A Culture of Respect

At a college with a true atmosphere of mutual respect, everyone is open with everyone else. Disagreements are expressed and received civilly. Everyone feels treated fairly, equitably, and consistently. Their diverse skills, expertise, viewpoints, and values are respected.

A culture of disrespect can be hard to turn around. Tackle it with root cause analysis (Chapter 10), asking: “Why does this culture exist here?” (I list some potential root causes in Chapter 4.) Then use the answers to identify strategies to foster a culture of respect. Here are some ideas to consider.

Be fair. Fairness is about treating your college’s current and prospective students, your college’s community, and your college’s other stakeholders equitably and consistently. It includes, for example, putting college policies and practices in writing, sharing them, and sticking to them, as discussed later in this chapter.

Trust. Here is an example. Some colleges insist on assessing the learning outcomes of programs or general education curricula through independent “blind” scoring of student work: student names are removed, the work evaluated by people other than the students’ professors, and inter-rater reliabilities (Chapter 14) are calculated, comparing the evaluators’ scores for consistency. This is a good research practice, but what does it say about your trust in your faculty to evaluate their students’ work fairly and consistently? If you have evidence that faculty are not evaluating student work credibly, first try to find out why before investing in independent blind scoring. Perhaps it is a matter of clarifying a fuzzy rubric, or training faculty on how to use it properly, or providing support to address any shortcomings in student learning identified by the rubric. I talk more about the costs and benefits of independent blind scoring in Chapter 18.

Tap faculty expertise. I worry when I see a business college with an ineffectual strategic plan or financial plan or a college offering a communication or graphic design major whose evidence is impossible to find or incomprehensible. What are you teaching your students, I wonder? If you are teaching this well, how can you be doing this so badly? It often turns out that administrators are not tapping faculty expertise.

Involve students. A great deal of the work to implement a culture of quality can be done by students through class projects, independent study, or co-curricular activities:

• Students, especially those in teacher education, can help identify a program’s learning outcomes and design rubrics and test blueprints to assess student achievement of them.
• Student government organizations can collaborate with faculty and administrators to design programs to improve student success.
• Business students can help identify dashboard indicators.
• Marketing, statistics, and social science students can help design and analyze surveys, do market research on your college’s stakeholders and their needs, and analyze competitors.
• Economics students can measure the economic impact of your college and the cost-effectiveness of your programs and services.
• Accounting students can review various ratios of your college’s financial health and performance.
• Information technology students can design ways to record and process evidence.
• Graphics, communications, and information technology students can help develop infographics, slide presentations, and websites to share evidence.

Let people learn from their mistakes. Some colleges require faculty and administrators to submit assessment plans to a committee for approval before they are allowed to implement them. While I understand the intent—we all want to do things right the first time—critiques can make people defensive and uncooperative. Trying and initially failing, on the other hand, can be a valuable learning experience. Let administrators try to assess poorly worded goals, and they will quickly see the need to state them more clearly. Let faculty with a history of working in silos design and implement their own assessments, and they will soon see that they are drowning in apples-and-oranges data. Let the student development staff send out a survey without strategies to maximize the response rate, and they will soon see that they do not have enough responses. After these experiences, people will be willing to move to more thoughtful and collaborative models (Frye, 2012).

I offer words of caution here. As I discussed in Chapter 4, people in higher education would much rather improve methodologies than use results. Treat these initial trials like a research pilot study. Pilot studies are conducted once, and then the actual research project gets underway. Do the same with any quality effort, including assessment: move from one trial run to implementation.

A Culture of Communication

Open, honest communication is vital to a quality college because it affects so many aspects of the cultures of quality, including integrity, transparency, respect, and collaboration. As Richard Morrill has noted, “Providing information creates a sense of common circumstance and ownership that builds trust and motivates action” (2013, “Communication,” para. 2).

Here are some of the suggestions I have offered to colleges:

• Just sending out e-mail announcements may not work; we all know how many e-mails are never read. Plan your communications with an understanding of your stakeholders and how they prefer to receive information.
• Do not overwhelm students and employees with so much communication that they cannot discern the signal (important information) from the noise (irrelevant information). Monroe Community College found that honing and targeting its communications to students increased student attention to announcements about early fall registration, leading to a 30 percent increase in registrations (Nelson, 2013). Try putting routine college announcements into one daily e-mail coordinated by one office.
• Communication is a two-way street, of course, not just telling but also listening. Create forums for input . . . and make sure they are taken seriously. This is where collaboration, which I discuss next, comes into play.

Chapter 16 offers suggestions on sharing evidence effectively.

A Culture of Collaboration

A culture of collaboration is another indispensable component of quality (Morrill, 2013). Learning experiences, for example, “. . . need to be integrated into a coherent whole for each and every student. And this integration needs to occur as a result of enhanced collaboration among faculty across departments, as well as closer collaboration between faculty and student affairs professionals—including academic advisors, career counselors, and other campus educators who work every day to help students make sense of their educational experiences” (Humphreys, 2013, para. 13).

Yes, there are people who will never appreciate the bigger picture, but these kinds of people seem to be in the minority at most of the colleges I have worked with—except, perhaps, those whose courses, programs, or services are facing declining interest and demand and who are fighting to keep their jobs above all else. Most people I have encountered are ready to work with their colleagues on key issues of quality.

The best way to build a culture of collaboration is to deploy resources—people and facilities as well as dollars—in ways that address broad rather than narrow needs. Give budget priority to projects (identified through systematic evidence, of course, as discussed in Chapter 17) that cross department and disciplinary lines. Target professional development funds for collaborative projects, such as for a group of faculty who want to work together to learn how to improve their students’ critical thinking skills. A sizable portion of the President’s Innovation Fund at Lebanon Valley College, for example, which was created to encourage pilot projects with wide-reaching potential for fostering transformative learning, is reserved for collaborative teaching/learning experiences between disciplines and programs (Lewis Thayne, personal communication, August 19, 2013).

Other strategies to foster a culture of collaboration include the following:

• Use videoconferencing and online forums to facilitate meetings across locations.
• Carve a time slot out of weekly class schedules—say Wednesdays at noon—that is dedicated to faculty meetings, with no classes scheduled.
• Block off dates in the academic calendar for faculty and staff retreats to perhaps discuss collected evidence and identify strategies for addressing any shortcomings.

A Culture of Growth and Development

A quality college cannot be static, so neither can its community. Everyone’s expertise needs to grow and develop. Most people at colleges are eager to learn (Suskie, 2013). Help them! Help your college community learn about and discuss stakeholder needs, external forces affecting your college, and current research and good practices on student learning and student success (Alexander & Gardner, 2009).

Then provide ongoing venues for faculty, administrators, and board members to discuss and use this information to help your college achieve its purpose and goals and advance the five cultures of quality. Possible venues include:

• A teaching-learning center
• On-campus workshops, brown-bag lunch discussions, online forums, and webinars
• A network of mentors or champions to provide one-on-one assistance and support with particularly challenging work, such as student learning assessment
• If you use rubrics, training so that faculty interpret and apply them consistently and fairly

Focus on your college’s priorities. As with any other resource, focus professional development programs and opportunities (and this can include travel and sabbatical leaves) on helping your college achieve its purpose and goals and advance its quality agenda (Kuh, Jankowski, Ikenberry, & Kinzie, 2014). If one of your college’s priorities is developing in students a commitment to civic engagement, for example, give priority to funding professional development activities on civic engagement.

Provide coordination and guidance. Just as students learn best when they are given clear guidelines for their assignments, so faculty and staff do their best work in implementing a culture of quality when they are provided with clear expectations, guidance, and coordination. Hancock College, for example, helped faculty learn about student learning assessment through a flexible combination of drop-in sessions, group training, one-on-one training, going to faculty offices, and even having the institutional research and planning office enter results for them if need be. After less than a year of this guidance and support, the proportion of courses with reported student learning assessment data jumped from 8 percent to 92 percent (Jennie Robertson, personal communication, June 26, 2013).

The best people to provide coordination and guidance (Suskie, 2009) are those with:

• Sensitivity and open-mindedness
• Flexibility: readiness to encourage and facilitate multiple approaches
• A passion for your college’s purpose and goals, especially teaching and learning
• Recognized expertise

Because so many aspects of the five cultures of quality are about student learning, look to your teaching-learning center director or someone else with respected experience in curriculum design and teaching methods to help provide leadership, coordination, and guidance. Long Island University (LIU), for example, created the position of General Education Faculty Fellow, filled by an experienced, respected faculty member, to coordinate the assessment of LIU’s core curriculum (Frye, 2012).

Support adjunct faculty with training and supervision. Today, nearly half of all college faculty are part-time/adjuncts (AFT Higher Education, 2010) and, at U.S. community colleges, 58 percent of all courses are taught by adjuncts (Center for Community College Student Engagement, 2014). Adjuncts can enrich student learning through their real-world experiences, but they can provide a quality learning experience only if they understand and convey their courses’ key learning outcomes and standards and how their courses fit into the program or general education curriculum. Training, supervision, support, and clear, appropriate expectations are thus essential. If possible, consider including in adjuncts’ contracts requirements that they fulfill key responsibilities before receiving their final payment. Examples of such responsibilities include:

• Incorporating certain core elements into their syllabi,
• Including a common set of questions on their final exams,
• Engaging in certain professional development activities, and/or
• Participating in assessments of learning outcomes by submitting student work or completed rubrics.

Offer constructive, collegial feedback. Just as students learn best when they receive feedback on their work, so faculty and administrators do their best work in implementing a culture of quality when they receive constructive feedback on their efforts. Consider, for example, charging a committee of peers with reviewing annual reports on assessment efforts and offering commendations for good assessment efforts, constructive feedback, and support such as mentoring.

A Culture of Shared Collegial Governance

An effective governance system balances power, authority, and responsibility appropriately among:

• The board
• The president
• The college’s leadership team and other administrators
• Faculty
• Students

To people who have spent their careers at traditional colleges, the concept of shared collegial governance is self-evident. But to those from outside higher education or at what I call outlier colleges, the concept may be foreign. In the business world, for example, “governance” traditionally refers only to the responsibilities of the corporate board and officers.

Does your college really need a system of collegial shared governance? After all, there are plenty of companies and non-profit organizations that operate successfully without the governance system prevalent in U.S. higher education. Do dysfunctional governance systems really hurt the quality of student learning? And do not elaborative governance systems, with multiple layers of committees and review, slow down progress?

These are legitimate questions, but I have seen plenty of examples of what happens when a governance system is dysfunctional and the balance of power gets out of whack. Faculty go up in arms because their president has announced major new initiatives without consultation. Presidents depart in frustration over micromanaging boards. Assessment committees set college-wide learning outcomes without input from or approval of the faculty . . . and then wonder why the faculty are not helping to assess those outcomes. Faculty step in to fill the power void left by weak college leaders, doing end runs directly to the board.

Do these problems kill a college? Of course not. But they sap morale, time, and energy and can lead to high turnover and a chaotic campus environment. People focused on these kinds of issues cannot spend time on far more critical issues, such as improving the quality of the educational experience.

A Culture of Documentation

Part of fairness and effective shared governance is documenting in writing what I call “the rules of the game” and then applying them consistently and equitably.

Provide clear statements of everyone’s responsibilities and how their work is integrated into organizational and governance structures. Make clear the role of every individual and group in making college decisions, including whether each has an advisory role or final authority regarding particular decisions. When faculty or students have a proposal, for example, where do they take it? What is the process to ensure that appropriate groups offer feedback on the idea? What is the process by which the idea is considered formally by appropriate groups and individuals, such as the chief academic officer, the president, and/or the board? Similarly, to whom does the college assessment committee report? What decisions can it make on its own, and which must it forward elsewhere for review and ultimate approval? Keep in mind that many accreditors expect that faculty have leadership and responsibility for student learning, including learning outcomes, curriculum design, teaching methods, and assessment.

I am not talking about simply pulling together existing bylaws and position descriptions. Bylaws provide the legal framework for the establishment of a board or other governance body, but they typically do not list the board’s specific responsibilities or how it conducts its work.

Document policies, evidence, and decisions. Have a clear, written research-based definition of effective teaching, for example, that your college uses in decisions on promotion, tenure, professional development, and resource deployment.

Pull together and share documentation. For example, organize all governance and organizational documents into one college website, so that all members of the college community can see their roles in your college’s governance and organizational structures.