4

Yesterday was good. Hunter entered to the theme from Superman, and that sort of set the tone. He had this really nice speech at the beginning where he talked about the opportunity that college represented for people and cautioned everyone not to let anyone ever belittle the students we work with. I never really see him get worked up about anything other than when he recounts stories of it when someone downplayed developmental education or the students working through those course.

The day started with a fairly basic review - the differences between assessment and evaluation (short answer: assessment is what other people do to you, evaluation is what you do for yourself), formative and summative processes, etc. We then moved into identifying the values we bring in to the workplace and talked about "measuring what we value rather than valuing what we can measure."

It was more less a natural progression, which I enjoyed. Figuring out what you value about your work isn't terribly hard after thinking about it. Then it's just a matter of measuring it and sharing it with people. Hunter said the industry standard for developmental courses is figuring out which percentage of your students go on to take a college course and earn a "C" or better. And that eliminates the FGCU problem (as I've called it - students who simply go to Edison for developmental course, never intending to take college credit at Edison) - if we had 100 students take a developmental course, and only 50 of them took a college credit course at Edison, and only 40 passed it, our passing rate would be 80%, not 40%.

Today is:

9-11:45 / Evaluation
1 - 4 / A model for evaluating developmental programs

From what he said yesterday, this is essentially the process of going back to the campus and eyeballing "what works."