Forty-Eighth Year Abbey & University Church Saint John\u27s University Mr. Charles M. Denny, Jr. was the guest speaker and Andrew Dirksen was the student speaker

SJU Class of 2009 Commencement Celebration

May 10, 2009 One-Hundred Fifty-Second Year Abbey & University Church Saint John\u27s University Dr. Sharon Daloz Parks was the guest speaker and Joe Kane was the student speaker

CSB Class of 2003 Commencement Celebration

May 10, 2003 The Eighty-Eighth Year HCC Fieldhouse College of Saint Benedict Kathleen Hall Jaimeson, Ph. D. was the guest speaker and Karolanne Hoffman was the student speaker

CSB Class of 2009 Commencement Celebration

May 9, 2009 The Ninety-Fourth Year HCC Fieldhouse College of Saint Benedict Belinda Jensen was the guest speaker and Andrea Carrow was the student speaker