Monday, February 10, 2014

Making the Vision a Plan for Success

“Components of an Effective Outcomes-Based Assessment Plan and Report” – Bresciani

            This chapter starts off by discussing the amount of assessment plans any given department should have. The authors discuss how the head of a department may create completely different assessments, each catered towards the individualized components of the office. Another option is to have a universal assessment done to see if there is benchmarks hit in each area or subdivision of the office. I see this happening within the Greek Life office here on campus. Our staff includes two professional staff members as well as six graduate assistants. At times, it can be great to have so many people on staff working together and there are also times when there are just too many cooks in the kitchen. Because of the surplus of staff, some GAs, myself included, will assess the work of their collateral (focus within the office) to see what practices can be done better. This; however, is not always in line with what the head of the office has in mind or it is and they don’t have the time to approve it and see the results because there are so many other things going on each semester.


            Another point in this chapter is defining learning outcomes and being able to recognize what is institutional, divisional, and program specific. One of the major efforts we as a Greek Life office make is to have the community shift their focus from internal to external. Our chapters are so focused on the operations and success of themselves that they don’t see the larger picture of similarities between chapters, resources within the office, and image from outside factors. We have been trying to have effective programming that follows the learning outcomes of our office that also fits with the goals of each chapter, which is quite the task.

No comments:

Post a Comment