1:45 – 2:30 Collaboration and Transparency: Creating and Disseminating Program Assessment Materials

Karen Gardiner and Jessica Kidd, University of Alabama English Department

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Nick's Notes:

UA is building a new writing program. The old program had –and this is my word, not our speakers'—atrophied, fallen into a kind of auto pilot where adjunct and TA training had faded and folks were teaching pretty much how and what they wanted in the FYW course.

TA training wasn't working

FYWP was inconsistent, no common goals, no common course curriculum

Carolyn Handa came in as new WPA has helped them to make constructive changes and strides.

At about the same time as Carolyn began, the Dean of the school (a Math Prof by training) become interested in learning-centered teaching (because of SAC review).

So there was both need to redesign FYWP for both the sake of program integrity and to meet the pressures for changes from above that the courses be more learning-centered (rather than lecture centered, as many of the FYW courses had become).

Fall of 2005 C. Handa started composition committee to derive goals, mission statement, outcomes for the FYC. She reached out to all levels of dept. from grads, adjuncts, tenure track faculty and so on. So using the fact that there was pressure (and support) from the top, Carolyn moved to change the program from the roots up, which is key to buy in from key people – those who will teach the new courses and curriculum.

People were excited and engaged to be part of the project. They started with creating mission statement which they wanted to meet these qualities:

1. Mission Statement -- needed to reflect UA's and UA's A&S's mission statements.
2. Needed to address whole spectrum of FY – from ESL to Honors
3. Wanted to avoid negative language
4. Didn't want to claim were handling all writing teaching needs for everyone.

Next, they established goals, objectives and then outcomes from each course.

To see what they accomplised, including mission statement and go to http://www.as.ua.edu/fwp

To see how a particular course was given a Goals, Objectives and Outcomes (GOO) go to

http://www.as.ua.edu/fwp/101cg_ro.html

Happening now:

Ongoing process, not nearly done yet.

Mission this semester is to move from GOO to rubrics. The process is recursive – establishing rubrics makes them look back and see some goals/outcomes/objectives impossible to do or not clearly defined.

The process and discussion remains highly collaborative – lots of emailing to lots of people.

Also important to process is keeping things very transparent in 4 ways:

1. Simply creating a WWW site so people can visit and see what was going on. (couldn't get elephant to sing alabama fight song). Enable to share quickly w/ constituents of all kinds what they were doing, and with talking to high school teachers.
   
   
2. Created a customized handbook w/ Comp Program. And use A Writer's Reference and Comment. Trying to brainstorm and then have Comment code in tab and so on to make things easier for students. Inserted Comment instructions and goals, objectives, outcomes, and other materials from program are part of the book. Really important tool in getting program information into hands of people who needed the info. Can change each year to reflect program changes and new policies.
   
   
3. Site and handbook combine to help w/ TA training. Had prescribed texts that were picked by someone and TA was given the book and assignments to use and sent to class to work on their own. TA's can pick own books now, and the TA's can use anything that works for them. TA's take a 3 credit hour pedagogy course where they select an analyze texts, create a syllabus, analyze and create course materials. And then before teaching a week long orientation. Also have four teaching observations: formative (2 by peers; 2 by faculty). Student opinion surveys on class and learning. And a teaching dossier that uses the Dean's form. GOO also helps w/ teacher growth.
   
   
4. Opportunity that comes with being this aware does for outreach. Karen's interest is high school to college transition. Working on alignment. Did workshop w/ 25 high school teachers. HS teachers wanted to see what the college was urging so they could see what they were doing. So they worked on the fly on creating assignments that HS teachers could give to their students to ready them for college.

http://www.thenexus.ws/english

Karen's personal goal is to create a site for HS teachers to find info on what college expectations. GOO's are not just for one's own program, but also for others, especially sometimes HS teaches and students.

NC observation: It's also worth noting that the transparency and public information does two things that are important: it promotes and advertises the program change and shows U. admins that progress on meeting UA outcomes and learning objectives is being made. Also, rubrics and other elements will provide benchmarks for program to measure their progess on over time, setting a way for fine-tuning, program self-assessment, and continued innovation.

High School connection helps with recruitment, but more importantly retention. All good stuff.