Midterm Report
to the
Accrediting Commission for
Community and Junior Colleges
Draft
Date
Cabrillo College
6500 Soquel Avenue
Aptos, CA 95003
www.cabrillo.edu
Certification Page
To:
Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges
From:
Laurel Jones, Superintendent/President
Cabrillo College
6500 Soquel Drive, Aptos, CA 95003
I certify that there was broad participation by the campus community and believe this report accurately reflects the nature and substance of this institution.
Signatures:
Margarita Carrillo, Chair, Governing Board / DateLaurel Jones, Superintendent/President / Date
Kathie Welch, Vice President, Instruction and Accreditation Liaison Officer / Date
Robin McFarland, Faculty Senate President / Date
Alta Northcutt, President, Cabrillo Classified Employee Union / Date
Martin Vargas-Vega, Student Senate President / Date
Table of Contents
Statement on Report Preparation
Response to Team Recommendations and the Commission Action Letter
Recommendation 1
Recommendation 2
Recommendation 3
Recommendation 4
Response to Self-Identified Issues
Planning Agenda 1
Planning Agenda 2
Planning Agenda 3
Planning Agenda 4
Planning Agenda 5
Planning Agenda 6
Update on Substantive Change in Progress, Pending, or Planned
Appendix A
Statement on Report Preparation
The Accrediting Commission for Community and Junior Colleges, Western Association of Schools and Colleges, took action to reaffirm the accreditation of Cabrillo College at its meeting on January 8-10, 2014. The action letter from the Commission set in motion the process of responding to four recommendations and six actionable improvement plans.
The College immediately began engaging our participatory governance process to work on the recommendations and action plans. An Institutional Effectiveness Committee (IEC) was formed and became the Accreditation steering Committee.
The IEC reports to the College Planning Council (CPC). The charge of this committee is to improve program planning and resource allocation processes in support of student learning by:
● Ensuring program planning processes are documented
● Providing technical assistance to units developing program plans including establishing baseline data, designing measurable outcomes connected to College strategic plans and utilizing findings from evaluation efforts
● Reviewing and analyzing goals to identify institutional themes to aid the integration of planning and resource allocation efforts
● Recommending improvements to processes to ensure efficacy in fulfilling the college mission and that the campus meets accreditation standards
● Communicating trends and findings with the campus community and visiting accreditation teams
IEC Membership:
Director of Planning and Research, IEC Chair, ex-officio
VP Instruction, Accreditation Liaison Officer, ex-officio
VP Administrative Services, ex-officio
VP Student Services, ex-officio
Accreditation Co-Chair (2)
Outcomes Assessment Review Committee Chair, ex-officio
Administrator/Manager (2)
Faculty (2)
Confidential Staff (1)
Classified Staff (2)
Student (2)
This midterm report summarizes the work Cabrillo has done on the site team’s recommendations and the self-identified planning agendas. The Accreditation Liaison Officer (ALO) compiled a draft report which was reviewed and edited by the IEC. The report was then sent to the College Planning Council and the Faculty Senate for review and was approved by the Governing Board on June 6, 2016.
Laurel Jones, Superintendent/President / DateResponse to Team Recommendations and the Commission Action Letter
Recommendation 1
In order to improve effectiveness, the team recommends that the College build on its extensive, meaningful dialogue and develop a plan to document and assess institutional effectiveness more thoroughly through a culture of evidence embedded in codified roles, systems, and processes.
In response to Recommendation 1, Cabrillo formed the IEC to address all institutional goals and objectives and to ensure integration of planning and resource allocation. In addition, Cabrillo developed a list of centralized committees, members and reporting lines published in the Participatory Governance Manual[1] in December 2014. The College Planning Council (CPC) is our highest level participatory governance committee, and posted on the CPC website[2] are the up-to-date membership lists for the primary governance committees with links to their sites. An agenda template was also created in October 2013 for each participatory governance committee that includes institutional effectiveness measures and goals. The agenda template was revised and updated based upon committee feedback and has now been replaced by BoardDocs where every participatory governance committee posts agendas and minutes for public view. BoardDocs also serves as a searchable database to guide content searches of not only Cabrillo, but also other colleges using BoardDocs to compare policies and approaches to common problems. With these institution wide tools, our dialogue has been transformed from ephemeral conversations into systematic documentation readily accessible by the campus community.
To codify roles, systems, and processes, the aforementioned Participatory Governance Manual was developed and refined to both capture existing effective practices and clarify where needed. For example, page 8 of the manual codifies the roles of participatory governance committees, operational committees, subcommittees, ad hoc committees, and task forces. These terms had previously been used somewhat interchangeably, in some instances, such as with subcommittees and task forces. These have now been clarified to indicate the former is permanent and the latter is issue and time limited. The distinction between participatory governance and operational committees has also been helpful in setting standards for representation and communication with governance committees having constituency representation. In addition, this work developed consistency in the posting of agendas and minutes for Brown Act compliance. Operational committees have functional
representation relevant to the committee charge. In addition to providing definitions of terms and roles, the Participatory Governance Manual also provides diagrams of committee reporting lines (page 9) and decision making flow charts (page 12). Additional process flows for program planning are available on the Planning and Research Office (PRO) website[3]. The processes and associated diagrams were developed through an iterative and collaborative effort among ARC, IEC, Administrator Council, and CPC.
Three trainings on decision making processes were provided to the members of the CPC:
- CPC Retreat: 10/4/13 Agenda, 10/4/13 Minutes
- Pizza workshop – training on new agenda templates and websites (CPC 8/19/15)
- A Collaborative Process for Decision Making
Training was also provided for the managers for team building and decision making processes in the following meetings:
1. Managers’ Agenda 11-05-2014
2. Managers’ Meeting/Handling Difficult Conversations 11-05-2014
3. Managers’ Agenda 03-04-2015
4. Managers’ Meeting/Creating a Climate of Trust 03-04-2015
5. Governing Board Online Evaluation Form - Fall 2013
Classified staff were also provided with an opportunity for team building training:
Professional Development Workshops for Classified Staff.
PRO provided support on a year-long process to develop a data driven five year Strategic Plan[4]. These data were presented in series of forums and meetings to hundreds of participants. A visioning task force used participant feedback to create draft focus areas and goals that were finalized and adopted by CPC and the Governing Board. Each year the annual goals are prioritized through the participatory governance process and posted for public access along with a SmartSheet that tracks progress towards strategic plan goals:
http://www.cabrillo.edu/services/pro/strategicPlanning/
These updated strategic goals provide a basis for integrating program planning into resource requests to achieve College goals. Just after the team site visit, the College expanded its program planning and resource allocation process to include all operational units in all stages of their planning cycle. Previously, departments and services would have requests associated only with a six year comprehensive program plan. We have since moved to invite resource requests each year as part of the annual update process. All requests must be tied to a strategic goal or other institutional plan such as the technology plan, facilities plan, or education master plan. Requests are collected centrally via survey software and distributed to components (Instruction, Student Services, Administrative Services, President’s Office) for prioritization and identification of possible funding sources within their operational committees. Cross component dialog in the President’s Cabinet finalizes prioritizations and funding resource recommendations. These are forwarded to CPC for review, feedback, and approval and submission to the Governing Board for review and approval.
The IEC analyzes the final requests and allocations to determine trends, gaps, and process improvements. One planned improvement is the infrastructure that collects and manages requests. Currently the process involves web surveys and spreadsheets with manual processing to incorporate the request and prioritization task with existing program planning processes. The College is now ready to develop more robust infrastructure consisting of a database solution that will manage requests and prioritization scores and link allocations to budget data in the campus system. This will help ensure more precise, timely, and accurate allocations by providing budget codes and balances. It will also result in a data set that can be more readily and extensively analyzed. The College has requested technical assistance from the Institutional Effectiveness Partnership Initiative (IEPI) to aid the planning and design phase of such a system.
The IEC worked with PRO to create possible metrics of committee effectiveness and used them, along with information from other colleges, to design and implement an effectiveness survey. The results were presented to each primary governance committee with an omnibus analysis provided to the CPC. Each committee generated recommendations for improving their processes and effectiveness, which will be assessed.
Recommendation 2
In order to improve effectiveness, the team recommends that the College clarify and document its definition of a program and include the evaluation and improvement of all degree offerings in the program review and planning process.
ARC, a shared governance committee that analyzes each year’s SLO and AUO assessment results and makes recommendations to improve assessment processes across the campus, began the process to meet recommendation #2.
The first step was to analyze the recommendation itself. Minutes of the October 13, 2013 meeting, held immediately after the site visit, capture the preliminary thoughts of the group, which were only deepened when the college received the team’s final report and recommendation. The committee noted the following:
● Those interviewed by the visiting team gave differing definitions of a program.
● A quick perusal of the college web site found different usages of the word “program.” For instance, the English department described its courses and major as a program, but listed its writing awards as departmental awards. The website for Mathematics says “Welcome to the Math Department” and then described its courses and degrees. There was no consistency.
● Though the college was clear that it was using data from the assessment of its college core competencies to measure three different things - institutional level outcomes, the GE program, and program outcomes for degrees in transfer -- it was not clear to the visiting team. There were no maps of the assessment process to guide them, and the SLO assessment forms and program planning documents (Cabrillo’s name for program review) did not differentiate between the results for each specific area.
During spring semester 2014, ARC created an Action Plan to define and document what the College means by an “academic program” and to clarify and better publicize the assessment and program review processes for all degree offerings. The plan, along with its calendar for the accomplishment of its steps, was then taken to the following campus committees for feedback and approval:
● Instruction Council (link to minutes) I cannot find any minutes
● Faculty Senate ( minutes from 10/07/2014 meeting)
● College Planning Council (link to minutes) I cannot find any minutes
send to marcy - cannot find
● Governing Board (6/8/15 - Agenda Item I.2 - Annual Report on Student Learning Outcomes at Cabrillo)
In addition, it was featured in ARC’s 2014 Annual Report (page 10 and Appendix C) and, as part of that document, was also shared with the Governing Board, the faculty and classified unions, and the Student Senate.
The plan has 4 major parts:
1. Defining a program.
2. Publicizing that definition.
3. Demonstrating the link between the college core competencies and transfer degrees.
4. Evaluating all programs through program planning.
I. Definition of a Program:
An academic program at Cabrillo College is now defined as: “A collection or series of courses that lead to a degree, certificate, or transfer to another institution of higher education. For purposes of college organization, a program is composed of all the degrees and certificates offered by a specific academic department. CTE departments that offer separate programs accredited by different outside accrediting agencies are considered one department that offers multiple programs.”
An academic department is: “A group of faculty in a related field of study or a discipline that offers an academic program.”
Departments are people. Programs are courses of study, certificates and degrees.
As a result of this new definition, Cabrillo has gone from having 21 programs to 56 (see the difference in numbers in ACCJC annual reports 2014 and 2015).
Six of those programs are interdisciplinary and do not belong to specific departments. They include:
● Bilingual/Bicultural Studies
● General Education
● General Science
● Latino/Latina Studies (a certificate is in the process of being approved by the Chancellor’s Office and, once it is approved, a degree will then be created).
● Liberal Arts and Sciences
● Liberal Studies/Elementary Teaching
ARC has created a plan to assess those programs and will undertake a pilot of the plan in Spring 2016 (ARC minutes December 7, 2016). Minutes are not yet posted
II. Publicizing the Definition of a Program
The definition is now published in the following places:
● College Catalog (page 48)
● Program Planning Instructions (is this true yet? Will it be? Not ready yet
In addition, it is the process of being added to:
● Appropriate Board Policies and Administrative Procedures
● The faculty contract, as appropriate
● Appropriate other documents that include programs
● Appropriate places on the college web site (including each academic department’s web site and listing under Majors/Programs)
A publicity campaign to highlight the new definition is also underway. It has repeatedly been discussed as part of the SLO Coordinator’s reports at Faculty Senate, at the Governing Board meetings, and in division meetings. The campaign will include presentations at the Department Chairs meeting during Spring 2016 staff development week, division meetings and other venues that arise from campus activities, as appropriate.