Good afternoon and welcome to the fifth installment of the Program Development Series for ACPA17. Our focus today is on “What makes a successful program proposal”. My name is Ray Plaza and I serve as the APCA17 Program Chair and I am joined by my colleague Thomas Murray, our Spotlight Sessions Coordinator.
The Program Committee has developed a series of webinars to assist with both program and presenter development. All of the sessions before the Program deadline, which is upcoming September 9th, are focused on the program process, and the sessions after the selection of programs in October will be focused on presenter development. We see these webinars as opportunities to increase and expand professional development and an opportunity for those of you joining the webinar to ask a variety of questions about programs and the process. This webinar is being recorded and will be available on our Program Resources page on the ACPA17 website so that you can follow up afterwards.
Our webinar today provides a reminder snapshot of the different programs types available at ACPA17, an opportunity to share feedback on what makes successful program proposals, and provides tips on what top programs provide, provides a review of the critical components in the submission process and a wrap-up of dates and contacts.
You may notice different colored bars on the side of the presentation. These correspond to particular focus areas and have been consistent throughout the webinar series. For example, the blue bar is typically the introductory slides, while the orange bars, are the main focus of the webinar. If you’re new to the GoTo software piece, if you’re doing this online, you’re able to type up questions and there will be opportunities throughout the webinar to ask specific questions as they arise.
So we want to share this little graphic from William Glasser, that talks about how we learn; it talks about, we learn 10% of what we read, but I want to highlight, we learn 70% what we discuss, 80% of what we experience, and 95% of what we teach others. So when we think about what it means to be an ACPA program presenter, it is about learning and teaching others, so in that process of teaching others we also learn, so that’s a very important piece behind why we have programs at convention.
Throughout the webinar series, we have been including perspectives from throughout the ACPA membership. This a piece from one of our longtime leaders, Vernon Wall, who you may all know from LeaderShape and one of the founding faculty of SJTI. Here, he talks about how the curriculum at our convention is always current, thoughtful, and bold, and provides an opportunity for our profession to come together to talk about the needs and issues we face. So just one perspective from a long-time member.
In thinking about ACPA17, there are many different programmatic options; there are actually nine different ways available to you that will engage you in the program process. Whether you’re a new graduate student, an entry-level professional, mid-level, senior-level or faculty member, we believe that there is something for you within the programmatic process. But we can’t submit that program proposal for you, we really need you to submit that program proposal.
ACPA17 provides different opportunities so over the next few slides, I want to briefly highlight what some of these opportunities are. For example, there’s the opportunity to present a research poster. This is an opportunity to create a formal poster, there will be an opportunity for you to interact with your colleagues, and display your poster throughout the convention.
Another way, if you’re thinking about doing something out the classroom, is submitting a formal research paper. These will be part of our 75-minute programming slots where in combination with 2 other papers, you are part of a group that has a discussant that moderates the discussion, and you talk about some of the scholarly research you’ve done.
Another way is through a Practice poster, some of you just finished opening or training in the halls – let’s say you did something innovative, this could be a great opportunity to do a poster on what you did, highlight that best practice in a poster format, and get that programmatic experience.
This slide highlights some of our major program types, such as general programs, these are the traditional sessions that you would often find at convention. These are 60 minute sessions that are rooted in theory an in competency, and we’ll talk about those later. Then we have our sponsored programs, these are general programs that are sponsored by the different entity groups. Whether it’s one of our functional areas or one of our networks such as the LatinX Network, the Pan-African Network, or one of our Colaitions such as the Coalition on Womens Identities, if your program hits one of these focus areas, your program could be sponsored by one of these entity groups; all it would need is for you to mark that in the program submission process. Let’s say you have an idea that you believe is going to take more than 60 minutes; then you could submit an extended session. These are two-hour length sessions that provide you the opportunity to go much more in-depth on a particular topic or issue.
Next we have our spotlight sessions, which Tom is our Coordinator for; these are half-hour sessions, so within traditional hour-time block, you would have 2 sessions that are related to each other. This is a great opportunity if you’re a new presenter and want to highlight an innovative practice on your campus, a spotlight session could be that great entry into your programmatic experience at ACPA.
Another new program type is our Competency-Based Sessions . This was a focus of a previous webinar so we encourage you to view that webinar. But this session is specifically focused on the ACPA/NASPA Professional Competencies. We see these competency sessions as an opportunity to focus on the needs of our mid-level and senior level professionals. Our goal is to have one competency-based session per competency and level, whether it be foundational, intermediate and advanced.
In addition, we also feature technology-related programming, which was also featured in a previous webinar. So for example, we have Genius Labs. These would happen during the convention and at our Social Media Command Center. These are opportunities to get hands-on demonstrations of the latest software and technologies that help our work as professionals.
Introduced at ACPA14 in Indianapolis, we will continue to offer PechaKuchas. These are PechaKucha 20x20, which is a simple presentation format where you show 20 images, each for 20 seconds. The images advance automatically and you talk along to the slides. If you are a storyteller and willing to engage with an audience, this will be a great opportunity for you. And then finally, prior to the official start of Convention, we will continue to offer Pre-Convention workshops. These can be ½ day or full day sessions. Information about our slate of Pre-Convention workshops for ACPA17 will be shared at the beginning of September, and you’ll be able to register for those as well. Just a snapshot of the 9 different ways you’re connected as a program presenter. Now we want to shift to the main focus of our presentation, which is what makes a successful program proposal for ACPA17? And I’m going to turn it over to Thomas.
Thanks Ray. Hi folks, as Ray previewed earlier, I am going to be talking about the things that make a program proposal successful, as well as what top programs provide to their audience. These tips were collected from folks on the programs team who have attended and presented at the convention in the past, so this is really some collective wisdom from those who have been successful at this process. You will notice some duplication of ideas, and I think it’s helpful to see that duplication so you can see what issues come up a lot.
Reviewers are asked to look at how well a proposal is supported by the literature in our field. Now that doesn’t mean that what you offer in your session must be completely and directly tied to a theory or model – maybe you have adapted something, or perhaps your program or experience offers a counterpoint to the literature. But, in general, we want to see something that is informed by research in higher education.
When reviewers read your proposal, they want to be able to get a mental image for how that session is going to play out. So your proposal should include an outline that accomplishes this – so the reviewer knows that you have a plan for how you will parcel out the time that you have in your session.
The convention provides all of us with an incredible space in which we can think creatively and innovatively. Outside of the constraints of the practicalities that often bog us down at work, sessions can and should get participants to think outside of the box or even create a new box – to push us forward as a profession. Of course, we don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so being grounded in the “tried and true” is fine. But if all a session provides is tried and true, it is not necessarily encouraging growth. As an example, a session that I co-presented last year on providing critical feedback, we looked at the research. We took a framework that most of us are familiar with – SMART goals – and created a new framework – SMARTER – adding a few letters to the acronym, for providing employees with critical feedback.
The proposal form has some very specific prompts and relatively short word counts, so your proposal needs to be concise. You don’t want to assume that the reviewer is going to make the connection between your proposal and competencies or that your session will be engaging. You really need to spell that out in your proposal and make it very explicit and very clear. Instead of trying to be subtle, you can write things like, “This session relates to the Social Justice and Inclusion competency because….”
Sessions should engage the audience, in some way providing them a way to interact with you, each other, and the material. Now, this looks differently in different sessions and from different presenters, but we want to be sure that our convention-goers get an experience that allows them to be more hands on than just listening to a lecture format for an hour. Earlier, Ray pointed out that we learn 80% of what we experience, much more than what we simply read or hear. And hands-on does not need to be some big complicated project or connection. In a session I attended a few years ago on universal design, this took the form of just some brief personal reflection and freewriting time for us to be able to consider how we could implement some of the concepts in our first week back to campus.
I touched on this briefly before, but we definitely want something that pushes our profession forward – that challenges the way we do our work – so that we are continuously improving the work that we do for our students.
So this slide contains the comments that I actually wrote when we were asked for ideas on what makes a good proposal or session. I cannot stress enough the importance of your abstract and the audience level, so beginner, intermediate, or advanced, that you select. If your session gets accepted, then your title, the 80 words of your abstract, and the audience level are the only things the convention-goers have to determine if your session is the one that they should attend. Your abstract should be a very accurate in its representation of what it is that you are doing and you should be honest about the audience. It’s fine if your session is for beginners, or maybe if you originally thought it was for beginners, you want to reconsider whether your material is best suited for those who have more experience.
It’s all about managing expectations. If you have a session that does what your abstract says and for the people it says it’s for, you are more likely to have satisfied audience members. Time is very precious at convention, so when people feel like there is somewhat of a bait-and-switch between abstract and session, they tend to be disappointed. That means that if you write your proposal without actually developing your session – which I know a lot of us do – you should be referring back to that proposal and abstract as you develop it, using your original learning outcomes, and your original outline – that’s what got you accepted in the first place!
Now, many of us have experienced this before, that we are so familiar with a topic that we talk to others about it as if they know everything that we know. Or maybe you’ve been the recipient of that – my father was a chemistry professor and he certainly struggled with coming down to my level when trying to teach me high school chemistry.
Don’t assume that the program reviewers are familiar with any of your content because you don’t know their background. This makes being concise even more important because if you can pare your words down, it gives you more space to explain what you as the expert know to someone who may have no knowledge of it.
Again, many folks are looking for innovation. What are some new and different ways that we can look at student development, or human resource management, or budgets? What created the need for this innovation? How did it come about? How might it have been informed by research? These are things indicating innovation that program reviewers are going to want to see so that they know that the session will be forward thinking.
Successful proposals and presentations appeal to different kinds of learners. They integrate auditory and visual learning styles and offer something hands-on for kinesthetic learners who learn best by doing. In a session I co-facilitated last year on using storytelling as a way to teach leadership, we discussed the research that led to our framework, we discussed and provided a visual for the framework, we told our own stories, we had participants write their own stories and then tell them to a small group to get feedback. While all those pieces are very simple, that format allowed us to engage different types of learning styles.