Tag: Community

Dialogue, Engagement

Community Hour

Missy Alexander

Last week I spent the morning with a group of colleagues, mostly from outside of academic affairs. I had reached out to folks in academic advising, student affairs, admissions, athletics, and career services (they’ve just moved to academic affairs) to help me think about how we might weave together some shared goals. There were just a few faculty members and the academic deans for this conversation, mostly because I wanted to expand my thinking and I needed this group’s help with this. The discussion prompts were essentially, 1. How do your areas align with the university learning outcomes, and 2. How might we work together to build an organized plan to achieve those goals with contributions from all areas of the university? The conversation did not disappoint.

Much of this conversation happened without my participation. I left for another meeting and returned to check in after about ninety minutes. I had thought to regroup, but they were still busy discussing the ideas at hand, so I waited for the final report out at the end. There were lots of important observations about how communication occurs with our students and with each other, how we do or do not connect across areas, and, of course, that we should revise those newly approved university learning outcomes. Like emerging observations in our NECHE accreditation report (being overseen by a different group), there was a keen interest in revising our mission. Interestingly, the drivers for why it should be revised were very different. That was a great “aha” for me. Then the folks in the room asked to meet again. For three hours again! And perhaps continuing on a regular basis for the rest of the term.

As the folks in the room continued to talk, I agreed to schedule the next meeting and suggested that I would add a few more representatives from the faculty. This led me to a bigger puzzle, how do I foster these conversations everywhere? I have a meeting with department chairs this week and we will engage a piece of what this group did last week. The Steering Committee for our NECHE report will be meeting in another week and I hope that they will help to facilitate related conversations as we bring our report out for comment. Our University Senate meets next week, and I will provide updates on new programs, our accreditation report, and I will start a conversation about mission. These are the normal steps, moving through governance meetings, divisional meetings, and so on. These practices allow me to start conversations and try to keep folks in the loop, but they don’t always (often) lead to continued action or engagement.

At some point we are likely to decide to have a retreat, which is great for some of this work, but I’m not sure it really gets us to the heart of what we really need. Having run many retreats over the years, in good times and tough times, they don’t seem to foster the intended inclusivity that they are designed to create. No matter how many ways I try to cluster people in smaller and larger groupings, when we get to reporting out, it is clear that not all perspectives make it to the summaries. The process of reporting out stimulates an attempt to find consensus, and as great as that is, dissenting ideas disappear. Or maybe I’m wrong about this, but this is only part of why I am not seeing this approach is an obvious next step for thinking about our university mission and outcomes right now. The real reason is that Friday’s conversation made it clear to me that we are aching for community.

It is always a struggle to engage our colleagues outside of official meetings. The demands of our varied roles are pressing, and we prioritize our efforts there. We have families and things outside of work that we care about, and they, too, are prioritized. We find ourselves coming to work, doing our jobs and going home (often to continue doing our jobs), without much casual interaction. Making time to connect with each other and really learn from and about each other is usually the bottom of the list. Then we start feeling less connected, less respected, less seen, and less happy. It is a lonely experience to say the least.

Since last Friday’s conversation, I’ve really been puzzling through ways to address this. As great and open as that conversation was (and it will continue), I think it is in the less formal but more consistent conversations that we build understanding of our peers, students, and the perspectives that come with each person’s area of expertise and experiences. It is through the routine interactions that we build community and it is there that the opportunity to really have a shared vision can emerge. I think this is what we are all craving.

So, here’s where I’ve landed so far. I’m not looking to establish a common hour because folks will just schedule meetings in those time slots. We need some common hours for activities, but they won’t help solve the community problem. Instead, I am proposing community hours. I am not going to schedule them, but we all need to to do so. These will be time slots that we put on our calendars to have coffee, tea, or whatever with a colleague. I recommend that we block out a couple of hours each week, but starting with one will do. Schedule it now so it doesn’t get absorbed by something else. Then just start sending invitations. Sometimes it might be with someone in your department so you can deepen your understanding of an idea, or just relax together with no pressure to solve anything. But most of the time, we should reach out to people from other areas – students, faculty, staff, administrators – and get to know each other.

This is a small, and maybe silly, thing, but I suspect it will do a world of good for us. Maybe it will help us solve big problems or move new ideas forward. Maybe it will uncover barriers to success or new opportunities to create together. That would be awesome. But most of all, I hope it will help us build a true sense of we. When that happens, the mission will be obvious.

Higher Education, Reflection

The Power of Collaboration

Missy Alexander

Universities and colleges are frequently (and accurately) accused of living in silos. From external accusations of ivory tower thinking to internal challenges to interdisciplinary or cross-divisional collaboration, we struggle to move ideas forward with any kind of unity of purpose. Even as we work together to agree on missions, visions, values, and strategic plans, the coordination of efforts can be elusive. There are good reasons for this: We are a culture of experts.

To start, every single faculty member is an expert in their discipline. Our doctoral degrees and their equivalents (MFAs, for example) are designed to build a depth of knowledge that no one without that advanced educational experience can possess. That depth of knowledge helps us see the world through our disciplinary lenses and forms the basis for how degrees are organized. At the same time, each of us engaged our discipline from the perspectives of our graduate institutions, and ultimately from the perspective we developed in our dissertations. These differences in perspectives can be wonderful, opening the door to research collaborations or exposing our students to deep debates in the field. They can also be the source of petty feuds.

We do honor some parallel experiences in professional fields because they are meaningful and often beneficial. We may recruit a successful artist, journalist, or nurse practitioner without a doctoral degree because we are committed to connecting what we teach to the world beyond the academy. Enriching our faculty in this way can lead to new approaches to teaching, new connections with the external community, and an increased sense of relevance in the material for our students. It can also be a source of disagreement about meaningful research or other university expectations that are largely defined by folks who have gone the academic rather than professional route to teaching. In other words, even within departments with shared expertise, there are real differences in ideas about what is important.

Universities are also made up of experts in student affairs. Leadership in these areas have advanced degrees from a variety of fields. Whether they focused on advising practices, socio-emotional development of students, approaches to academic support, or fostering student engagement, each one brings specialized knowledge and expertise to their areas. Just like faculty, student affairs personnel attend conferences to learn about emerging trends and interesting innovations. Their knowledge is an important part of student success at a university. Whether connecting students to the help they need at any point in their undergraduate or graduate experience, developing great activities and events to support a vibrate campus environment, or facilitating transitions into and out of the university, student affairs can be a wonderful partner to academic affairs. Or it could be left on its “side” of the university, without the opportunity to fully develop strategic priorities in partnership with academic affairs.

There are also professionals in admissions, registration, and financial aid. The specialized knowledge of this group is essential for the health of the university. They are charged with managing the intricacies of system, state, and federal regulations. They rely on input from academic and student affairs to maintain compliance with these regulations. They also identify local policy problems that trip up our students, keeping them from enrolling or graduating. This group has to keep a close eye on changes in academic programs in ways that faculty do not see. They are aware of internal logic problems (like inconsistent prerequisites) and external barriers to new programs like regulations about certificates vs. degrees. This group is incredibly important to the success of the university and can be a fount of information as we develop new programs, revise existing programs, or plan our student support strategies. Or they can be left out of the planning and asked to clean things up after the fact.

I could continue and remind everyone of the importance of the experts in facilities, information technology, human resources, and finance and administration, and so on. Every one of them matters in every decision we make. They need to be included in the development of strategic plans, to be sure, and they usually are. It is the coordination after the plan that is the rub.

The trouble with all the expertise is that it often keeps us from being good collaborators. To our credit, we are a culture with a penchant for individual initiative and problem solving. This inspires us to move forward on ideas that are immediately concerning or interesting, without looking at how it integrates with the whole. We tend to do our homework, planning from our specialized perspectives, which speaks well of our work-ethic. Unfortunately, it often leads to the duplication of efforts (at best) and undermining of efforts (at worst). It also tends to leave out important perspectives because, in our rush to solve a problem or move an interesting idea forward, we forget that our colleagues with complementary or just plain different expertise are there.

I love the diverse group of experts that shape universities. As provost, I am lucky to interact regularly with colleagues in every department and I learn from every single conversation. Over the years, I have tried to connect people across disciplines and divisions, with some successes. But it has not been enough. We are still operating in silos and they have outlived their usefulness.

There is plenty of evidence that supporting students requires collaboration across disciplines and divisions. From emergency funding to problematic course sequences to planning co-curricular activities, shared understandings, ideas, and interventions are the best way to create great educational experiences and improve outcomes. Sharing ideas and aligning strategies can help us avoid duplication of efforts and keep us from developing initiatives that end up cancelling each other out. It can also help us better understand how the ideas and expertise of our colleagues can inform and improve our own ideas and expertise. There is power in collaboration and coordination of efforts. It is time to re-imagine our processes so that the power of collaboration can be harnessed for a better future.

Community

Belonging

Missy Alexander

It is late August and we are all gearing up for another year. Students will join us on Friday, classes will start next Monday, and I am sure that faculty are putting finishing touches on their syllabi. It’s that exhilarating rush of new beginnings and the optimism that comes from the chance to start fresh every fall.

There has not been much downtime for us at WCSU this summer. We have been collaborating on projects that we hope will re-shape our future. I am grateful for all of the hard work that took place, and the ways in which it brought together members from all areas of the university to think things through together. What comes of all of that hard work will be discovered as we review that summer work, but it is that sense of community and belonging that I am thinking about today.

There is a lot of research coming out right now about how important it is for our students to feel a sense of belonging. It is directly related to retention, it is directly related to the success of our students of color, our first-generation students, and our students who sometimes struggle to find their fit. Spring 2022 saw reports from faculty and student affairs professionals all over the country about students feeling at sea, disengaged, and wobbly about being in college. It is showing up in classrooms, mental health offices, and retention rates.

In Reimagining the Student Experience, a recent report from The Chronicle of Higher Education, there are lots of good observations about steps we can take to help students see themselves as members of our community. Here’s a short list.

  1. Everyone needs a group of friends, but building these friendships is not easy for everyone. Commuter students don’t have activities created by our Residential Staff, working students don’t have time for many campus activities, and many students find initiating conversations challenging. The best place to overcome some of these barriers to friendships is to build social connections in classes. Most of us initiate connections between students with icebreakers and introductions. We need to do it throughout the semester in intentional ways.
  2. Help students create a buddy system so they have someone to contact about notes, etc., when they have to be absent. This is so obvious, but it is hard for some students to ask.
  3. Try to schedule some office hours adjacent to your teaching time. For many students (especially commuters) it is easiest to ask their questions right before or after class. Even with all of our remote access for advising, which is probably the best outcome of COVID-19, the immediate conversation is still incredibly valuable.
  4. Demonstrate interest in students’ lives outside of class by participating in or attending some of the events that they value. See their shows or games, go to their fundraisers or service events, participate in a co-curricular activity. Faculty and staff can’t do it all, they have lives too, but a little bit goes a very long way.

These are good ideas, ideas that I know many of us have been doing for years. I enjoy the low-tech, simplicity of it all. If this will help our students feel they belong, let’s do it.

As I write this, though, I am thinking more about the people here who have been working all summer. Faculty, staff, and administration are trying to understand the path to a stronger university, together. People we once knew via email are now people with whom we have had long and passionate conversations. Strategies for student success that have been supported in one area, are now known by people in other areas who are trying to do the same thing. People who were struggling alone to try to solve problems, now know that others are interested in those same goals. In other words, I think our summer work has created a better path to a sense of belonging for all of us.

In that report about Reimagining the Student Experience, Sarah Rose Cavanagh argues that “Students– and indeed, people generally– are motivated by the feeling of being part of a team tackling a shared problem.” It is that common effort that makes us feel connected and valued. Certainly, this offers insights on creating a more connected campus community and a more connected student body.

But in that same report, Flower Darby asks us to think not just about belonging, but about the value of the learning experience, something many students have been questioning. Darby says, “[T]hink about the value that students get from spending time with you, the instructor….The benefit of taking your class is taking it with you.” Wow! That’s a reframing that I needed to read. I’d like to take it beyond the classroom: What is the value that our campus community gets from spending time with you, our colleague… the benefit of interacting with you is you!

This is a provocative and exciting observation. Instead of focusing on seeing the best in others (an effort that shouldn’t be ignored of course), it asks us to think about how we bring a unique perspective and vision to our roles and responsibilities. This question encourages us to see our value and it might even help us narrow our focus and hone that thing we are really great at. I hope so. What I am certain of, though, is that the question gives me a new way to think about this year. It’s a fresh start once again.

Higher Education, Resilience

A United Vision

Missy Alexander

As I drove to work this morning, I was overcome with concern for the future. Like many universities in the Northeast, we are trying to navigate the “demographic cliff” – long projected and clearly already here in Connecticut. Projections for high school graduates in the region continue to drop for the foreseeable future, and we have no choice but to re-think what we do. This re-thinking of what we do is not in our nature.

Well, that isn’t fair. We actually re-imagine courses and majors on a regular basis. Our program reviews and annual assessments drive some changes, emerging technologies and industries drive others. Indeed, in the last five years – un-slowed by the pandemic – WCSU has added six new graduate degrees – all designed to prepare students for jobs that are in-demand in the region. We also re-imagined our education degrees at the undergraduate and graduate levels to help meet the demand for, not just subject matter expertise, but also regional need for support for English Language Learners, and advanced certifications that support career advancement. We also closed two graduate degrees that were not attracting enough students. This was hard, but we did it.

At the same time, several of our undergraduate degrees have been re-imagined. Accounting, for example, has focused on tools for data analytics. Justice and Law Administration is adding a homeland security option. Social Work has strengthened its focus on social justice. Courses are regularly updated, and faculty have added new topics that speak to changes in student interests. History, Anthropology/Sociology, and Political Science have all added courses that call attention to the many peoples and voices that should be represented in a quality undergraduate degree. Important topics like Undocumented Migration, Race and Power in US History, The Irish in America, Model UN, Public Anthropology and Sociology. These additions also required a hard look at under-subscribed courses and decisions to eliminate some offerings.

We are also working hard to re-imagine the balance of online versus on-ground courses we offer. At the graduate level, most programs are now online or hybrid. With a focus on working adults, this transformation has been necessary to help them succeed while juggling jobs and families. We had been moving this way slowly, but the pandemic accelerated our path. At the same time, we identified several undergraduate degrees that could be good opportunities for students seeking degree completion options. Last week we had great news from our accrediting body that will allow us to move forward in offering these online degree completion options.

No, we are not complacent or even particularly slow moving. We have been working hard as part of our regular curricular review processes to evolve to meet the needs of our students and to broaden our offerings for adult learners. All of this has been happening slowly and steadily as a result of our last strategic plan. Unfortunately, our efforts – abundant as they may be – have not kept pace with the demographics. We are in a jam.

Although we are excellent at re-thinking things in constrained spaces (courses, majors), we are less adept at evaluating the full scope of what we do. Despite several recent attempts to work across departments, schools, and divisions, we are siloed.

  • Four separate schools have four separate visions of the university. None of those visions include perspectives from Student Affairs or Enrollment Services. How can we compete for a dwindling number of students without a unified vision?
  • Our student supports are distributed across three divisions, with limited coordination of efforts, and despite intense effort, with limited effect. How can we improve our retention and graduation rates without a unified plan?
  • Our campus is split between two locations, and the strains on one are different from those on the other. Yet, the use of these spaces has not been thoroughly aligned with projected enrollments, costs of degrees (including the types of spaces necessary to support them), costs of student support services and student activities delivered on two campuses. How can we build efficiencies in our operations without a thorough review of everything and a will to do things differently?
  • The coordination of schedules, the most basic of requirements for student success, eludes us every semester. Walking through our classroom buildings tells the tale. It is a sea of over specialized rooms that are empty far more than they are occupied. How can we build schedules that are both cost effective and easily navigable by students, without taking a more centralized view of our scheduling processes?

These are the conversations we have been unsuccessful in navigating. We try in fits and starts, with ad hoc committees, special initiatives, and even in developing our strategic plan, but somehow it just doesn’t come together or stay together. This big-picture thinking is not well-defined in our governance processes and routines. Indeed, those documents are really designed to keep our silos in place. It is not necessarily intentional, but it is the result. Those silos are not working for us. It is from this larger perspective that the real re-thinking has to take place.

I think we are ready to do this work together. I am excited by the possibilities the important conversations ahead might reveal. But whatever we discover together, the most important result must be a united vision and a map to achieve that vision quickly. A united vision is essential to our future: separate initiatives are no longer serving us well.

Evaluation, Quality

The Follow Through

Missy Alexander

Here is a question that I am frequently asked: Why would you want to be in administration? It started with my first truly administrative role, assistant dean, and it persists even now that I have served as provost for nearly six years. As a person whose career began as an adjunct faculty member, then tenure-track to tenured faculty line, it is not lost on me that there are losses when one leaves the classroom. That dreams that led me to higher education were built around love of my discipline and the desire to help students see its value. Teaching is hard work, often frustrating, often rewarding, but it carries with it a clarity of purpose–teach the students in front of you. Living that purpose is exhilarating.

So, why move to administration? Well, for me it was about an ever-widening circle of concerns about how students were experiencing their education. One of my earliest questions was about whether or not students were getting the most out of the totality of their degrees, instead of just focusing on the major. I worried about the connections students were not making between those required humanities or social sciences or science courses and their major. Once I opened that can of worms, my attention moved away from my discipline and toward education as a holistic. Thus, an administrator was born.

What does that holistic perspective mean now that I am a provost? It means I continuously examine data about who we serve, who is thriving, who is not, what students are learning, where our programs are strong and where they need support, what new ideas about teaching are emerging and how to engage faculty with those ideas, and of course, since WCSU is in New England, what to do about enrollment. There’s more. There are questions about equity for everyone (students, faculty, staff). There are questions about processes and organizational structures, and whether they are doing what we want them to do. There are questions about the balance of scholarship, teaching, service, for faculty and appropriate support for professional development for everyone. There is no shortage of things to think about when you are trying to imagine an effective and rewarding whole.

Unsurprisingly, I do a lot of reading about higher education developments and trends. Indeed, this Sunday, as I settled in to review the news and enjoy my morning coffee, I found my attention drawn to a publication from the Chronicle of Higher Education, called The Truth about Student Success. I know, why ruin a perfectly nice Sunday? But I am worried about outcomes and so I downloaded the document and read it through. When I was done, all I could think was, but we’ve done all that already!

Except we haven’t quite. Despite my best efforts to foster an environment where ideas are welcome, strategies for improvement are implemented, and then results are examined, I think I am falling short on the part where we learn from it all. It reminds me of my early days in administration when I realized that higher education is very good at starting (adding) things, but terrible at finishing (subtracting) things. Even worse, we are often missing the part where we examine results and act on them, you know, closing the loop.

Over the last twenty years, higher education as a whole has developed some reasonable habits around the use of assessment to improve curriculum. Everyone has learning outcomes now and assessment plans to trigger reviews of the results. Some plans are better than others, and some programs are more committed to the meaning of those outcomes than others, but overall, folks are trying to learn from their efforts at assessment. At WCSU, I can see the impact of this work on curriculum and to some degree on teaching strategies. This has room to grow, and the sharing of this information is spotty, but it is going on.

We are (I am) less successful at systematic use of the data about the rest of what we do. For example, has the implementation of Degree Works improved academic advising? Has asking about advising practices in annual reports resulted in any changes in strategies at the department level? Are the pre-major pathways (meta-majors) reducing the time to graduation and the accumulation of excess credits? When faculty have participated in teaching institutes, has it changed their teaching strategies? Has it improved outcomes? Has the transition to embedded remediation reduced the number of students stuck in foundational courses? When we see that some courses have very high withdrawal or failure rates, are we acting on that information? There is so much more, but this is the main idea.

As fast as I run, I can’t seem to stay on top of all of this. I have not even managed to implement a good data dashboard to try to keep people in the loop on these things. I hope to complete one this semester, but in the meantime, things are filtering through Deans to Department Chairs to Faculty (maybe), listed in my weekly announcements (sometimes), announced at our University Senate meetings (when time allows), and listed in annual reports (usually). I have to do better.

Without consistent examination of information by the whole community, all of those good things we are doing will just be in pockets (silos). Departments (academic and otherwise) will continue to try new things, but we’ll never see the full impact. We risk not learning from each other and duplicating efforts that would be better if coordinated across areas. We risk abandoning strategies too soon or simply forgetting they are underway. We risk under-investing in things that show signs of working. Most of all, we squander the value of a shared effort to be better, and that is a fundamental waste of talent and resources.

So, as I finished my coffee and that darned report on The Truth about Student Success, I realize that there is no more pressing initiative than establishing good processes for gathering, analyzing, and distributing the information we already have. There is nothing new to do but that. We’re doing all of the other things that everyone else is doing. If we get this part right, we might be able to re-double our efforts on things that are working and stop doing the things that are not. That’s the follow through, folks. We need to learn from what we do.

Examining our processes and making sure that a data dashboard gets done this semester is one more thing on my endless list of duties, of course, and I wonder how I’ll get it done. But I have to because there are no magic bullets to discover; there are only evaluations of what we have already done and plans for next steps. The data dashboard is on me, but I hope that the result is for everyone. I’m hoping with better follow through many more members of our community will work together to improve the whole of the university experience.