President’s Workgroup
April 18, 2014 – 19-224 -- 1:30 to 3:00 pm
Attending: Sandy Garber, Mark Woolsey, Joani Fisher, Nancy Schafer, Terri Eckel, Patrick Burns, Jeremy Obudzinski, Joanne Oellers, Karen Leja, Scott Farnsworth (only could stay 30 minutes)
Survey
100 surveys were returned; 39 from faculty; 53 from staff; 4 no affiliation, 1 other/CTEC, and 3 Other/Prescott.
Question Numbers 1 and 4 – people responded with their job duties. If doing future surveys, need to look at wording of questions.
Some patterns of similar responses were reviewed:
Students not prepared
Mentoring
Building relationships
Getting engagement
Communication – all directions – among all college community
Conferencing
Connection/visibility of faculty with students
Advising, mandatory advising, Peer advising, Faculty advising
Sandy will draft paragraph to send out with survey results; thanking people for participating; received good number of responses; attach summary of responses; plan to review at Summer Institute – invite to Institute session
Summer Institute, May 13-14-15
1-1/2 hour session on Student Success Workgroup. Could split into two groups, faculty and staff, discuss survey results and summarize into groupings for half-hour; then come back together to exchange information/ideas.
Faculty group led by Joani, Nancy, Mark, Joanne
Staff group led by Sandy, Patrick, Terri
Karen will check with Todd Conaway to see if second room available for session so groups can split up for the 30 minutes.
Student Success Plan
Five plans/proposals received were reviewed. Plan should take ideas from surveys and from best practices.
Again, many similar ideas, including:
Blog (TELS did 9x9x25 blog – very effective; opened a lot of communication; comments, articles, writings posted)
Group looked at Library page, Beyond the Wall, as an example of a page that could be formatted on Student Success.
Potential Blog topic – define student success
(Blogs are taking place of newspapers for students)
Focus Groups with students
Book discussions (Tinto’s book)
Panel discussions (potential group – first generation college students)
Brown Bags
Topics – multiple topics may get more people involved; email suggested topics to Karen.
May want to have Dr. Blacklaw lead a group.
Report on New Student Orientation
Academic Advising
Dates/times – need to differ to again get more people involved. First Fridays are not good days for faculty attendance – 2nd and 4th Fridays better for faculty
Food – providing food helps get attendance; especially would like to have food for student activities
Good way to get students to activities – invite them to give their input/need their input
FYE class students – good group to target – 12 or 13 sections in Fall
Target activities for different groups
Student Services would like to have activities
Scavenger hunt has been effective to get students involved. At other institutions, a passport used to get students to activities
Student Survey
Important to get student input. Could have SLC create survey; contact variety of students to be part.
May want to look at New Student Orientation student interview video to get some questions.
Workgroup Continuation
This group, or a group like it, should continue to monitor activities as to what’s working, what is not.
Administrative Support
Important to have continued administrative support for Student Success activities. Will have need for some budget monies.
Actions
Sandy will send out draft paragraph to go out with survey results.
Sandy will work with Karen on outline of plan and send out to group by April 30th