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Partnership Meeting: Outcomes & Actions SparkedSara Stein Koch, PhDJNGI

Flash back to 2012 & 2013

What can you learn from those who stepped before you?

Focus on Planning

This was a time to focus on planning! We had the ability to create plans with both houses of the college.

Planning for partnerships must be intentional.

Renewed Importance of True Collaboration

For there to be true collaboration, there must be an issue that needs addressing. We need to find common ground to problem solving.

Our team came away stronger as we understood each other better.

Enhanced Communication

That the more people we bring to the table, the more dynamic and engaging the discussion can be--and while that is not shocking--the discussion produced items that did lead to some "a-ha" moments of thought and reflection for action.

Quality Team Time

Gave us a chance away from our institution to really talk about what some of the issues were, even though we have high trust and high desire to collaborate.

Recognition of Need for Change

Us" vs "Them" has not served us well. It's time for on-purpose change.

Actions Sparked

MeetingsEngagement

Creation

I have already scheduled several meetings with various stakeholders to begin discussing some of the initiatives that we came up with. I also was assigned to our President's Summit Planning committee which met this week.

As a result of attending the institute, have recommended that we focus our next campus summit on collaboration between not only academic affairs and student life, but all areas of campus using the Gardner Institute as a model.

We are moving forward with our plans from the institute. We are putting together a 1-day summit where we will cover the same topics from this institute. Our goal and focus for this forum is to get as many faculty in attendance as possible.

We have had a meeting with faculty on campus about our thoughts and are planning to address how we implement the various high impact programs we currently have with more intentionality.

Our team created a plan for some activities to improve student success through student affairs and Academic partnerships and we are meeting as a team with both the VP of Academic Affairs and VP of student services to discuss our ideas. This meeting is scheduled for early next week.

We actually received funding from the President to create the AHA! Mentoring Program in collaboration with Residential Living and Learning to provide mentors for their lowest academic performing residents hall. In the Spring, our mentors will train their Residential Leaders on how to be academic mentors.

Meeting on a regular basis with cross-functional teams to collaborate in ways to ensure the success of students.

The VPAA and the VPSS are modeling a partnership attitude across our areas by being mutually supportive and collaborative.

I have briefed the President, worked with the VP

Student Services, and spent over 2 hours with him last Friday discussing common issues and strands.

We are in the process of involving more faculty in the advising process leading to registration. We are in the formative stages of forging new partnerships on our student success course and study skills seminars.

Our freshman orientation was completely redesigned.    Another big change we have implemented (this was not as a result of participation at the Institute, but was certainly influenced by it) is turning over academic advising for students with < 60 hours to a team of professional advisors.

We made the decision to participate in the Foundations of Excellence Refresh study as a result of our Institute experience and chose to modify an event that was originally designed to be an Academic Affairs/Student Success summit into the launch meeting for FoE.

-Kennesaw State

We're starting a deliverology team (with AA and SA members) which will focus on several campus initiatives to include math remediation. Student Affairs and Academic Affairs now report directly to the Provost. 

Our institution was able to launch a student success initiative called ACES, Academically Committed to Educational Services. This program came about as a direct relationship between Academic Affairs and Student Affairs after we attended the John Gardner Institute last fall.  This program is housed on two of our campuses and it provides students with a place to study, receive tutoring, form study groups, or just work on the available computers on assignments that they might not be able to access if they do not have home computer access.

Specifically we chose to use our time at the institute to develop a plan on how to engage our entire campus community in designing an integrated First Year Experience. An expanded cross silo team met weekly throughout the spring and bi-weekly through the summer and fall.

Now its your turn!

The Power of Partnerships: Some Opening ObservationsJohn N. Gardner

© 2015, John N. Gardner Institute for Excellence in Undergraduate Education

January 15-16, 2015 │ Costa Mesa, CA

A [Brief] History of All Things Related!

In the beginning there was…

…the faculty who did everything that attended to student learning

and personal development.

…World War II and the ascendency of the research model changed all that.

And a new profession was born: Student Personnel/Student Affairs

And a new paradigm emerged that looked like this….

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Faculty – attending to students’ intellectual development

Student Affairs – focusing on students’ social & emotional development

Cognitive Affe

ctive Divide

The results of this paradigm

• Bifurcation

• Out of sight/out of mind • The residential student experience =

an “auxiliary” enterprise

• Competition for resources

• Separate routes for graduate education preparation

• Misunderstanding

• Mistrust

• Informal rather than formally integrated partnerships • Second class citizenship for SA leads to drive for parity

and understandable status concerns

The results of this paradigm

• Focus on territorial responsibilities

• Less focus on student success

• 1990-92 Recession—disproportionate cuts for SA • 1994 Schroeder et al: “The Student Learning

Imperative”

The results of this paradigm

Fast forward to the present

• New student demographics • Who is better prepared/inclined to work with these

students? • Hiring of professional staff now outpaces appointments

of new faculty • And proportion of full-time, tenure track/tenured

faculty is decreasing

The Present

• Coupled with the academy’s obsession over costs and making money like other institutions in a capitalist society

• Plus greatly increased public policy pressure for degree completion

• Hence the “Completion Agenda” • But are we asking “completion for what?”

The Present

Gives rise to the new focus on “student success” and some questions…

StudentSuccess

• What does this mean?• Whose responsibility is this?• Is this a whole new profession? If so, where is it

aligned? To whom does it report? What are its values? What is its training and pedagogies?

• Is this focus on student success influencing, shaping, redefining, the ways we organize our institutions to go about this work?

Student Success

See the Gardner Institute blog, “A New Profession…?”http://www.jngi.org/education-insights/a-new-profession/

• The new focus on “student success” requires an unprecedented amount of integration…and partnerships

• This is very threatening to some - and even more

exciting to many…

While there are more things I am unsure about here than sure about, I am confident of the following:

Let’s shift from the big picture to you/us

We are all products of our education, experiences, values. So what from this background

do you bring to this conversation?

The Odyssey (of a Typical University Professor)

Here is my background, my journey:

This broad definition of first-year student success is achievable only through partnerships.

Academic Success/GPA

Relationships

Identity Development

Career Decision Making

Health & Wellness

Faith & Spirituality

Multicultural Awareness

Civic Responsibility

Retention – the baseline

In addition to my directing of University 101 and my scholarship,

this is how I have acted on my belief in the value and positive

outcomes of partnerships:

• 1982-1999—Hosted the Conferences on the First-Year Experience; and Students in Transition

• 1986 Established University of South Carolina’s National

Resource Center for First-Year Experience and Students in Transition

• 1988 Worked with Betsy Barefoot (under her leadership)

to establish a wider literature base on partnerships

• 1999—Betsy Barefoot and I established new

non-profit organization

• 1999-2002—preliminary work on new forms of assessment using partnerships and foundational research on key question: what is excellence in the first college year?

• 2003-present Foundations of Excellence ®--self study,

planning improvement process utilizing partnerships for task force based assessment—264 institutions

• 2012 – Launched first in new series of 3 national

Academic & Student Affairs leaders’ institutes all about partnerships

• 2013 - Roll out under Drew Koch’s leadership of new form of partnerships task force based assessment to focus on high failure rate courses: G2C ™ Gateways to Completion ™

• 2014 – Roll out, also under Drew Koch’s leadership, of Retention Performance Management™ (RPM™) which can only be done using partnerships

So what is your journey?

I hope you can share this with your teammates

on this trip about partnerships.

Key Assumptions

• The greatest influence on new students is that of other students.

• Learning takes place anywhere there are students, faculty and staff members interacting.

• We are more likely to achieve student success through partnerships that integrate learning, both inside and outside the curriculum.

• The preeminent goal of partnerships is academic success.

Elements of a Student Success Partnership

Elements of Partnership

• A shared vision, jointly developed, for student success• Shared resources – including personnel and money• Joint reporting lines• Functional integration;

curricular/co-curricular integration

• A willingness to ask for and offer help

• A willingness to share responsibility, credit, and blame

• Big picture thinking• A capacity for organizational unselfishness• A willingness to come together for what’s best for

students, the institution, my unit, and others we serve

• A willingness to plant the seed and let others run with it (and even take credit)

Elements of Partnership

• A willingness to give up something you started when it needs to be institutionalized somewhere else

• Getting people to work together who ordinarily would not interact with each other

• A decided preference for collaboration over competition

Elements of Partnership

• Formal agreements based on informal understandings

• A plan for public dissemination and assessment of partnership agreements

• A connection of the agreements to the institution’s mission statement and strategic plan

Official, Formalized Components

• More available resources – people and money• Each unit gets the benefits of talents, skills, capacity

and political support it wouldn’t have on its own• Reduces or eliminates unnecessary duplication and

waste of resources• Is a model of best practice for illustration and

emulation• Teaches students by example• Student success more likely to be the outcome

Practical Advantages of Partnerships

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January 15-16, 2015 │ Costa Mesa, CA