LibLog

November 3, 2009

Working Together
By John Ottenhoff, Associated Colleges of the Midwest

Inter-institutional collaborative work on assessment has been a hallmark—and perhaps the distinguishing genius—of Teagle-funded projects over the last five years. After colleges got over their initial horror—Share our sensitive data with our competitors (or friends)?—most found important benefits in the collaborations. It turns out that having faculty colleagues at other institutions to share the load makes the work of assessment more intellectually interesting, less prone to political maneuvering, and, maybe best of all, likely to branch out into other productive projects.

The Associated Colleges of the Midwest (ACM)—Beloit, Carleton, Colorado, Coe, Cornell, Grinnell, Knox, Lake Forest, Lawrence, Luther, Macalester, Monmouth, Ripon, and St. Olaf—has certainly found the truth in these assertions. Maybe it’s because we’ve been working together for over 50 years, starting with athletic competitions and branching out across the world in student programs and opportunities for faculty. But, even then, collaboration isn’t easy; it takes hard work and imagination to get colleagues accomplishing something together. Here are a few insights we’ve gained over the past several years about working across institutions:

1. The work has to be real, but so does the “play.”
The ACM -Teagle Collegium on Student Learning, midway through its 30-month funding life, has been a most valuable effort for the colleges of the ACM because it has a clear, important focus. The Collegium group has set out to learn more about metacognition (thinking about thinking) and how metacognitive strategies affect students’ mastery of learning, how attention to metacognition can change the learning and teaching environment and reframe our discussions about liberal education. We have concentrated on this work with help from experts like Patricia King at the University of Michigan and Daniel Bernstein at the University of Kansas and learned a lot from our consortial colleagues. Proposals for manageable classroom projects—new assignments or approaches, different questions and frameworks—have kept the group working towards attainable goals. But we’ve also found that unstructured time—not exactly “play” but still pleasurable time beyond the work agenda—has been vital in building our networks of knowledge and sustaining the collaborative trust and friendships that make this project so satisfying. If our faculty members are finding pleasure in this work, our institutions gain.

2. “Ramp up and ramp down.”
It’s not easy, but institutional assessment efforts need to connect to assessment on the classroom level, and the efforts need to inform each other. The scholarship of teaching and learning answers some questions about student learning on a very local basis that should fill in some of the gaps in our institutional reports. A recent conference at Ripon College reporting on the work of the Teagle-funded collaboration between Beloit, Knox, Monmouth, and Ripon Colleges showed the value of this thinking. Members of the ACM-Teagle Collegium group reported on their emerging classroom research about how metacognitive strategies were making a difference in student learning in anthropology, music, and geology classrooms. Those reports deepened the discussions about the Beloit-Knox-Monmouth-Ripon collaborative efforts to get departments analyzing how they contributed to student learning in the general education areas of critical thinking, writing, and civic engagement the four colleges. The institutional mission-drive discussion needs the finer-grained analyses; our classroom teachers need the institutional perspective; departments need to connect the two views.

3. “Time on Task” matters
We’ve known this for a long time about student learning. No surprise that it’s true for inter-institutional faculty collaborations. It takes time and repeated meetings for research communities to come together, to find the right balance of trust, friendship, and core knowledge. Institutions and funding agencies should recognize this and find ways to get groups together—and to keep them together. Virtual collaborations can happen—after groups have come together physically; but even then, unless the group reconvenes at least occasionally, it’s hard for the community to keep its shape.

4. Networks build new networks.
The recent Ripon conference showed how successful collaborations keep expanding. ACM faculty who met each other at an ACM-Mellon-funded conference on assessment at Lake Forest College were soon collaborating in the Teagle Collegium, forming smaller groups focused on disciplinary assessment in education and biology and seeking new grants for collaborative explorations. Members of the Collegium group are visiting each other’s campuses, helping out with workshops and building new enthusiasm for working together. And those networks influence other networks in the ACM, as we come together for meetings about our off-campus study programs, our committees for minority concerns and the status of women, and for our deans and presidents. One hesitates to call it “viral” in this time of pandemics, but the ideas—and the enthusiasm for the work—are definitely spreading.

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