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AQIP driven by common sense
It is not enough to do your best; you must know what to do, and then do your best. - W. Edwards Deming
... when me know facts, me can say facts. - Bob Marley
As the new school year begins, we're in the early stages of a self-study leading to inclusion in the Academic Quality Improvement Program for accreditation purposes. Some of the buzzwords may be new to us in academic life, but there's a lot of common sense, good business practice and, perhaps most important, good classroom teaching methodology behind the process.
And as we progress toward an eventual merger with Benedictine University, the planning that goes into AQIP can help us bring our management practices at SCI more closely in line with Benedictine's.
"Benedictine University has already moved to AQIP and has found the process challenging and rewarding," Dr. Bill Carroll, president of the two institutions, said earlier this year.
Over the summer, SCI got a running start on AQIP. In July Dean of the College Jeff Mueller, Dean of Students Kevin Broeckling, math/sciences division chair Theresa Matheis and Benedictine vice provost Eileen Kolich discussed the accreditation process with representatives of the North Central Association in Chicago. This month they were joined by Operations Director Heather Bigard and assessment chair Pete Ellertsen to finalize questions for an on-line survey eliciting attitudes about SCI's management processes and overall educational and institutional quality. The next steps are part of a planning process called "Vital Focus," and they will involve all faculty and staff:
Currently 94 schools have been accepted into AQIP, including Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, Richland Community College in Decatur and, of course, Benedictine. "The process is structured around quality improvement principles and processes and involves a structured set of goal-setting, networking, and accountability activities," said Dr. Carroll. "AQIP integrates accreditation into an institution’s own quality improvement processes, strategic planning and timetables. This alternative process for re-accreditation is the direction I encourage us to pursue at Springfield College."
Dean Mueller said he was especially encouraged by the accrediting agency's attitude. "There was a very convivial spirit at the Chicago meeting," he said. "The people from North Central said the essence of the program is, quote, 'almost obnoxiously optimistic.' They really believe people can work together to change things."
While it is a fairly new program, AQIP is grounded in a business philosophy called Total Quality Management that has been around for quite a while. I first ran into it as a newspaper reporter in the 1980s, when I was writing about a major restructuring in the farm equipment industry in the Quad-Cities, and again when I was doing public policy analysis in the early 1990s in a state government agency.W. Edwards Deming, who started the TQM movement, said the key is getting everybody in an organization to "[c]onstantly improve the system of production and service."
TQM was first developed as an industrial management tool. (It's a pretty effective one, too: Deming was largely responsible for rebuilding the Japanese economy after World War II.) But it's vitally important that AQIP puts the goal of helping students learn at the head of its list, and identifies student stakeholders as the most important among all the "groups that have a major stake in the institution's success."
Dean Mueller, who has a business background in addition to his academic qualifications, said he likes what he's seen of AQIP so far. "I'm a pragmatist," he said. "I judge the value of an idea by its utility. In this case, it's necessary. It makes sense. It's good management. It's a a healthy thing to bring people together and hear what they think."
We can get a pretty good preliminary idea of AQIP's overall scope from its nine Quality Criteria:
All of these, in one way or another, have to do with gathering facts and planning. It isn't enough, to paraphrase Deming, to work for quality; you have to know what you have to do in order to get quality, then work for it. That requires planning, and that in turn requires institutional research - which includes things like next month's on-line Vital Focus survey and October's conversation day.
As reggae singer-songwriter Bob Marley once said, "... when me know facts, me can say facts."
And that, of course, is where assessment comes in. To know facts about what students learn, we have to use multiple measures of learning outcomes. As we phase in our assessment plan at SCI, we're getting pretty good about using these measures and documenting our findings. AQIP can give us more and better ways of communicating these data - completing those loops we keep talking about - and getting the facts where they're needed in SCI's decision-making processes as we strive together for continuous improvement. Here are links to discussions of AQIP's management philosophy:
Instructors, faculty advisors please note
Learning outcomes assessment data compiled in the Languages and Literature Division suggest that developmental reading students may not yet have attained the competencies they need for success in psychology, sociology and speech courses. If you have students who express feelings of being overwhelmed by the reading or testing in those classes, please have them contact Lynette Shaw-Smith, who teaches English 098 (developmental reading), or Pete Ellertsen, who teaches ENG 100 (advanced reading techniques), as soon as possible so we can assess the level of difficulty they are experiencing and determine how best to help them.
Nuts & Bolts is an electronic newsletter published by the Assessment Committee of Springfield College in Illinois.
Faculty members of the Assessment Committee are to be appointed this month. Serving ex officio are Dean of the College Jeff Mueller and Dean of Students Kevin Broeckling; and Pete Ellertsen is chair. If you have information, comments or feedback, please contact any committee member or Nuts & Bolts editor Pete Ellertsen, in Becker L-16A on the SCI campus, 525-1420 ext. 519 or by e-mail at ellertsen@sci.edu.
