According to a dear friend of mine, “August is September’s waiting room.” While some may take a gloomy view of this late summer month, the arrival of August has always been exciting for me. It is a time of possibility and promise of what could be.
During my years as a full-time faculty member, I spent August preparing for new students, refreshing course materials, and looking forward to catching up with my colleagues on campus. Yet, there was one thing I never looked forward to — the start of the school year meetings.
These days, as my institution’s Director of Outcomes Assessment, I spend my summers developing programming and materials for our annual assessment meetings, which take place just before the start of the academic year. (Yes, I now plan the type of meeting I used to dread as a faculty member.)
However, my past experiences have informed my way forward as we strive to foster a culture of evidence at our institution. Over the past few years, I’ve discovered a few strategies that have helped to increase the chances that the year gets off on the proverbial right foot concerning assessment.
I share the following in the hopes that your start-of-the-year assessment meetings (whatever the format) energize and engage your faculty concerning all things assessment.
5 tips for engaging assessment meetings
As you prepare for your upcoming faculty meeting, remember that people’s time is valuable, including yours and everyone else in attendance. Use the time to:
- Review key agenda items with participants.
- Gather thoughts and feedback from faculty members.
- Focus on professional development and relationship building.
- Identify improvement areas.
- Solve problems and make decisions.
Here are some handy tips to remember as you roll into the new academic year.
1. Plan and prepare
A pivotal first step is mapping out an agenda for your upcoming assessment meeting. The last thing you want is for your colleagues to feel as if their time is being wasted on a long-winded discussion with no end in sight. A meeting without a clear-cut game plan can quickly become too long, leading to needless rambling and frustrated attendees.
Consider sending the agenda to participants in advance, inviting additional items if necessary. Agenda items are usually more effective when framed as questions for the group to answer. Try to allocate an estimated time block to each point you’ll cover.
If there is specific material you’d like the group to read before the meeting, distribute it with the finalized agenda at least three days in advance. Better yet, you can assign different items to other faculty members so different people have a chance to address the group. You can also request that participants send some brief written responses to the agenda before the meeting.
Like preparing a lesson plan for a class, a carefully thought-out agenda is necessary to engage colleagues and make the best use of their time. Additionally, try to keep the meeting to an hour maximum, if possible.
2. Maintain an efficient pace
Maintaining a good meeting pace is important to keep participants engaged. Try to keep each item as succinct as possible while still addressing all relevant points. Since it is challenging to facilitate a conference and take insightful notes simultaneously, consider designating a note-taker from the group, especially if it’s a high-stakes meeting.
After discussing an agenda item, go over the key points and verify them with the group before moving to the next item. If an item turns out to be more complex than expected and the group can’t reach a decision right away, table it until the next meeting and move on to the next item to stay on schedule.
At the end of the meeting, have everyone create a list of actionable tasks, and specify who will oversee each responsibility. Ensure every attendee receives a detailed summary of the meeting’s findings, decisions, and assignments.
3. Make it meaningful and actionable
Some software solutions make it easy to generate reports. However, keep in mind that in some cases, these reports may be overwhelming for faculty. To address this situation, consider how you might present results in ways that speak to and engage faculty.
For example, we’ve created dashboard reports with pie charts for each program outcome using data pulled from the Learning Achievement Tools (LAT) platform. The at-a-glance format helps faculty more quickly determine which results they want to explore more deeply. It can result in richer conversations about what the data means and what actions faculty should take.
4. Own the data
There can be a tendency for faculty who have not scored student work for assessment purposes to feel that they shouldn’t be actively participating in the discussion of results and what they mean.
At my institution, we’ve worked hard to stress that all faculty own the assessment data regardless of who did the actual scoring. Just as they “own” all of the students who walk across the stage during commencement ceremonies, they similarly all own assessment data. This mantra of ownership is critical to fostering a spirit of engagement.
5. Keep the focus on improving, not proving
Assessment data can be messy, especially if results rely on authentic student work rather than standardized testing, for example. Despite best efforts, there will be issues with rubric use, interrater reliability, population size, and how you implemented an assessment task.
This imperfect reality can lead some faculty to worry that the assessment efforts aren’t worth much to external audiences because of problems with data-collection methods. However, if the focus remains on using results to drive faculty discussion and inform actions aimed at program improvement, the assessment process is working perfectly.
Prepare for the new year with solutions by Watermark
Watermark specializes in data collection, measurement, and analysis software designed to drive academic success in higher education institutions. Because data flows directly to the dashboard to generate quick reports, you don’t have to worry about any mundane manual entry.
They’ve tailored their software to streamline various processes, including:
- Course surveys and evaluations: Watermark Course Evaluation & Surveys makes it easy to collect and analyze student feedback to improve their overall learning experience.
- Student engagement: With features like guided student pathways, intuitive reporting, attendance tracking, and automated notifications, Watermark Student Success & Engagement can help increase student retention.
- Learning outcomes measurement: Through Watermark Outcomes Assessment Projects, you can seamlessly execute rubric-based student assessment projects. You can also calibrate a pool of evaluations for analyzing learning outcomes. Additionally, dynamic assessment and intuitive scoring make it quick and simple to locate improvement areas.
With over 20 years of industry expertise, you can trust Watermark to deliver an innovative data management solution for your organization. Learn more about how Watermark's advanced software can benefit your institution by requesting a demo today.
