Full Description
This book is a step-by-step guide for improving student learning in higher education. The authors argue that a fundamental obstacle to improvement is that higher educators, administrators, and assessment professionals do not know how to improve student learning at scale. By this they mean improvement efforts that span an entire program, affecting all affiliated students. The authors found that faculty and administrators particularly struggle to conceptualize and implement multi-section, multi-course improvement efforts. It is unsurprising that ambitious, wide-reaching improvement efforts like these would pose difficulty in their organization and implementation. This is precisely the problem the authors address. The book provides practical strategies for learning improvement, enabling faculty to collaborate, and integrating leadership, social dynamics, curriculum, pedagogy, assessment, and faculty development. In Chapter 2, the authors tell a program-level improvement story from the perspective of a faculty member. Chapter 3 inverts Chapter 2. Beginning from the re-assess stage, the authors work their way back to the individual faculty member first pondering whether she can do something to impact students' skills. They peel back each layer of the process and imagine how learning improvement efforts might be thwarted at each stage. Chapters 4 through 9 dig deeper into the learning improvement steps introduced in Chapters 2 and 3. Each chapter provides strategies to help higher educators climb each step successfully. Chapter 10 paints a picture of what higher education could look like in 2041 if learning improvement were embraced. And, finally, Chapter 11 describes what you can do to support the movement.
Contents
Foreword—Stephen Hundley Afterword—Natasha Jankowski Acknowledgments Preface Part One. Introduction to Learning Improvement at Scale 1. Laying Out the Problem 2. What Could Learning Improvement Look Like in Higher Education? 3. Dismantling Learning Improvement Part Two. A Step-By-Step Guide to Improving Learning at Scale 4. Testing the Collective Will to Improve 5. Vision 6. Where are We Now? 7. Developing Interventions 8. Intervention Implementation 9. Re-Assessment Part Three. Expanding Learning Improvement at Scale 10. Doing Higher Education as If Learning Improvement Matters Most 11. Join the Improvement Movement. What You Can Do Now Appendix A Appendix B Appendix C References About the Authors Index
