Curricular and Pedagogical Evidence-Based Decision-Making Counts

Learning from the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies and from the McCombs School of Business

Last Spring, faculty and staff worked hard to document improvements in their 2013-14 academic assessment reports for the April 1st SACSCOC Fifth Year Referral Report deadline. This fall, as academic and non-academic units work towards completing their 2014-15 assessment report by Sep 30th, a few departments and units across campus employed some successful strategies that led to unexpected, yet exciting and beneficial conversations. To complete their reports, two academic units engaged in a form of data gathering to document their evidence-based decision-making and innovative actions in a different way.

Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies:

Engagement in assessment is quite similar to engagement in innovative learning techniques and program development. The acknowledgement of what inventive practices faculty are already performing is a great first step. These thoughts led Agnes Sekowski, Assistant Director in the Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies in the College of Liberal Arts, to elicit a sharing of ideas at the department’s general faculty meeting. At this meeting at the beginning of the 2015-16 school year, she had everyone write down the innovative changes they’ve recently made to their curriculum, what drove these changes, and what they planned on implementing in the future and why. The responses shared throughout this meeting revealed some creative teaching methods faculty were already using in their classrooms, which was quite useful in finishing up their 2014-15 assessment report. Faculty were happy to discuss new ideas and were able to share the methods they were engaging in to enhance student learning. This approach of asking faculty to ‘share what you’ve done’ creates an intrinsic motivation to engage in the assessment conversation to share their success stories. It often prompts better, more thoughtful responses than asking them to ‘submit this report by Friday.’

Dr. Marina Potoplyak, a lecturer in the department, noted that this approach, “…proved to be an excellent way to summarize our pedagogical approaches and to connect with colleagues, as this experimental exercise led to a spontaneous discussion about our teaching methods.” This practice seemed to really benefit the faculty individually, as well as the department as a whole.

McCombs School of Business:

Information sharing practices often reveal new discoveries in teaching and instruction. In some cases, all it takes is an email to spark the exchange of some of these new ideas. In the McCombs School of Business, College of Business Administration an email was distributed to be shared with faculty and staff requesting feedback on recent curriculum changes and pedagogical innovations in each of the departments. The overwhelming volume of responses (over 20 pages or so that included many two-three sentence responses as well as a couple that were a page long), demonstrated how interested faculty were in talking about and sharing current innovative teaching practices in their classrooms.

Dr. David Platt, Associate Dean for Undergraduate Programs, found that many faculty had been working on new and exciting changes for a period of time but never had an avenue to share their work. These innovative practices were evidence-based decisions adopted by individual faculty based on books they had read, best practices in the discipline, market/employer recommendations, conferences they had attended, or a desire to experiment with their curriculum and teaching to better address their students’ learning needs. Dr. Platt noticed that people were more than happy to share what they had going on, it just took a simple email to elicit these responses. Thus, the ‘let us hear what you’re doing’ approach ameliorated the need for departments to dictate faculty engagement in assessment reporting.

This approach helped the School of Business report on how faculty are innovating or engaging in curricular or pedagogical improvements to advance student learning. It is a first step towards meeting the institutional assessment reporting expectations because it elicited information that could be shared with accreditors that offered evidence of data-based decision-making and how the programs were improving—from both a curricular and pedagogical standpoint.

Leah Miller, Director of Academic Services in the BBA Program, noted that there is an interest in implementing this method of eliciting and sharing best practices into their yearly assessment process as a systemized method of information retrieval. The goal would be to also possibly use this information to create avenues for conversation about teaching and learning as they engaged in more thoughtful and useful assessment in the future. By becoming more aware of the innovative practices happening within the department, these curricular advancements can be used in assessment analyses and future program progression planning. “We first engaged in this process as a compliance exercise, based on Divya Bheda’s suggestion, to meet the reporting deadline last April. We did not expect or anticipate the rich discovery of the amazing things happening in our school around teaching and learning. Now, we know. And we are fully exploring all the possibilities on how we can use this information to spark conversation and energy among our faculty to have discussions and share best practices around curricular and pedagogical innovations,” concluded Dr. Platt.