I hope you are enjoying the bright sunshine today.  Seeing that we might crack the 70 degree mark by the end of the week makes the sun that much more invigorating!

As you almost certainly know by now, we have been focusing on responding to the suggestions raised in the Higher Learning Commission accreditation report regarding programmatic assessment. The first step in that response has been to gather curricular and learning outcome maps for every major.

So far, we have 32 out of 45 major-to-college outcomes maps and 14 out of 45 courses-to-major outcomes maps.  Look at it as good or look at it as bad – at least we are making progress, and we’ve still got a couple weeks to go before I need to have collected them all. More importantly, I’ve been encouraged by the genuine effort that everyone has made to tackle this task. So thank you to everyone.

Yet as I’ve spoken with many of you, two themes have arisen repeatedly that might be worth sharing across the college and reframing just a bit.

First, many of you have expressed concern that these maps are going to be turned into sticks that are used to poke you or your department later. Second, almost everyone has worried about the inevitable gap between the ideal student’s progress through a major and the often less-ideal realities of the way that different students enter and progress through the major.

To both of those concerns, I’d like to suggest that you think of these maps as a perpetually working document instead of some sort of contract that cannot be changed. The purpose of drawing out these maps is to make explicit the implicit only as a starting point from which your program will constantly evolve. You’ll change things as your students change, as your instructional expertise changes, and as the future for which your program prepares students changes. In fact, probably the worst thing that could happen is a major that never changes anything no matter what changes around it.

The goal at this point isn’t to produce an unimprovable map. Instead, the goal is put a map together that is your best estimate of what you and your colleagues are trying to do right now. From there, you’ll have a shared starting point that will make it a lot easier to identify and implement adjustments that will in turn produce tangible improvement.

So don’t spend too much time on your first draft. Just get something on paper (or pixels) that honestly represents what you are trying to do and send it to me using the templates I’ve already shared with everyone. Then expect that down the road you’ll decide to make a change and produce a second draft. And so on, and so on. It really is that simple.

Make it a good day,

Mark