Acceleration Team

On August 22, I met with faculty to talk candidly about student success. I asked faculty for input related to the following four questions:

• What are the top three challenges you face as faculty members in trying to pursue student success?
• How do we best measure student performance?
• If you were on my board, what criteria would you use to measure my performance?
• How do you believe your performance should be measured?

I want to thank all of the faculty for participating in the faculty meeting. As a follow-up, a 90-day Acceleration Team will be created whose goal will be to gain a deeper understanding of the feedback received and to identify value-added actionable and sustainable strategies that maximize classroom time and directly impact student success. Classroom instruction is the most influential time we have with our students. We must have an unrelenting focus on maximizing every moment of instructional time. The Acceleration Team will research and make recommendations to address the following research questions: How can we (as an institution) accelerate student success through the classroom experience without adding additional work to faculty? The Acceleration Team’s outcomes will be presented to the Executive Committee and Council for Academic and Student Affairs (CASA). The Team will consist of faculty (teaching) from the BCAS, CCE, HHS, and IET divisions. The Student Services and Center for Teaching and Learning staff are a vital part of supporting our student success efforts in the classroom and will be involved as well. However, this will be a faculty driven Team.  Faculty from each division will appoint one faculty member from their respective division (BCAS, CCE, HHS, and IET) by November 29. Additional faculty may be appointed at a later time to further represent the divisions.

Team members must exhibit a high level of maturity and critical thinking and must be able to exemplify the following principles:

• Be proactive versus reactive
• Focus on responsibility versus blame
• Listen first to understand before being understood
• Focus on growing circle of influence, not circle of concern
• Agree to disagree and seek win/win agreement
• Apply the abundance mentality versus scarcity
• Be innovative
• Build meaningful professional relationships

Team members will be asked to seek and gain understanding of their own perspectives, perspectives of the workplace, and the community of practice through specific readings, viewings, and other data points relevant to the discovery process. Team members will be required to develop and deliver powerful and concise presentations to solicit feedback regarding the proposed recommendations/outcomes. The Acceleration Team will begin meeting the first week of December and will meet at various times over the 90-day period which will conclude in late February or early March.

I look forward to working with the Team through the discovery process to learn what strategies and tools we can use to further our goal of Maximizing Student Success.