Cohort 3 Leadership Extension

The whole team from Centralia College participated in the extension of Cohort 3 that focused in helping Change Agents improve their leadership skills.

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Leadership Accomplishments and Lessons Learned

Teri Adams

• Use of active listening to ensure individuals feel heard and appreciated
• Increased awareness of personal Bolman and Deal leadership frames and expanded frames beyond personal frame preference
• Used of knowledge of Bolman and Deal leadership frames to adjust engagement with others

Karen Goodwin

• Lead by example to provide a model for others
• Use of clear communication and consistent systems to provide information to others; taking time for thoughtful responses
• Understanding how to use servant leadership as a faculty leader

Michelle Harris

• Engage with colleagues who are student focused to share ideas learned in the project
• Self-awareness of personal leadership abilities
• Seen by others as a faculty leader and advocate for students, resulting in committee appointments

Activity Report

Activity Plan

We presented a workshop on the rationale for examining course level data, and how it could be used to determine focal points for change in order to enhance student success. This workshop was primarily presented to members of the assessment committee who had agreed to have their data pulled in order to participate. We ended up inviting all faculty, and had several people attend who were not part of the assessment committee.  We also invited our institutional researcher to answer questions about the process.

Results

We accomplished many of our objectives.  We began with a break-out session to list all the factors that can influence student success, then we determined which of those factors faculty might be able to positively affect.   We then talked about how data could be used to help identify those factors in our courses.  This "took the bullet out of the gun" (thanks Amanda for the term!) and allowed any hesitant participants to see this as a positive process.

Next, we showed data from our original data pull for Math and Teri did a great job of leading an open discussion of that data.  "What do you notice?". Finally, we used a bit of time to show how easily the data can be manipulated with a pivot table and the slides supplied by Eric.  
We wanted to have more time for our Institutional researcher to answer questions, however we had a bit of an unexpected turn during Teri's portion (see below).

Some changes we made from our initial plan - We decided to not invite admin, nor did we record the session, to allow for free and open discussion and questions.  If we do a larger session like this in the future, I think that will be a good thing as well.  No one questioned or seemed fearful of the process, but that could change in a larger group.

I have not yet heard any feedback from participants - we may need to do a short survey to ask how people felt about the information provided.

Lessons Learned

Overall we had a great plan, and it went really well.  One thing that was interesting is that when Teri was presenting her data, all of the sudden people were examining it and trying to "fix" or find the root cause of the issues.  "Have you looked at the data before and after common core math".  "Have you looked at how this might be related to how many students are entering at different levels",  etc.  

At the time, I think we all were a bit frustrated that that was using up time and we ran out of time to show the pivot tables - Teri was very gracious and there were some good conversations around the math program, though.  In retrospect, I think we could leverage this into a conversation about how we can look at data in this way, and even when there are negatives, NOT ONE PERSON pointed at Teri and said "see, you are not doing your job".  So, if we as faculty can look at other people's data in an objective way and help come up with ways to improve it, we can certainly look at our own data without fear of retribution.