Academic Leadership Retreat

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Academic Leadership Retreat

• August 15, 2005

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College and University Faculty Who

• Hold themselves to high standards of teaching
• Hold their students to high standards of
  intellectual work that require strong commitments
  of time and attention
• Set clear, interrelated goals for their courses,
  academic programs, and student learning
• Accept responsibility for, and teach to achieve,
  the goals
• Design coherent curricula and employ teaching
  practices to help all students achieve the goals
• Regularly assess their own and student success,
  and use the results to improve learning
• Individually and collectively assume
  responsibility for the entire curriculum
• Embody life-long learning by engaging in
  professional development to improve teaching

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Ratings from August 2004
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Sources

• John Tagg, The Learning Paradigm College, Anker,
  2003
• William Massy, Honoring the Trust, Anker, 2003
• George Kuh, et al., Student Success in College,
  Jossey-Bass, 2005
• Richard H. Hersh and John Merrow, ed., Declining
  by Degrees, Palgrave, 2005
• Greater Expectations National Panel Report,
  AACU, 2002

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Goals for Today

• Develop some consensus understanding of what Deep
  Learning is for all of us, so we speak the same
  language
• Look at current literature on issues in higher
  education that originate in a lack of focus on
  student learning and development as the central
  goal of the academy across the nation
• Establish the importance of Deep Learning in
  sharpening the focus on student learning and
  development at the center of Winthrops mission

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Breakout Session I

• Define Deep Learning and list examples of
  pedagogies that produce it and ways to evaluate
  it. Think of both existing and possible examples
  in both categories.

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Deep Learning

• Attend to underlying meaning of information as
  well as content
• Integrate and synthesize different ideas, sources
  of information
• Discern, describe, and discuss patterns in
  evidence or phenomena
• Apply knowledge to/in new and different
  situations
• View issues from multiple perspectives

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• Deep Learning is learning that takes root in our
  apparatus of understanding, in the embedded
  meanings that define us and that we use to define
  the world.
• Tagg, page 70

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Students Today vs. Ten Years Ago

• Pay more to attend college
• Spend less time on academic tasks while there
• Learn less
• Get better grades

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The Academic Ratchet

• A term to describe the steady, irreversible
  shift of faculty allegiance away from the goals
  of a given institution, toward those of an
  academic specialty. The ratchet denotes the
  advance of an independent, entrepreneurial spirit
  among faculty nationwide, leading to increased
  emphasis on research and on publication and on
  teaching ones specialty in favor of general
  introduction courses, often at the expense of
  coherence in an academic curriculum.
  Institutions seeking to enhance their own
  prestige may contribute to the ratchet effect by
  reducing faculty teaching and advising
  responsibilities across the board, thus enabling
  faculty to pursue their individual research and
  publication with fewer distractions. The
  academic ratchet raises an institutions costs,
  and it results in undergraduates paying more to
  attend institutions in which they receive less
  faculty attention than in previous decades.
• Massy, page 97

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Realities Related to Deep Learning

• If we have a sharp focus on student learning and
  development as the center of our mission,
  generating Deep Learning is the most important
  job of Winthrop faculty.
• Deep Learning occurs frequently in many places
  across this campus it is a characteristic of
  Winthrop life.
• Many Winthrop faculty and staff are committed to
  Deep Learning and work hard to bring it about.
• We do a very poor job of evaluating student
  learning and faculty performance in ways that
  demonstrate the presence and centrality of Deep
  Learning at Winthrop.

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If Winthrop is to put student learning and
development as defined by Deep Learning at the
center of its mission, we must create

• A campus environment that expects it
• Pedagogies that generate it
• Evaluations of student learning (tests, papers,
  projects, etc.) that emphasize and reveal it
• Programs that demand it increasingly for progress
  to completion
• Evaluations of faculty that demonstrate they
  produce it
• A reward system that values it

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Breakout II

• How can we evaluate teaching in ways that show
  the presence and extent of Deep Learning by
  students?
• What would it take to create such a system of
  evaluation?
• Who would have to participate?
• What stands between where we are right now and
  doing this?

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• A Learning Paradigm College Aligns All of Its
  Activities Around the Mission of Producing
  Student Learning.
• Tagg, Page 280