Vice-President for Academic Affairs
My philosophy and approach to institutional effectiveness are anchored in my understanding of the learning process. Education by its very nature is a transformative process. Done well, education aids in the process of human development, sometimes it even changes human behavior. Whether it is the addition of new skills, new ways of understanding complex issues, new information to consider in decision-making, the educational process is one of the portals through which humans develop.
Human development is a very complex process, dependent on some magical combination of a whole list of factors: motivation, prior learning, ability, readiness to change, existing skills, cultural influences, personal circumstances, self-esteem, role models, etc. If it weren’t for the fact that most of our investment in the concept of “hope” is based on the belief that human beings have the ability to change, few of us would ever tackle the complex task of trying to influence human development. But many of us do, and we do it with joy and enthusiasm despite the many setbacks.
Because education is synonymous with human development, it is a very complex process. No matter how good we get at the process of education, we will never get it completely right! The process is just too complex. It is my awareness of both the power as well as the complexity of the educational process that has informed my evolution and journey to my current approach to institutional effectiveness.
Instructional Effectiveness
It is the potential power and value of education that motivates me to always aspire to the most successful design and delivery of programming and systems within the educational setting. Given my role within the institution, my primary focus on institutional effectiveness focuses on instructional effectiveness. Motivated by an aspiration to excellence, I always want to know three things about instructional effectiveness. First, how successful were we in meeting our goals? Next, in what ways can we modify what we do to be more effective, and finally, what can we confirm as successful approaches.
I think the concept of institutional/instructional effectiveness has been a hard sell because we have never anchored our approaches in the context of our mission and what we do. Our emphasis in the past has been “evaluative” based on discrete assessment points. We have divorced these inquiries from the complexity and value of what we are attempting to accomplish through education. If we really accepted that education is a very complex process, we would be more inclined to value cyclical assessments leading to revisions as necessary. Much like the process of writing, we have learned that the first attempt needs much reworking or rewriting before we approach a more finished product.
The Portfolio
As the reader explores QCC’s Institutional Effectiveness Portfolio, please know that our efforts are “works in progress”, and will continue to evolve as our own development and engagement with this project takes us to new levels. Also, the academic arm of the College agreed to take the lead in implementing this project. So initially, the portfolio concentrates on academic endeavors, but ultimately, all arms of the College will need to participate if we are to truly optimize our institutional effectiveness.
We have made a conscious choice to give our faculty a strong voice in how they approach instructional effectiveness within their own programs. While we requested that each program include some common information, we also encouraged faculty to individualize their approaches to measuring how well they met their stated goals.
One of the most powerful aspects of QCC’s portfolio approach within academic affairs is the way in which each program has chosen to demonstrate and share insights on how evaluation informs their practice. The readers actually witness faculty thinking and reflection on such questions as: How successful have we been in fostering human development? What is working well, what would we like to change and why?
In order to really benefit from efforts devoted to institutional effectiveness, we need to concentrate more on the “analysis and reflection” of the practitioners. We have begun to collect lots of data, but much of it sits somewhere with no direct link back to practice.
In summary, the concept of institutional effectiveness is synonymous with developing a culture of reflective practice, where one routinely expects to assess the effectiveness of current practices, whether they be in the classroom, the business office, or the enrollment services area within the college. If we all share a common belief that education is a transformative process, then it follows very naturally that all members of an educational institution would want to optimize opportunities for transformation.
Thank you for visiting the portfolio and welcome!
