Academic Affairs Cluster

ACADEMIC AFFAIRS COMMITTEE OF CPC

 

M I N U T E S

October17, 2007

2:30 p.m.

President’s Conference Room

 

 

ATTENDANCE

 

PRESENT

Administration

Kristi Blackburn, Dr. David Humphreys, Bobby McNeel, Luis Rosas

Faculty

Nabeel Barakat, Carmen Carrillo, Joy Fisher, Lauren McKenzie, Joyce Parker,

Dr. Stanley Sandell, Beverly Shue, June Smith, Jim Stanbery, Tricia Wickers, Mark Wood, Bradley Young

Students

Liz Anceno, Naydalli Haro, Levila Leiato, Carlos Saenz

 

ABSENT

Administration

Dr. Bob Richards, Dr. Ann Tomlinson

Faculty

King Carter, Juanita Naranjo, Pamela Watkins

Classified Manager

Carla Mussa-Muldoon

Classified

Hovsep Kotelyan, Traci Liley

 

 

CALL TO ORDER

Luis Rosas called the meeting to order at 2:45 p.m. in the President’s Conference Room.

 

 

I. ADOPTION OF AGENDA

There were no objections to the agenda

II. ADOPTION OF MINUTES

After review of the minutes from the October 3, 2007 meeting, the minutes were accepted as presented with one correction—Mr. Barakat should be listed as absent.

 

 

III. FINAL ADOPTION OF UNIT REVIEW TEMPLATE

Mr. Stanbery stated that there were various attempts over the past few weeks to have special meetings of interested parties to discuss the templates, in addition to all the other consideration that has been devoted to them by the full committee. Due to scheduling conflicts, none of these smaller meetings ever came about; and while it is important to get this job done, it is also important not to act prematurely and try adopting templates before the committee as a whole is comfortable with them.

 

Proposed Unit Review Template

This document is not the template itself but describes the basis of the template. It begins with the committee’s May 2 resolution which includes the following five principles:

1. Unit, cluster, and college plans prioritize current as well as future activities, in accordance with the central principle of the Planning Manual (p. 22): “No activity shall be budgeted that does not appear in the operational plan of the unit expending the funds involved.” This is to enable us to know what we need to cut back when cutting back, not expanding, is required, or what future objectives should be implemented even without additional funding if they are of higher importance than certain current objectives.
2. These plans prioritize activities…not positions, equipment items, or facilities (which simply are the means by which the activities are implemented)…so for instructional units, the primary activities we prioritize are our course offerings.
3. The purpose of program review is to provide the data on which these prioritizations can be intelligently decided.
4. The result is prioritizations based on the extent to which each activity contributes to the goals specified in the college strategic plan.
5. The ideal is plans that are sufficiently detailed and comprehensive so all cluster decisions on offerings, positions, equipment and facilities can be derived directly from them.

The template derives from formats previously submitted to and discussed by the committee and incorporates input by committee members at those meetings.

 

1. The template retains a narrative introductory page to summarize the essential considerations in the review (see sample mathematics department introduction).

We talked about whether this should be a spreadsheet or a narrative or a mixture of the two. In the past, all units have been authorized to begin their reports with a one page summary and we are staying with that.

1. The template allows for optional narrative passages to be inserted between spreadsheet sections while retaining space within spreadsheet sections for text entries.

We also had a discussion over whether or not to include narrative passages within the spreadsheet. This is a compromise. In the activity samples you have space for narrative entries and the size of the cells on the spreadsheet can be expanded to handle any narrative entries you want to make.

 

1. The template separates unit objectives and the unit activities which fulfill those objectives into two linked but separate spreadsheets. On the unit objectives sheet, the unit can:
   1. specify its basic purposes and/or SLOs and
   2. ‘weight’ them and
   3. identify the district, college-wide or other objectives and/or SLOs served… to reduce the number of columns and numerical citations in the unit activities listing, with each entry there citing the unit objectives linked to that activity without necessarily also showing district, college-wide, or other objectives and/or SLOs already tied to that unit objective on the unit objectives sheet.

1. The template provides columns in which concerns of special importance at the

college or district level during that planning cycle can be flagged (for instance, the

current district emphasis on achievement of Basic Skills Initiative and

Technology Strategic Assessment goals)

This addresses the memo we received from the Chancellor that says to be sure that

we flag our basic skills and TSA aspects in our plan.

Unit Objectives

Guidelines for completing this segment of the review:

Ø Ultimately unit objectives should all be expressed as student learning outcomes covering the full range of unit offerings and other activities.

Ø Until that is possible, objectives should express the most basic instructional purposes justifying all the offerings and other activities of the unit.

 

For the benefit of the new student representatives, Mr. Stanbery was asked

to explain what the unit process is and its relationship to the overall bugeting process or overall process of planning for the college.

Ø As time passes, listings will become more and more accurate and complete. All that is necessary now is an initial effort.

Ø Every objective specified must be linked to one or more objectives in the district and college strategic plans and to any college-wide SLO to which it applies (Listings of each identified by # and by short-form title can be appended to the review so that the title will automatically appear in the spreadsheet column next to any in which the corresponding # has been entered).

Ø Since subsequent prioritizations of unit activities will depend in part on the relative importance of the unit objectives these activities serve, units should weight each unit objective (for instance, by the average of weights assigned by each unit member voting individually).

 

 

Ø Where a unit objective serves more than one district or college objective or SLO, units may ultimately wish to assess the % to which the unit objective serves each larger objective to which it is linked. This is not recommended now.

 

1. The template provides for instructional offerings as well as other activities, current and planned, as provided in the Planning Manual.

 

1. Numerical entries in spreadsheet columns are made singly to enable categorigal sorts and prioritizations.

(In other words, if you want to link an activity to several objectives, you list each one in a separate cell so that we can do categorical sorts and prioritizations by the computer more easily).

1. The only references to program review data included in spreadsheet cells are in numerical forms conducive to categorical sorts and prioritizations.

(We are not trying to put the program review information itself in the unit review unless it is in a form that helps us do the prioritization).

1. While unit reviews have a nominal time-frame as provided in the Planning Manual, the Manual also provides that CPC can incorporate new cluster priorities into the college plan at any time a cluster has revised its prioritizations, just as a cluster may incorporate new unit priorities into the cluster plan at any time a unit has revised it prioritizations.

(So this is a living document that can continuously be adjusted if decisions have to be made reflecting a change in the actual reality. The only requirement is that this be done through the process).

 

Unit Activities

The Unit Activities sheet has a segment at the top for commentary. The over-all concept is ‘zero-based.’ It is also possible to separate essential and secondary parts of the same activity in order to assign these ‘decision packages’ different priorities.

 

The Unit Objective Served column just ties each activity to the concerns we need to link it to. If you are going to weight these objectives, the courses that serve objectives that have a heavier weight are more important to your unit than the courses that serve less important objectives. Or units may not wish to weight activities at all.

 

Mr. Rosas pointed out that when you are talking about weighting, it is important not to think you can realistically have a purely quantitative model. You may want to be able to evaluate by discussion and consensus within the data-based framework you have to work from, so you also have this subjective side where you have values that come into play that may be changing from year to year. That is for the commentary square.

 

Mr. Stanbery added that the accreditors said that the college’s decisions are not sufficiently based on data, but that while we want to make this as numerical as we intelligently can, we can’t just rely on numbers for numbers sake.

 

June Smith added that research can be quantitative and qualitative, and in order to get to proper weighting, we cannot totally rely on boxes and numbers and would be making a serious mistake if we were driven in simply a quantitative format.

 

In closing, Mr. Rosas stated that Mr. Stanbery would like to present the materials that were covered today as working samples next week to the District Planning Committee, and asked the committee to forward further suggestions either to Jim Stanbery or Kerry Keener.

 

 

III. Adjournment

The meeting was adjourned at 3:50 p.m.