It is the end of another academic year, and as we move through award ceremonies, research presentations, and finally commencement, I take the time to look at my to-do list from last fall. It is a bit deflating to see all of the things I didn’t complete. I expect some of this to happen, after all, not all of my plans were good ones. A few things actually got done, some were re-imagined, a few were abandoned, and some just didn’t get the attention they needed to come to fruition. It isn’t all bad, but I confess to being a bit disappointed in myself.
Then I remember, higher education is designed to slow the pace of change. While we are great places for advancing knowledge (yes, new discoveries and inventions do come from higher education), we are best at slow deliberation. We analyze cultural patterns large and small and try to see them in context, rather than jumping to conclusions. We look at small changes in forecasting models for weather or economics, tweaking them slightly each year to get closer to a better predictor, and then analyze the results of those changes. We reflect upon the past to try to divine how we got to this moment. Change is not something we’re avoiding, it is something we’re vetting.
So here I am, an academic with an administrative role. I understand the care with which my colleagues approach change and I share their suspicions about the innovation of the week. The brakes they are putting on in the form of more questions, more input, more research are justified. However, I also spend my time looking at the whole organization and the whole student experience, and I see patterns of successes and failures that are calling for us to move a little faster. I feel the push/pull of the deliberative mindset and the urgency of responding to areas for improvement.
Take, for example, the way this generation of learners is coming to us. It is well-documented that their experience of reading is very different from that of the generations before them. (See “The Fall and Rise of Reading” by Steven Johnson in the Chronicle of Higher Education). It isn’t that students can’t read, it’s just that they really haven’t had to grapple with critical reading. The books read and tests taken prior to coming to college are all about short forms, summaries, and highlights. And of course, there’s the endless interaction on the Internet to reduce the time spent with texts. Reflective reading of long form texts is just not what they are used to doing. We know this to be true, yet we haven’t reviewed the literature on how to teach critical reading, and then incorporate into our classes.
Maybe we think this isn’t our job. High school was supposed to do it, so just pile on the readings and the students will get it eventually. But they don’t. We have to adjust our teaching strategies, and quickly, because we’re losing too many to this gap in skills. Even worse, we are diminishing the conversations we’re having in our classes because we’re not really expecting students to do the reading anymore. This is a terrible spiral, but the good news is we can stop it from happening. But we have to act, and sooner rather than later.
And then there is the issue that really made me sigh this morning. After repeated reports on who struggles to succeed at my university, I concluded that the at-risk group is any student who had less than an 85 average in high school. I learned this two years ago and started a conversation about advising strategies to address the at-risk group. At that time, I used the words “intrusive advising” which is a term found in much of the advising literature. Several of my colleagues objected to the term, so we moved to the idea of enhanced advising. I brought together a group to develop a protocol and nothing happened.
Then I appointed some faculty members to investigate ways that we might develop an advising protocol for those students. Like all good faculty members, they went out and talked to their peers. While they found out a few good things about how to support faculty as advisors (and I will work to support those findings), in reality, enhanced advising was set aside in favor of better advising for all. This is a good idea, but it will take too long to identify and scale those improvements. Meanwhile, those at-risk students are left with no direct support.
I just got an updated report on at-risk students and it is still students who earned less than an 85 average in high school. The difference in retention rates for this group is at least 10% lower than those at 85 or above, and the differences in graduation rates are even more stark. And there’s plenty of literature about how to support these students, so, I’m feeling an urgency.
So, I’m left pondering ways to balance the deliberation with the urgency. I do respect the reflective and thoughtful nature of my colleagues, but when I keep the larger patterns of student success (or lack thereof) in view, the pace of change is just too slow. I’m going to have to find a better balance, a better way to move the deliberation along just a little faster. Because, what I don’t want to do is have this on the unfinished list again next year.
