Outlook Etiquette

Did you ever have a birthday party in your growing up years? Remember how thoughtfully you chose the party invitations and how carefully you filled in the time, date and place? Do you remember the excitement of planning the party? and the intense feelings of anticipation when it was almost time for the guests to arrive?

Well, strange as it may seem, I feel much the same about the meetings I am responsible for. You may dread meetings rather than look forward to them; however, you cannot avoid them. I plan my meetings carefully, and I schedule them with awareness of the commitments of the people on my invitation list.

We on the King faculty have a powerful tool at our disposal—Microsoft Outlook. It can keep track of our events, remind us when it’s almost time for a class, appointment, or meeting, and—the best feature of all—allow a meeting planner to see the schedules of all invitees on the meeting list.

However, with the convenience comes important responsibility. We MUST post our schedules to Outlook and keep them updated. I include EVERYTHING on my Outlook calendar from dentist appointments to haircuts to weekends with my grandchildren. If you need me to attend a meeting, you can tell whether I’m busy or not.

Furthermore, just as you would have been disappointed not to know whether your best shildhood friend was coming to your birthday party, I am disappointed when I get no response to a meeting request. I will be frank: if I need to know whether you will attend a meeting or event, I send a meeting request. If I’m just letting you know that an event is occurring, I will send an email and not expect a response. Responses—yea or nay—to meeting requests help meeting planners choose meeting spaces, make the correct number of handouts, and prepare the right amount of food.



If you get a meeting request, PLEASE RESPOND.

Just click
"Accept"
"Tentative"
or
"Decline"

It's that simple.

And, make sure your calendar is always up to date.

Seeing and Believing

Moon rising in the autumn sky over Parks Field. You see it, and you almost don't believe it.

Many faculty have seen summonses this week from their supervisors becasue it's time for classroom observations--mandatory for all those in a contract-renewal year.

So far we have been encouraging classroom teachers and supervisors/peers to agree on a day and time rather than doing observations unannounced.

Why does the college believe this practice is important? Let me answer that question with the same story I told the Arts & Sciences Department Chairs when we met last Friday.

I come from a "teaching" family. My grandmother was an elementary teacher and principal in both the Chicago Public Schools and Cook County, IL. My aunt, who was like a second mother to me, taught third and fourth grades in Evanston, IL, and St. Joseph, MI. My mother taught elementary school in Illinois and mathematics Michigan and also served as a high school principal. My biological father was a long-time English teacher in Sioux Falls, SD, and--catch this--advisor to the yearbook. My stepfather taught history and government before finishing the last 20 years of his career as a high school guidance counselor. I come to teaching both by nature and nurture.

The year I was nine, my stepfather lost his job teaching social studies at Grant High School. The only reason for this disgrace was that he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. The Superintendent in Grant summarily fired all the teachers in the high school who had been there before he came. Mr. Schroder began his tenure in Grant in the Fall of 1952 and fired the entire high school faculty the following spring. No investigations, no documentation of competence or incompetence. Just no contracts for the next year.

This frightened me and angered my parents. They began job searching all over the state of Michigan. We went to interviews in Warren, Flint, and other tiny towns scattered in the lower peninsula, and it was not until well into that summer that both my mom and dad landed jobs in Watervliet. My dad finished his career there retiring in 1982. My mom only stayed for 2 years, moving in the fall of 1955 to St. Joseph, where she taught until she retired.

One effect of the job loss was a pragmatic and tough activism. Both my parents were strongly opposed to unionization for educators; mentioning the American Federation of Teachers always provoked them to make negative comments. They insisted that teachers were professionals, and that as such they should negotiate professionally for fair salaries and important benefits like health insurance, sick days, personal leave days, and protection from the sort of injustice that my dad and all the other high school teachers suffered at the hand of Superintendent Schroder in Grant. In those days the professional organization--not yet the union it is today--was the NEA and its affiliates, MEA (Michigan Education Association) and the local __EA in each school system. My mom served as president of the SJEA several times when she worked in St. Joseph. One of her motivations was, of course, protection--job security and just treatment of individual teachers.

My attitudes toward things like self-evaluation and peer/supervisor observation grew out of these events and the conversations I overheard all the years of my childhood and adolescence. I learned that having another teacher or a principal in your classroom could protect you from the whims of a demagogue. Documents in a teacher's personnel file demonstrating competence in teaching, the notes of a peer or supervisor observation, were also important to refute the attacks of disaffected parents. Helicopter parents are not an entirely new phenomenon.

So, though it may seem a bit unnerving to have your supervisor in your classroom and somewhat inconvenient to complete your self-evaluation and planning form, these things can be job savers. Seeing injustice done to my dad and many family friends made a believer out of me. So, for whatever it's worth, I pass this wisdom on to you.

Enrolling Yourself on Faculty Workspace

If you as a Full-time or a Part-time faculty member are not already enrolled on the Faculty Workspace Blackboard Site, you need to be!

Here is the procedure:

Log on to Blackboard
Go to Courses
Search “Faculty”
You will see “King College Faculty Workspace” as the course name
Under “Committees” is the symbol for a drop-down menu
Click on that symbol
You will see “Enroll”
Click on “Enroll” which will give you the self-enrollment screen
On the right side of that screen, click SUBMIT.
One of the administrators of the site will approve your request.

Get It out of the Way? . . . No Way!

Even though the whole college—business majors, nursing students, and pre-service teachers included—has some interest in the structure and content of general education requirements, these groups see it as something to “get out of the way.” As Tim Clydesdale’s The First Year Out so clearly states, for students the value of their college education is a narrow career objective with a $$ attached.

We in Arts and Sciences see things differently. For us, the ones charged with packaging and delivering the wisdom of millenia (hence Athena, Goddess of Wisdom, pictured here) and critical life skills in communication, numeracy, teamwork, and critical thinking, the Core Curriculum is the way, second only to “The Way” in John 14:6.

Because of our vested interest, we owe it to our disciplines, our college, and our students to do the Core with all the passion and energy we can muster. And, of course, we must measure what we are doing with precision and scrutinize our collected data with perspicacity.

The MEETING coming up on Monday, October 19, for all Core teachers is important. It will lay out our course-embedded assessment plan for 2009-2010. It will remind us what data we need to collect and which IDEA objectives to mark for each course being taught for Core Curriculum credit this semester.

The plan was laid out in the re-imagined course proposals that came to the Ad Hoc Core Curriculum Revision Committee. However, the measures and methods may not be as familiar to the “boots-on-the-ground” classroom teachers as they were to the course designers. Hence this meeting.

IDEA Course Evaluations
Last year we pre-marked the IDEA Course Evaluations for Core classes, but some teachers really felt constrained by the fact that they could not measure distinctive features of their particular courses. So, this fall we are counting on teaching faculty to mark the objectives “Essential” that are designated on the course proposals, AND allowing each teacher to mark other objectives of his/her choice up to a total of five as either “Essential” or “Important.”

Course-embedded Measures
Just as we hope our students will embrace not only their Core Curriculum assignments but also the values and understandings those assignments can foster, we must undertake assessment with zeal. This year that means doing course-embedded assessment well.

CBASE
We will be continuing to use the CBASE; however, we are not giving it in 2009-2010. In the future we will give it to seniors as a part of KING 4000 to see if (as the SACS standard stipulates…) our graduates, four-year King students and transfers alike, do possess the five competencies we say our Core accomplishes. The students who are seniors this year took CBASE in the fall of 2008, so we will not be testing them again in 2009-2010.

This year the burden of assessing the New Core rests on each person teaching, and all but two are in the School of Arts and Sciences. Good assessment practice is one way we will get to keep on doing the job we love. Let’s not treat it as something to get out of the way.

Home

If home is where the the heart is, this place, this view, is home for me. The top of the beachwalk in Birchwood makes my heart happy. I drive miles to get here. I walk to the beach in all kinds of weather. And, every time I get to the top of the beachwalk, I stop and breathe in hard.

If the Lake is rough, I may have been hearing it roar all the way from my house. But the first glimpse that I get is a reminder that I am home.

If the Lake is calm, glassy smooth as it often is in summer, when I get to the top of the steps, I can hear children at play or a dog barking.

If the Lake is frozen, I am awed by the expanse and the absolute stillness that never happens otherwise. For even calm, the water laps at the shore in gentle wavelets that make the smooth gravel at the shoreline whisper.

If I go at sunset, I see the bright path on the water, and the world is bathed in rosy light.

This home of mine renews my energy. After being here, I'm ready face my never-ending list.


Carl Sandburg lived in my neighborhood from 1927 to 1945: he wrote the Lincoln biography here on the dune overlooking the Lake. Roger Ebert has a house nearby; I meet him going in and out on the ravine road and see him in local eateries. He may write his movie reviews on the dune, too. I live here. Big chunks of my two books were written in this place. It's a writer's place.

Fall Break Greetings from Birchwood Beach
Harbert, Michigan
49115

Insomnia and the Harvest Moon

Scottish artist Lesley Mclaren created this oil on canvas; I found it on her personal/professional website (http://www.lesleymclaren.co.uk/index.asp. It could be the harvest moon over Appalachia.

Last night I lay awake and watched the moonbeams stream in my west-facing window. It seems I am often awake when there's a full moon. Could there be a connection? Wakefulness and dreaming often go together.

My days have been so busy lately that my dreams for Arts & Sciences have been submerged in the flurry of activity around the SACS visit and now the revision of all the program ABC forms. But the moonbeams worked their magic; they brought the dreams to mind.

Let me share two dreams with you:

1. I would like to see us "convert" a large number of students from undecided to Arts & Sciences majors. We have 22 exciting programs. Last spring we "signed" 76 new students to our rosters; we need to do that again this semester as we go into advising mode for Spring 2010.

2. I would like us to imagine one or two adult degree-completion programs for our School. Our total numbers should include not just our traditional majors and minors but also some adult learners who are working toward bachelors' degrees.

We are the heart of the institution, we teach all but one class in the Core, we provide most of the KING 1000 and 2000 instructors, we do the tracs in D.C., we supply most of the student and faculty lecturers, we attend ball games, plays, concerts, recitals, films, chapel, and Buechner events. All that is more than wonderful. But, I still want a piece of the action with the adult students. We need to add this one more arrow to our quiver.

What dreams surface for you under the harvest moon?

Closing the Loop

This diagram came from Arizona State's assessment website
But, I could have made it myself. You don't have to look very far to realize that colleges and universities across the nation are talking about assessment.

By next Monday each program administrator and I will have reviewed program assessment documents, the ubiquitous ABC forms, for all the programs (22) in Arts and Sciences. As a result of our SACS team's visit on September 11, we are doing some fine tuning to our report and the supporting materials.

At the moment we are tightening our outcomes and the measures we have identified to evaluate them. We are clarifying the language. We are making sure that every measure listed on a C form has a criterion for success. We want to make sure that we know how to determine whether a student has missed, met, or exceeded expectations.

Is this closing the loop? Not yet. As the diagram at the top so clearly demonstrates, we will not close the loop until May when we look back at the data we collected, analyze it, recommend changes based on our analyses, and make the changes. So, we are almost an entire year away from closing the loop.

The same process is happening in the Core Curriculum. Very soon there will be a meeting of all faculty teaching in the Core. The assessment process will be the centerpiece of the meeting. We will show what needs to be collected and what sort of analysis should take place. The conclusions reached in May 2010 will impact content, form policies, and dictate pedagogies for the next academic year.

Assessment is neither meatloaf nor moonbeams--neither comforting nor visionary. However, there can be great satisfaction in doing it well. Embedded in the process is freedom. Knowing the truth from the data we collect gives us the impetus to chart our course for the future. We are actors not victims.

The School of Arts and Sciences has really embraced assessment. We are life-long learners, and we are learning the necessary techniques and entering the discourse community of institutional effectiveness. I have contended all along that anyone who would teach well does assessment through every semester and in every planning cycle. We teachers are always thinking about what worked in a particular class and why. And, furthermore, we make changes in content, methodology, and delivery all the time. We close the loop.