Conducting Effective Program Reviews

You have data. You have the mandate to review your program. You have willing and able faculty members. What's next? Drawing on the expertise of leaders in the K-12 education space, there are industry recognized best practices for engaging groups of adults in the process of making data-informed observations and then planning for changed based on those data. Participate in this workshop to move beyond a culture of compliance and create a culture of inquiry among faculty who are involved in academic program review (assessment and evaluation).

This workshop can be taught online or in-person. It can be conducted using real student data as an actual program review (3 hours), or it can be conducted as a how-to with sample data and more brief descriptions of activity that will need to be lead by others (1 hour).

This basic premise from Drs. Laura Lipton and Bruce Wellman underly the philosophy of my program review model:

“Long-held patterns of

1) reasoning by anecdote and

2) persuading by volume and repetition, inhibit open-minded exploration.

The need for group members to convince others of the “correct way” to see data, or solve a problem creates tension and drains energy from group work. The trap is to use data to prove instead of to improve.”