|
When the question came up
recently at my division meeting as to whether the college should go from
a 6-year to a 4-year cycle for Program Review (PR), the vote was for a
10-year cycle! Program review, it seems, has come to represent for my
colleagues one of these pointless obligations that only a bureaucrat
could love: lots of work, dubious value, but everybody has to do it
because that's the system.
There is some truth
to that picture. The reports are so long to prepare that the Guild has
balked and demanded that its members be paid $750 stipends to prepare
them. With some 80 different programs in instruction alone, this adds
up to $60,000 and hundreds of hours per cycle. Then there are the
validation teams which have to meet and discuss these reports. They
were composed of three members, but the Senate now wants to bring the
number to four (the request from last year's PR committee was for
five!), which would mean 320 committee assignments per PR cycle, a job
creation program that would make Mr. Bush envious!
Then you might ask:
why 80 programs? Well, that follows the accounting system, and it's not
always very sensible. Math, for instance, has only one program, but
Physical Sciences, a division half the size, has five different ones.
And why are the reports in a given division all done at different
times? That's because division chairs feared that the work would
otherwise be too overwhelming.
Is all this
worthwhile? Could we achieve the same or better results with less work
and a more sensible system? Well, the answer to the first question is
probably not, and to the second certainly yes! This is what I intend to
show in the rest of this article.
There are two major
purposes for program review: to check the health of programs, and to
make sure they are aligned with the major goals of the college. The
first is done through data such as demand for classes, fill rates,
student success and persistence, student placement or transfer and
hopefully success on the job or at transfer institutions, and also
through budget data. Most of that information, if available, is
gathered by Institutional Research, and it should be on the desks of
division chairs and appropriate deans each year if not each semester.
It made sense
twenty years ago to make a big fuss about getting these numbers together
because they were difficult to collect. But with the development of
increasingly sophisticated information system software, producing this
information is now routine: there is no need for big reports. What the
college needs to do instead is to develop some criteria that would be
used to flag problem programs and bring them to the attention of all
parties concerned. Those programs, and only those, would then be asked
to comment and indicate, if appropriate, how they intend to deal with
the problem.
As for the
alignment of programs, this is a valid exercise that needs to be done,
but it should be done at the level of divisions. Program review should
be a time when the members of a whole division, or even of two or three
closely related ones, sit together and look at what they are doing, what
works and what doesn't, how well they contribute to the realization of
the college goals, what needs to be done and what needs to be better
coordinated. For that purpose, divisions undergoing program review
should be encouraged to go on a two- or three-day retreat, with at least
some representatives from other areas; they should be provided with all
the relevant data, and they should be given questionnaires, prepared by
the PR committee, to guide their self-examinations. This exercise would
be enormously valuable just by itself, and probably quite enjoyable as
well, and the resulting reports would be truly worthy of independent
validations and of serving as justifications for resource requests.
A good example of
such retreats is the one that the math division does annually, where its
members go through essentially the kind of steps described above. For
instance, at their retreat of last February, they looked at how they
were doing with their common finals, their honors classes, their
prerequisites, and their self-paced courses; they discussed how to teach
uninterested students and how to improve the performances of Hispanic
students and learning-disabled students; they looked at how well they
had implemented their previous plans, and they made new ones.
That's the way it
should be done. It makes no sense to break each division into
innumerable little programs and look at each one of them independently.
It encourages these programs to think and act as little silos, and it
emphasizes lack of cohesion and collaboration, one of the perennial
complaints about our higher education system. This is not what the
college needs, nor is it what students need. It doesn't make much sense
either that some programs go through their review at the end of the
planning cycle while others do it at the beginning. Why not have every
division go through its PR retreat in the first year or in the first two
years of each cycle? And why not follow up three years later with a
"mini-retreat" to see how things are coming along? Given the experience
of Math, divisions might not only welcome such follow-ups, they might
want them more often.
To move program
review toward this new mode of operation would not only be good for
program review, it would achieve other benefits as well. The Master
Plan, for instance, asks that we reinforce division life in order to
"increase faculty and staff excellence in all aspects of college
operations." What better way to do that than through such retreats? In
fact, this would be a perfect time for divisions to really look at what
they can do to implement other goals of the plan, such as improving core
competencies, providing learning opportunities, and making the college
more student friendly. By and large our approach to these goals is very
haphazard and we could do so much better.
If we decided to
do program review that way, we would not need the $60,000 for stipends,
and we could use it to pay for these retreats. We would also spare
ourselves these endless committees. Instead, and most importantly, we
would ask faculty to spend their time working together on our
educational program, which is after all what we are here for.
&
back to top
|
|
|