College-Wide Memo on Governance 9-25-01 from Dr. Shugart

I have a hypothesis about educational reform movements. I believe that most of them fail because they treat faculty as a problem, sometimes the problem. In the face of unsatisfactory learning results, the reformers seem to be saying, "If only teachers were smarter, or more innovative, or worked harder, or were more like well like us." Even in its most benign forms, where the main prescription for improvement is always more professional development, the underlying message is that we will improve our results by improving our faculty.

Please don't misunderstand me, I believe strongly in the development and support of the best corps of faculty possible as vital resources for learning (note our Strategic Goal 3: Learning Leaders.) The organization itself, though, creates important limits to student learning. Great faculty members are often unable to overcome these inherent limits if the college organization, procedures, and habits undermine or inhibit their work.

In fact, I will stretch the point a bit by claiming that we may well realize more learning gains, our most dramatic improvements in student learning, by redesigning our organization to eliminate habits, structures, and procedures that defeat good teaching and learning and creating new structures that support them. In the learning college movement, these things have come to be called the "deep architecture" of our institutions that are taken as "givens" in our work, but are really just conventions, often built on economic values rather than learning values.

It is this attention to the redesign of the organizations in which we try to orchestrate learning that first attracted me to the learning college movement. I have wondered, "What if we could liberate faculty and staff to do their best work in support of student learning by concentrating on improving this "deep architecture?"

This is precisely the topic of the comments Dr. Kay McClenney is preparing for our college planning day on September 28. It has also been the focus of much of our strategic planning this past year, yielding such first efforts as planned growth, precision scheduling, a new hiring schedule and procedures, enforcement of reading and writing prerequisites even in the face of strong enrollment demand, aggressive addition of tenure track positions, a new student services model called LifeMap, etc. Yet, we have just begun this work and have many habits and assumptions left to be challenged and rethought. The whole admission and registration process, the schedule, the way we compensate faculty and staff, even such basics as the fifteen week semester and the fifty minute period are all in discussion. You could name many more areas, and have been invited to do so in a recent email from Bill Castellano.

One area like this that has been in development for some time is the way the college is governed. While this may seem far from the moments of student learning, it in fact can have a dramatic influence on our progress in this basic mission. A learning college needs decision making structures that honor the fact that the faculty and staff who mediate student learning know things about the students and about the organization that the rest of us cannot know. Therefore, they must have a powerful voice in the collaborative decision making that characterizes a learning organization.

To this end, in collaboration with faculty and staff, we have redesigned the governance mechanisms of the college to reflect this important value. The details are included in the attachments. Here, I want to give a brief overview of our new system and principles of shared governance.

The tradition of the college has been strong executive authority with both the Board of Trustees and the Faculty Association functioning mainly as vehicles for communication, and with no vehicle at all for professional and support staff. Rarely were any of these groups invited to lead the college to a decision on a matter of importance. In practice, this left the Executive Council (and President) with a massive agenda and almost supreme responsibility for governance decisions, from curriculum and instructional matters to planning and budget to long range strategy and resource development. This is no criticism of this group; they worked fervently under a model in place at the college to serve Valencia well, and the college experienced a great measure of success.

Our new model of governance spreads these responsibilities among a variety of Governing Councils with representation from deep in the college.
The Board of Trustees remains the ultimate governing authority of the college and is being given more information and a larger role in defining the strategic directions of the college.
The Executive Council will continue to exist with a mandate to attend to the day to day operational governance of the college. In addition, their membership has been broadened to include faculty leadership and a dean.
We have created the College Learning Council, co chaired by a faculty leader and the Chief Learning Officer, to attend to the governance of curriculum, teaching and learning.
The College Planning Council, also co chaired by a faculty leader and the Chief Planning Officer, is responsible for strategic planning and annual budgeting, as well as institutional effectiveness accountability.
Finally, the Faculty Association Board is newly defined as a Governing Council of the college, with leadership responsibilities for issues such as faculty performance feedback, faculty academy and tenure, compensation review, and other matters.
The Faculty Association Board and I have developed together a set of ten principles for shared governance to guide our work. These also are attached.

We will continue to have standing committees for such things as curriculum, technology, diversity, professional development, etc. Each will report to the appropriate Governing Council and all are presently under review. The idea is that the Councils will commission, review, and approve the work of various committees, task forces, and individuals. Further, to avoid bureaucratic inertia, no matter will be approved by more than one Council, except where budget implications direct a decision to the College Planning Council for the coming year.

For Valencia to be a successful "learning college," we also have to recognize the important impact of the support staff and professional staff on the environment of the college and ultimately the learning outcomes of the students. We need everyone to "have an oar in the water" as we make this journey. This is the central reason for the inclusive nature of the upcoming meeting on Friday ALL full time staff. (I wish we had the facilities to include the part time staff, as well.) This is also an important reason for creating two more vehicles for collaboration in decision making. The staff councils on each location provide essential insight into issues of the quality of the learning environment, as well as staff welfare. In its first yea, this model is already yielding many positive changes at every location. Recently, we created a Professional Staff Forum designed to give the same sort of voice to the many professional staff who shape the learning environment just as powerfully. The message here is that although our roles in the college and in governance are different, every employee of the college has a vital role to play and voice in our future.

All of this, I believe, is a fundamental change in the "deep architecture" of Valencia. As such, it needs to be understood by all faculty and staff, because its purpose is to empower the college through its learning leaders to be more effective and to further shape the deep architecture toward a learning college.

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