Improving Policies and the Policies Process

Hi Everyone!  My name is Nina de Guzman and I’m working with Ms. Ellie Moore on the POG (Process, Operations and Governance) team at Reinvention.  Whether you are a Student, Faculty or Staff member, we would love to hear from you regarding current policy issues and how they affect you.  Here are some questions to ponder….

• Are current policies being communicated so that everyone understands their purpose?
• What policies are not being communicated enough?
• Have there been any recent policy changes that impacted your area which you would have liked to have had communicated another way?
• What are some examples of bad policies?
• Are Emails or memos an informal way of administering policy?
• What is not included in policy that needs to be included?
• How do you escalate a revision or addition to a policy?

Your opinions matter to us in order to help improve the process here at CCC!  Hope to hear from you soon.

     – The POG team

What should the tenure process be?

The Teaching and Learning task force of Reinvention is looking at the tenure process for full-time credit faculty members.  Many people gave a lot of feedback last semester, and that helped us get to where we are now.

We feel — and Kojo, our Provost, agrees — that the current system is broken.  The requirement for 15 graduate credit-hours does not serve us and should be eliminated or replaced with something else.  The tenure project and the structure of the tenure portfolio are also under review.

However, if the current system is to change, we need to replace it with something.  The tenure process should be a time to mentor new faculty members and also a time to evaluate them.

Here is a short summary of what we’re now thinking:

We are envisioning a tenure process focused on helping new faculty members acclimate to the college, giving regular feedback in order to help them achieve excellence, and providing meaningful faculty development through a Center for Teaching and Learning at each campus.

But we also want to know what you think is important in the tenure process.

We ask that you:

• Focus on what should happen, not what does happen now
• Look at big questions:
  • What should the tenure process accomplish?
  • What best serves the educational needs of our students?
  • What best serves the long-term health of our seven colleges?
• Remember that faculty members are a diverse group — think about the best teacher you know and the worst teacher you know, and ask what tenure process would be good for both
• Don’t feel constrained to compare to our current system—feel free to start from scratch
• Be succinct, if possible, so we can use this blog for an active conversation (a ten-page dissertation may not be the best way to communicate)

Thank you for your input!

     - Michael Maltenfort, Teaching & Learning Task Force

Light at the End of the Tunnel?

It’s no surprise that unemployment is on the rise- we see it, we read about it and we experience it through the stories of family and friends or maybe we are living it … job security isn’t very promising either, when only 23% of those under 30 say they feel more secure in their jobs now than they did a year ago according to a poll for CNN . That number drops to a measly 10% for those between the ages of 50 and 64. It’s easy to understand why people are concerned when unemployment remains stubbornly above 9% and is expected to stay there through the end of 2012. For those who are lucky enough to have a job, median incomes are on the decline. Meanwhile, there are 46.2 million people in the U.S. living in poverty – the highest level in almost 20 years.

So, the question is, is there a “light at the end of the tunnel?”  The answer is yes… The Student Support & Services (SSS) Task Force is looking at just that – how can we help prepare our students to face the challenges ahead in planning their career? What can be done now to prevent our students from becoming just another face clouded by dismal percentages of unemployment?

It’s no longer about getting a “job”- it’s about building a sustainable career in a volatile economy. The SSS team is focusing on what resources exist or need to be created to help students take the first step on the road to professional success.  From building career “roadmaps” of success to examining our career centers, the SSS team is examining every facet of the student life cycle in career development and planning.

For now, we have a little homework assignment for you- take a look here at which employers are hiring and what they are looking for- do you have what it takes to not become just another dismal percentage?

What would you find helpful in planning your career path? We would love to hear your stories, ideas and feedback ….

     – Irene Castañeda, Student Support & Services Task Force

New Term Means… New Ideas!

Summer is over. With the fall 2011 term upon us, new Task Force members have joined the Reinvention Student Support and Services Task Force.  Where do we go from here? Despite improvements in student supports and the CCC Registration process for the fall term, more needs to be done.

The Task Force plans on making the next CCC credit and non-credit student Registration process even better than the last. We’re also looking at how to improve academic College Advising for students. This means we’ll be looking at the entire college advising process itself, the many responsibilities College Advisors have, and how they’re prepared and trained to meet the challenges of their critical role supporting students.  Additional areas of focus will be on pathways to assist guiding students in their career choices, bridging the gap between CCC students and employment opportunities, tools to help students choose careers, orientation processes, and evaluating career centers at the campuses.  Much needs to be done. Are there any ideas you have that will make this Task Force successful?

     – Dan Dutchak, Student Support & Services Task Force

Operational Excellence and Optimization Task Force lives on through Reinvention-inspired Student Services changes proposed at Kennedy-King College

Operational Excellence and Optimization (OEO), one of the original Task Forces of the Reinvention team of City Colleges of Chicago (CCC), continues to produce strategic changes to positively impact the way City Colleges services many of its 127,000 students on a daily basis.  Recently merged into the newly formed Processes, Operations and Governance (POG) Task Force, Operational Excellence and Optimization was originally charged with diagnosing the registration process and producing substantive changes to increase student satisfaction with registration and to ultimately steamline the process to make it easier for students to register early for classes at CCC.

One College immediately impacted by this objective was Kennedy-King College (KKC).  Led by Interim Dean De’Reese Reid-Hart and endorsed by Interim President Derrick Harden and new AVC Preston Harden, KKC has made plans to address issues with registration services to students by:

• New Student Center.  This change will allow the college to more adequately address new students in a “one stop shop” format to more readily and easily navigate registration into the College.  It will also allow and encourage more robust and year round advising of new students (one of the principle recommendations of the OEO team), support the “1st Year Experience Initiative” and provide greater communication of the services, options and benefits students may utilize to successfully complete their educational goals.
• New Advising Center.  This change will once again allow for year round advising of returning students.  In addition, it will allow for more “quality advising” of students utilizing newly recommended career advising technology to again support positive student outcomes relative to their educational or career goals.
• Renovating and Expanding the Financial Aid Center.  This change will bring added privacy, technology and file management to the Financial Aid department that will increase the resources available to all students requesting and/or receiving Financial Aid.

These changes are expected to be completely enacted at KKC by the end of the year.  Once enacted, these changes will serve as the realization of the vision of OEO and will represent an enduring legacy of an original Reinvention Task Force.

     – David A. Sanders, Director of Auxiliary Services, Kennedy-King College

Blogging and POGing

My name is Charles Ansell and I am the project team leader for the Processes, Operations and Governance (POG) task force. Before going into what in the world POG is / means / does (in a nutshell: nine people – students, faculty, staff – investigating real pains and possible gains in HR, Procurement, Security, Policy and more) I want to second some sentiments from over at Harold Lounge…

There Are Many Many Many CCC-related Blogs Now

On September 16, 2011, The Realist at HL, proclaimed Tolle Blege - “Take Up and Blog” – proving the Romans foresaw every way to prevent Latin from ever becoming a dead language. Realist notes the plethora of new blogs emerging this academic year and takes it rightly as multiple call to arms – to all to have more say in the shaping of CCC. He concludes:

“Get out there and blog (and fb). Give Don some input! Give Kojo some feedback! Reshape Reinvention! Tweet the Chancellor!”

I wholeheartedly second this. Harold and Truman lounges have been ahead in online dialogue, and it’s being bolstered suddenly and to huge effect by CCC broadly, particularly via social media and blogs – from students receiving solutions to registration problems on facebook, to CCC providing updates on Twitter, to Provost Kojo Quartey’s workflow and academic policy investigations yielding faculty feedback to integrate, to HW President Don Laackman’s lifehacking,  student-entrepreneurship-promoting and eponymous-tropical-storm-chasing. Ideas, major change proposals, and flat-out helpful info and fun links now abound, supplemented and re-shaped through constant comments and re-posts. It’s my hope the same happens for this Reinvention blog.

The above conversations are hugely important and, thus far, hardly duplicative. The trick is to keep tabs on this constant info flow. (Personally, I use an RSS feed reader – which will retrieve all your favorite blogs, newsites, social networking sites and more into one personalized portal. Google Reader is what I use to “subscribe” to stay up-to-date while on a stalled blue line headed downtown, though others work well too.)

POG POG POG

Over the next several months, you’ll receive timely, POG-ly updates through this blog from myself and from the POG team. We are two students, three faculty, an adult educator, a registrar, an HR admin, an advisor and a team lead – representing all seven colleges and do, of course. Doing our best to prioritize issues by impact (to student outcomes and organizational health) and feasibility (can it be done), we decided to delve into current-state investigation, best practice modeling and gap analyses on the following:

• HR: On the pre-employment side we’re looking at workflow for hiring faculty and staff, staffing patterns and broader ability to forecast demand for new hires and recruitment strategies and tactics. For post-employment we’re hoping to make recommendations on performance management and professional development.
• Procurement: Checking-out vendor management (how we leverage spend for volume discount purposes) – note PO workflow recommendations from Reinvention are already in the works, to the ends of reduced cycle time and other benefits.
• Security: What security policies could best impact student success for the majority of students?
• Governance: What are all the governing bodies at CCC and what functions presently overlap? (These include Adult Education off-sites.)
• Policies: Where are policies stored? How do we communicate them? Do they conflict with each other?

We’ll be posting project plan info and data-driven recommendations. On a barely related note, as we do our work, we’ll be debating whether or not to use myriad tech tools to aid our endeavors. Do you have certain Web 2.0 free tools you have found useful in completing your school work, managing your projects, sharing your files or leading your classes? Please share. Some I’ve considered: mindmeister for brainstorming and trello for collaboration.

Talk to Us

Look again at the above areas of POG interest – Are we looking at the right things? Do you have opinions on this? Research? Leads? Note: This blog is not titled “Listen to Us.”

Talk. To. Us.

Your fellow faculty, staff and students originate Reinvention recommendations, soliciting and reconciling input from all directions – they do so as a principle of good research. Without your regular contributions, reactions, directions and knowledge, however, we all lose. Q&A’s and conversations at college-wide meetings and with faculty councils, adult educators, leadership, staff focus groups, student associations and other governance bodies only go part-way. Please let this blog serve as a vehicle for involvement in any and all changes going on at Reinvention.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

     – Charles Ansell, Process, Operations & Governance Task Force

Teaching and Learning

Hi All! A new crew arrived a few weeks ago to form one of our new task forces, Teaching and Learning. The task force is charged with the question: “How do we ensure that we have high quality and continuously improving instruction relevant to today’s student?” The team is comprised of nine really super faculty, staff, and students that bring to the team a wealth of knowledge and a drive for improving CCC for our students. We are ensuring that we are building upon the hard work of the spring 2011 task forces.

Teaching and Learning will focus on components across Adult Education, Developmental Education, and Faculty Development. A common theme that seems to surface in many cross-team conversations (and supported by last semester’s Developmental Education team) is a need to have multiple pathways that serve the different needs, abilities, and intent of our diverse student population. Additionally, by having a combination of Adult Education and Developmental Education task force members on one team, more light has been shed on many of the academic and non-academic similarities among the two student groups. It will be really interesting to learn what the team discovers this semester!

On the Adult Education sub-team Ileo Lott (OH), Kevin Scavuzzo (DA), and Ada Muhammad (WR) are exploring:

1. The potential synergies that might exist between Developmental Education and Adult Education as we try to better understand the needs and abilities of these students
2. The structures or pathways for advanced Adult Education students that would result in more of those students transitioning to credit programs
3. The existing limitations and inaccuracies of current testing policies and procedures that result in inappropriate placement of Adult Education students

The spring 2011 task force and collaborators laid solid groundwork for the new team to forge ahead on improving developmental education across the district. This team, Neila Adams (TR), James Lacy (MX), and Athan Vouzianas (HW), and their work will revolve around:

1. Ensuring we take a holistic approach to testing and placement to ensure students are appropriately placed at the onset to improve student success (including COMPASS Awareness and Prep)
2. Tailoring course design to the specific and very different needs of our developmental students (including College Success)

A lot of headway was made last semester on the Faculty and Staff Development task force. This semester, as a part of Teaching and Learning, Michael Maltenfort (TR), Jennifer Meresman (HW), and Mary Beth Nick (WR) will be working to:

1. Solidify the “Talents of Teaching,” which are  proposed measures by which we can drive faculty development and measure faculty excellence
2. Align and revise the inputs and outputs of the tenure project against the overall purpose and goal of the tenure process

You will be hearing from all of our task force members as they reach out for your thoughts, expertise, and feedback. We’d love to hear from you; feel free to comment!

     – Alicia Rankin, Teaching & Learning Task Force

Reinvention initiatives in implementation

In May, the Spring 2011 Reinvention task forces finalized their recommendations and presented them to the faculty council (via the gallery walk) and the Chancellor.  Since then, the Reinvention teams and leadership have been trying to understand which of those recommendations most resonate with the CCC community.  After conversations at each of the colleges with faculty, staff, and students, we have started the implementation of some of those ideas.

We would love to get your thoughts and feedback.  Even with the initiatives under way, we welcome additional conversation as we work through the details and aim to ensure high-quality implementation.

Here’s a list of initiatives, programs, systems, and plans that are happening now:

• Faculty-led development of new CIS curriculum.  We are looking to build out our computer science programs with an eye towards adding students in some of the upper-level areas around database management, networking, and web development.
• Expansion of the Gateways to City Colleges program (the Truman Incentive Program, but we can’t call it that at other colleges) to bridge adult education students into credit with tuition-waived classes.  There has been a steady upward trend of incentive students who continued their college studies after completing the program. The program is being piloted at Olive-Harvey and Daley this semester.
• A GED College Prep pilot program which offers students more intensive help in taking the GED and introduces them to college programs and student support services.
• We are creating a new scholarship program to encourage students to take the GED exam.  This will help us with our completion numbers and also give us opportunities to recruit students into our credit programs.
• We have initiated the process to acquire an early alert and appointment management system.   This system will allow us to better manage student appointments in student services, keep notes on students, make referrals for various student services, and run early alert campaigns in an automated way.  Vendor selection will take place over the coming months, with representation from various groups and every college.  We hope to have the system in place by early next semester.
• We have initiated the process to acquire a staff performance management system.  This system which will help us do fair and consistent evaluations that will also help us target additional professional development aimed at benefiting a diverse cross-section of CCC employees.   We realize that there needs to be discussion about this with the unions and with each of you before anything is put into place, and we will ensure that those discussions take place.
• One of the issues that we have been striving to address is the difficulty that college administrations, faculty, and staff have in getting access to student data from Peoplesoft.  We’re therefore in the process of writing a request for proposal for a  “business intelligence” tool to democratize access to our Peoplesoft data.
•  Similarly, we think it is critical that students have access to a degree audit and educational planning system.  Such a system would enable students to electronically see how the classes they have taken compare to our degree requirements, and create an educational plan to fill in the difference.  Those educational plans can then go to an advisor for approval.  You can imagine how these electronic educational plans will become part of a revised and updated advising process.
• Currently, Harold Washington, Kennedy-King, and Olive-Harvey have Wellness Centers, that address students psychological issues, form support groups, and help connect our students to services in the community.  There were interviews last Friday, 9/9, and we anticipate expansion of the Wellness Centers to colleges that do not currently have one in the coming months.
• At Truman, one of the faculty is leading a Center for Teaching and Learning pilot program.  For the time being, we are figuring out what programs, workshops, and tools we should offer to faculty through this program.  Longer term, we envision these centers expanding the faculty-led professional development opportunities.
• We are working to acquire room and event scheduling software to make the process of finding an empty room easier.
• We know that in the current state, it’s difficult to get supplies, materials, or any kind of funds on a short time frame.  There are changes underway to the procurement process – which will streamline the approvals process and reduce the amount of time it takes to get items.
• We made improvements to the Fall 2011 credit registration process – as you may have seen in previous emails – and the corresponding increase in student satisfaction.
• We are initiating conversations with faculty about  manufacturing to understand how we could build stronger employer partnerships in those occupational programs.

We welcome your feedback or thoughts on any of these initiatives.  Although they are in flight, we realize that conversation, communication, and redirection will be necessary to ensure that they are successful.

Let us know what you think by posting comments here.

    - Sameer Gadkaree, Center for Operational Excellence

Career and Academic Program Pathways – Fall 2011 Workstreams

The old Program Portfolio Review task force has been renamed Career and Academic Program Pathways (CAP)and our scope has been focused more on assuring the full pathway for a student towards their goals. This Fall, the CAPP task force team is focusing on five workstreams: Occupational Program Review, CCC Articulation Strategy, Adult and Vocational Education Bridges, Return on Educational Investment by program and assisting with the Implementation of Spring 2011 Recommendations.In Occupational Program Review we will continue our work reviewing programs. This Fall we hope to review Education and Training programs (including a continued review of Child Development), Transportation programs, Distribution and Logistics programs, Business programs, Healthcare Support programs, and Law and Public Safety Programs. Since these are occupational programs, our focus will be on how to help students on the path to a viable career.Articulation Strategy will be looking at different models of articulation, which models are best for each type of program, and how we can get there.Adult and Vocational Education Bridges focuses on the best models and programs for bridges to occupational credit programs for adult education students. In later semesters this workstream will be expanded for bridges to transfer programs.Return on Educational Investment seeks to understand the economic returns to the student and the City from different programs so that we better understand how to communicate value to the student and the value of the institution.
Finally, in Implementation we will be working with faculty in Computer Science, Manufacturing, and Health Care to start working on areas of agreement. In Computer Science the focus is on building a robust transfer degree. In Manufacturing the focus is on tying our programs to industry credentials. In Health Care the focus is on creating a common health care core curriculum.

     – Leighton O’Connell-Miller, Career & Academic Program Pathways