Using CAS for Assessing Program Effectiveness and Student Learning

Summary

In this informative session, Gavin Henning and Jen Wells discuss how the CAS standards can be used in higher education for program evaluation and to enhance student learning. The focus is on using these standards to conduct rigorous self-assessments within educational institutions, which involve planning, evidence gathering, and strategic improvements. The session also introduces various resources and guides that assist educators in conducting these evaluations systematically and effectively, emphasizing the importance of honesty, evidence-based assessments, and actionable change as outcomes of the process.

Highlights

• Discover how CAS standards can streamline program evaluation 9d0
• Understand the role of honesty in meticulous evaluations 4a1
• Learn about assembling a diverse review team for assessments 46e
• Explore how to plan effective program reviews amidst other institutional priorities 9f1
• Get insights on using technology to manage evidence during reviews 4c1

Key Takeaways

• CAS standards help evaluate program effectiveness and student learning 4aa
• Honesty and evidence are vital for effective program reviews 93e
• CAS provides guides for systematic self-assessments 4da
• Leadership support is crucial for implementing changes post-review 934
• Technology aids in organizing evidence efficiently 4bb

Overview

In a compelling discussion led by Gavin Henning and Jen Wells, higher education professionals are introduced to the intricate world of using CAS standards for program assessment and student learning evaluations. CAS, a consortium of 40 organizations, provides crucial guidelines and a systematic process to better educational environments.

Through a detailed breakdown, the speakers stress the critical importance of planning and evidence gathering as part of a self-assessment review. The talk highlights CAS's flexible nature and its ability to adapt across various sizes and types of institutions. Participants learn about the rewarding outcomes of fostering shared visions and setting clear standards within teams.

Emphasizing a fun yet serious tone, the session concludes with practical advice on implementing action plans derived from CAS reviews. Despite potential challenges, the integration of new technologies and leadership fosters changes that enhance educational effectiveness, ensuring all institutions leverage these guidelines to best suit their community needs.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction to Presenters and Session Goals The chapter begins with introductions from the presenters, Gavin Henning, a professor at New England College and past president of Cass, and Jen Wells, an assistant professor at Kennesaw State University and Cass editor. They welcome the audience to the session focused on using Cass for evaluating program effectiveness and student learning. The session's goals include helping the audience identify various approaches.
• 00:30 - 05:00: Overview of CAS and Its Importance The chapter discusses the significance of quality assurance in higher education, emphasizing the role of CAS (Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education) standards. These standards are vital for program reviews and evaluating student learning outcomes. The chapter also highlights the utility of CAS self-assessment guides, which serve as worksheets to aid in the program review process. The importance of implementing an effective program review process is underlined, and practical tips for doing so are provided. An introduction to the CAS standards is also included.
• 05:00 - 08:30: Uses of CAS Standards The chapter discusses the CAS (Council for the Advancement of Standards) and its formation. Established in 1979, CAS started with a few organizations and has since grown to 40 members representing various functional areas in student services within higher education. Each member organization has two representatives responsible for developing, revising, and approving standards. The importance of these standards is emphasized as the chapter unfolds.
• 08:30 - 15:30: CAS Learning and Development Outcomes The chapter discusses a consensus-based approach to improving standards, which are approved by various organizations within the field. There are currently 47 sets of functional area standards and three cross-functional frameworks. These frameworks address issues that transcend single functional areas, such as the first-year experience. The chapter emphasizes the collaborative effort required across multiple officers and teams to address these issues, and offers guidance on coordinating these efforts.
• 15:30 - 25:00: Overview of CAS Self-Study Process The CAS Self-Study Process chapter explains the purpose and mission of the CAS (Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education) initiative. It focuses on forming specialized teams aimed at enhancing student learning and success. The chapter highlights the development of programs and standards to support this mission, underlining the creation of various resources and frameworks to aid the implementation and use of these standards in facilitating student learning.
• 25:00 - 35:00: Steps to Conduct a Program Review The chapter titled 'Steps to Conduct a Program Review' discusses common misconceptions about the utilization of CASTE (Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education). Many people primarily see CASTE as a tool for assessment, but the chapter highlights its broader applications, such as designing new programs and services. It emphasizes that CASTE standards can serve as a valuable resource for identifying key focus areas and effectively directing time, energy, and resources. Furthermore, the chapter notes that as the field evolves, so too do the staffing needs, necessitating ongoing development and adaptation.
• 35:00 - 41:00: Developing an Action Plan from Review Findings The chapter focuses on the development of an action plan by utilizing review findings. It highlights the importance of adjusting strategies to meet the evolving needs of students. By using CASTEs (Critical Assessment Strategy Templates for Evaluation) as a guide, leaders can better identify the necessary skills and knowledge required for effective implementation of key elements. This involves strategic planning over a period of three to five years, where functional areas determine their primary focus areas. Additionally, the chapter mentions the role of CASTEs in supporting this process and emphasizes the development of learning and development outcomes.
• 41:00 - 48:00: Preparing Reports and Implementing Changes This chapter discusses the importance of measuring programs and services in education. It highlights five principles that support the implementation of standards, emphasizing the creation of supportive learning environments. As the educational field becomes more diverse, a focus on equity is crucial. The aim is to foster inclusive communities and achieve equitable outcomes for students.
• 48:00 - 54:00: Tips and Lessons from CAS Users The chapter discusses the importance of organizational leadership and human resources in functional areas, emphasizing the need for people and resources to support their work. It highlights the significance of ethics, laws, and policies in guiding the work within these areas. Additionally, it touches on the structures and infrastructures necessary to support student learning effectively.
• 54:00 - 60:00: Conclusion and Contact Information The chapter provides an overview of how to support program development for students. It highlights that detailed information can be found on the organization's website, where visitors can navigate to a specific section dedicated to standards. Here, one can view a complete list of standards and choose to purchase either individual standards or an entire set. The chapter also mentions that further discussion on general standards will follow.

Using CAS for Assessing Program Effectiveness and Student Learning Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 hello my name is Gavin Henning professor of higher education in New England College and the past president of Cass and we welcome you to our session on using Cass for evaluating program effectiveness and student learning now let Jen introduced yourself hi my name is Jen wells and I am assistant professor of higher education at Kennesaw State University and I am also the cast editor so first we're to talk a little bit about what we want hope that you'll take away from this this recorded session first identify approaches to
• 00:30 - 01:00 quality assurance using casts and using a set of professional standards for higher education really focusing on house casts and cat standards can be helpful in program review and assessing student learning and then also be able to think about how to use the self assessment guys which are worksheets that that accompany our cast standards to actually go through that program review process and then we'll share a few practical tips at the end for actually implementing an effective program review process but first we'll tell you a little bit about cast so if
• 01:00 - 01:30 you're not familiar with cast it's actually consortium of 40 member organizations it was founded in 1979 with a small group of organizations that now has grown up to 40 representing pretty much almost all the functional areas primarily in student service areas in higher education each a member of the consortium has two representatives and these are the individuals who really are the primary we have the primary responsibility for developing revising the standards and finally improving those standards and the reason that's this is important is because we have a
• 01:30 - 02:00 consensus based approach and so when we improve standards they are really approved by all of these organizations and thus approved by the field for the field we have 47 and sets of functional area standards at this point and we have three what we call cross-functional frameworks which are frameworks to actually address issues that transcend any one functional area for example a first-year experience is one of those so it's not necessarily office but it is a function that is served by multiple officers working together and a team and we provide some guidance on how to
• 02:00 - 02:30 actually set up those types of teams so Cass is about really skander's but ultimately our goal is to help develop and improve student learning success and through the programs is that ring about so that's really why we developed the program since the program standards and so that we can really help support student learning and success so that's really the ultimate mission of castes and we're creating more and more resources to support the use of our standards the frameworks and other ways to support student learning
• 02:30 - 03:00 now a lot of folks think caste is about doing a suspect and it is and most people use caste standards for assessment but it can be used for a lot of things for designing new programs and services if somebody's designing new program doesn't know where to go the caste image can be a great starting point focusing time energy resources because the caste standards identify what are the key things that functional area needs to do devising step development you know so as our field changes the needs of staffing change
• 03:00 - 03:30 because the needs of students change so using the castes as a guide for what the functional area should be focusing on helps a staff or a leader of a department identify what are those skills and knowledge that the staff need to really be able to implement those key elements I mean strategic planning really thinking through in three to five years what are those areas that a functional area wants up wants to focus on and the caste errors can provide some support for that and then obviously developing learning and development outcomes we'll
• 03:30 - 04:00 talk a little bit about that except in a second and then measuring program and service abacus there are five principles that undergird all the caste standards they really kind of support various sections of the standards so first the students and their environments how do we create environments that support learning and as our field becomes more diverse and are focused on equity the caste centers also focus on equity to really think about how do we create inclusive and communities and really have equitable outcomes for students
• 04:00 - 04:30 since people and resources are keys to functional areas there's a section or what about one of our key elements is organizational leadership and human resources so what are those resources that are needed to support their work and obviously we need to keep in mind ethics as well as laws and policies and how do different laws and policies guide functional area work and then finally learning to do some structures so really what those elements with the infrastructure that supports student learning to
• 04:30 - 05:00 support a program area to be able to develop programs or services for students while this is really small this just gives you a an overview of all the cast little areas you can easily find this on our website by going cat to cast that edu clicking on the top menu item this says standards you can see a list through all of those I mean you can purchase individual standards or you can purchase I'm a whole set of standards and we'll talk about that near the end as well the general standards which were
• 05:00 - 05:30 revised in 2018 I really serve a couple different functions first it actually divides a functional areas standard into 12 sections in each one of these sections has a set of standards so they're really a bunch of standards that really talk about the mission standards that talk about the technology about assessment and then within each of those sections the general standards are some common specific standards that occur across all functional areas doesn't matter what the function is these are things that cast leaves every
• 05:30 - 06:00 functional areas should do and there's an example at the bottom of the slide the functional area must develop and define its mission so it doesn't matter what the functional area does that's a key piece and then also there are functional area standards which are specific to a functional area so in this example is about for your services and what that mission of career services should focus on so each of those twelve sections there are these general standards which we also call boilerplate which are the same for all functional areas and they're more than a specific
• 06:00 - 06:30 to that function functional area and then we also have standards and then guidelines so standards are really the basic element that the most base threshold for what a program or service should do and this just really doesn't matter what the institution is how big how much money it is has you know how big the endowment is how many staff these are standards that every single institution should be able to follow so if we're looking at a set of standard for housing and Residence Life those
• 06:30 - 07:00 standards should be applicable to the Ohio State University which is ginormous to my institution New England College which is very small so it doesn't matter the size or the function resources it has no standards you are applicable to all and the guidelines are way to really amplify and take you know kick it up a notch and take a little bit step further about these are some ways to really enhance some of the practice and the standards are in bold type so they're easy to identify where the guidelines are in
• 07:00 - 07:30 light bass type as I mention cast is not just about professional scanners don'ts about student learning and we have a set of domains and dimensions there are six student learning development outcome domains and then with each within each of these domains there are sets of dimensions it's really it can be used as outcome statements and the expectation is that all functional areas do some focus on student learning we leave it up to the individual focus area the function layer decide which ones are
• 07:30 - 08:00 most important and most applicable but we think every functional area should be focusing on learning at some level these are the learning and development outcomes that we have so knowledge acquisition construction integration and applications are really about cognitive thinking cognitive complexity with about reflective thinking critical thinking those types of things interpersonal development interpersonal development humanitarianism and civic engagement and then practical competence and as I
• 08:00 - 08:30 mentioned we really think that every functional area should be doing both focusing on student learning development and success and providing evidence of that and that's all part of that program review process and embedded in that process those outcomes may look familiar to you and partly because they're really aligned very well with other functional area or other outcome frameworks such learning we considered the essential learning outcomes from AAC and you even some discipline accrediting agent themes agency themes the jury qualification
• 08:30 - 09:00 profile as well as project CEO where employers and the National Association of Colleges and employers did did a study a project to look at what are those key outcomes so the nice thing is you can use the cast Learning and Development domains to really bridge across diffic functional areas so in my institution we use the the leap outcomes for our institutional learning outcomes our student services area could use the cast learning domains
• 09:00 - 09:30 and dimensions and easily map to our institutional algorithms so that's why those this mapping is really important so we're gonna really focus the rest on this this presentation on the caps stop study process and so I'm gonna pass it over to Jen who's going to give you an overview of that and go into a little bit more detail Thank You Gavin so I'm gonna take some time to talk about the cast cast self study I do want you to know that if this is the first time that you're listening
• 09:30 - 10:00 to this it may seem overwhelming but we're gonna try to break down all of these steps and we do have resources available to further help you through this so right now it's just an overview but this could easily take a half day to talk about so there are some fundamentals abouts casts in our self-assessment process so it's internally driven now what is helpful is that it's systematic and regular and so it provides a process for you to do a self-assessment so you're not just
• 10:00 - 10:30 trying to figure out what to do it is effective in terms of cost and time and so there are different ways that you can approach this but it is can be low resource driven and it will it really does provide accurate information it supports staff development and it really can provide recognition and rewards so what it really can do is provide this shared vision among constituents not
• 10:30 - 11:00 only within a department or unit but also within the division and also within a university it provides language shared vision among individuals to really help drive this and I think one piece that's really important about this is that honesty leads to a meticulous evaluation which really ultimately leads to having an action plan for improvement and so that's really at the heart of a self-assessment is that it helps us look
• 11:00 - 11:30 holistically so that we can decide how we want to improve and then creating a community while we do that so what we provide our self-assessment guides so Gavin showed you a list of all of the functional areas and so that you could purchase those individually or collectively all of those also have their own self-assessment guide that we call the SAG and so this really drives
• 11:30 - 12:00 you and walks you through the self-assessment guide it is a workbook it has not only an instrument that you can use but it has worksheets to help you make meaning of the information and so on the next page that shows you a vision of what this looks like so this is just one small piece of the caste sag this is the assessment section and so this is what we call our general standard seg so you're not seeing a
• 12:00 - 12:30 specific functional area here but every section of those parts those twelve have recommend suggested evidence and documentation what I like to tell people is it does not mean you have to collect all of these things but a lot of times evidence it becomes a place where people are paralyzed or they think they don't have a lot of evidence and so we really want to provide examples to help you with this process that is the most time consuming aspect we also clustered our
• 12:30 - 13:00 criterion statements to help you out so now here are our seven steps of the program review process and you can see the areas here and I'm gonna walk you again briefly through these seven steps so the first is to plan the process it's exactly what it talks it looks like you really have to plan is this the right time or do you have other assessment projects going on and so on the next
• 13:00 - 13:30 slide it talks a little bit about some things you should think about is this are you currently in the middle of an accreditation year well then it might not be the right time if you're gathering evidence already you want to do to self studies but you also want to think is there like right now could be a good time given everything that's happening with the pandemic it could also not be a good time depending on what your institution is doing to look at this you may want to
• 13:30 - 14:00 do it in three years to see what happened but you also want to think why am i doing this what are what are the outcomes and is there support then you want to assemble and educate your team this is probably one of the most important pieces is is getting people together and we have a lot of different ways that you can do this and so on the next slide we have a couple of examples here but really there should be a
• 14:00 - 14:30 coordinator ideally not the unit leader but the unit leader could maybe help with organization or facilitation but really if you can get somebody outside the unit to serve as the leader of the team that can really help plus it allows more for that objective point of view which can be really powerful in this process so we generally say that there's about three approaches but you can also mix these and come up with some somewhat
• 14:30 - 15:00 like six different approaches but the first is internal and that means you're really doing a true self study where maybe you're just using your unit or just using your division and you're really going through and doing a true self study mix ternal is really you're using internal to institution but external to the unit so you're pulling people let's say your Residence Life you have somebody from a fraternity and
• 15:00 - 15:30 sorority life from orientation programs counseling a faculty member a student sitting on that committee and looking at your functional area and providing that perspective and then you can have the external review where you bring people outside of the institution generally who have expertise within your functional area and so they can provide that information as well one of the most powerful ways to do this is to do a
• 15:30 - 16:00 self-study either at the internal or external level and provide an external review that validates that study and provides additional information we encourage you to really think about diverse representation having people that may may have some knowledge having people that don't have any knowledge student involvement is really growing and then we're actually finding that students are providing some of the best feedback through the process
• 16:00 - 16:30 in the training session what I like to do is first provide some of the information that Gavin provided at the beginning of the session where we talked about what is calves why is this important so maybe some slides about why program review is important some of the bases on where that comes from but establishing some basis for people to understand but creating kind of a balance of knowledge across and you also want established team ground rules a lot
• 16:30 - 17:00 of times it's great to walk through the RIT standards and guidelines especially if you have a functional area maybe there's some language within there if you're not from the fraternity and sorority community it may be that there's some language that you're not familiar with and so that can be provided as well and really if you have the time going through each standard to walk those through it can be helpful what I think is important in this session is to remind people that honesty
• 17:00 - 17:30 is at the heart of this that we often want to be positive but we're trying to be as objective as possible and using the evidence to drive the ratings and so that's I think really important in this situation and then I think part of this is having expectations where are you how much time is it going to take what is the role of each person how often are they expected
• 17:30 - 18:00 to me what are deadlines this is an important part at this point now it's time to identify collect and review evidence I will tell you you can sort of do this throughout if you want to do that while you're getting the team together this can happen simultaneously but this is really the biggest amount of work on the unit which is often why that mix
• 18:00 - 18:30 ternal approach can be helpful because the unit can be gathering evidence while the the individuals outside of the unit are having team training and understanding the standards and doing that work but you want to gather evidence I think there's so much technology at this point that can help us out people will tell you in their reviews even 15 years ago they put binders together they had them divided out by sections and you had to make a ton of copies but with Google Drive
• 18:30 - 19:00 teams Dropbox as many options as you want you can really organize and we generally tell people to organize by those parts because it really helps your reviewer and you want to get a lot of evidence now one thing I want to caution and and I see this happen is people will look at the suggested evidence decide they didn't have it and want to create it so they'll say oh no we didn't have meeting minutes we better go back and
• 19:00 - 19:30 create meeting minutes well that's not what we want to do you almost want to think about it as a snapshot in time and usually it's great to establish a date like we're going to use all information prior to September first then it keeps it very clean and helps you really gather that information but you don't really want to work on improving while you're doing a self-study because it can get it all messy I know it's the instinct but we do caution against that for the review team they are going to
• 19:30 - 20:00 rate all the standards based on the evidence and so that's what I say so sometimes and this is where it can get messy if you're really familiar you can say we know we do this but we don't have evidence of it well we want to rate based on the evidence because it may be helpful for the area to say oh we're operating with this mission statement but we haven't updated it on our website that that may be an area that you can improve and so
• 20:00 - 20:30 then using the rating scale and everybody should rate each and every measure so and then it talks about the next piece here is how we move forward once we've looked at the evidence and this is interpreting the ratings and so what we use is a two tiered approach and again we recommend that each individual evaluates the standard and then collectively they discuss that what this
• 20:30 - 21:00 does is help look at discrepancies is there a place where the evidence speaks differently to people and so we should have a discussion I see it means this I see it means this but that's also strong information for the unit going forward to ensure that they're clearly putting out the messages that they want to do or that their evidence is very clear I often say bylaws are not often my thing that I want to read but sometimes it can be very important but if you think about
• 21:00 - 21:30 if bylaws language is unclear then it makes it really hard to interpret it and so it can be similar here as you think about workbooks and policy manuals and all the types of documentation that you might have within your unit at this point what you can do is start to develop the action plan so at the end of each section in part there's over a few questions and this helps to really get
• 21:30 - 22:00 that more of a holistic approach to the question so you have that sort of quantitative approach to each item and then the overview questions allow you to more get into that qualitative providing some meaning and we have that throughout the seg where you can say we gave this a zero does not meet but it was because we had no evidence so we don't know and that can provide some more information there but what you'll do in the worksheets is you'll have a section
• 22:00 - 22:30 where you identify areas of good practice and then you develop areas of improvement you have a worksheet to walk through discrepancies so that you can have that discussion and then recommendations for next steps resources responsible individuals generally the review team will do that initial part will they'll say here's your good practice areas improvement where we have discrepancy in areas we think you should focus on and then the unit will really
• 22:30 - 23:00 take it over from there to really dive deep into that action plan one of the other things I have found that some people do is they think this means they need to fix it immediately we have 20 items that we should improve on how are we gonna get it done in the next week this is not an emergency I like to say there's no assessment emergencies and I think that's true this is a deep dive but this is a holistic view and it takes time in in a perfect world it fits
• 23:00 - 23:30 straight into strategic planning efforts so then you do this self-study which then drives your strategic plan and as you can imagine strategic plans are generally three to five years and actually some of them are getting shorter because think changes are happening so much and so more on that three-year cycle but you're not going to do a self-study annually we usually think that three to five years five to seven years depending on what it looks
• 23:30 - 24:00 like so you really want overtime to make those improvements preparing the report we we do this one because I think it provides that documentation for multiple groups which can provide evidence but also you know if you've ever been somewhere we've taken a position and there are there is no documentation you don't know we had our Residence Life do an external review and they hired in a new director well that information is
• 24:00 - 24:30 really helpful to providing background for that director to really sort of research and get a lay of the land so maybe they don't need to do a second review at that minute but I also think there's definitely multiple audiences your vice-president main want the full report with every line filled in and the entire workbook they may want an executive summary about what are your areas of improvement and what are your strategies for implementing
• 24:30 - 25:00 those and so we do there are a lot of presentations out there that look at forms sometimes you could do a Google search I will tell you not all reports are created equal so I would really look at who is your audience and what information needs to be included and I would always say make sure you're talking about how you're going to implement the changes finally I think it really is that piece of actually
• 25:00 - 25:30 implementing those changes so I imagine we've all been there where we put a lot of work into something and then all of a sudden we don't get to do that last piece of it or something changes I remember I put all this work into helping with a strategic plan to find out that we were consolidating the next week and so the plan went and in halt and so those things happen but we really want to try to implement change this is
• 25:30 - 26:00 not an exercise just to put it in a report format and hang it on the wall on the shelf or to show people this is really about the action and I think that's where the value comes into play and so we've seen this for cycle a lot of assessment cycles may use different language but they all essentially aligned with the plan-do-check-act and so we really want to incorporate this in there and so you want to make sure
• 26:00 - 26:30 you're doing that action requesting resources as needed communicating the plan letting people who participated know hey this is what we've decided to do following back up with your external review committee so we have collected some tips and lessons from a lot of our users so these next two slides are directly from people who have gone through this and so we'd love to remind people that cast materials are flexible so you can
• 26:30 - 27:00 pick up a functional area self-assessment guide and it will walk you through all of the directions it will help you through this and you can take it that way you can also decide we're really gonna focus on part two this year we're we're not the cast police we're not around looking for that we want you to use these to help you out and we so they're flexible use them as needed having leadership is critical in
• 27:00 - 27:30 this I think not only at that team level but also having leadership that says you're gonna do this self-study and we're going to support you having these changes because that can be really frustrating for staff in the morale to go through an entire self-study and then find out that nothing is gonna change it can't be implemented now I can't promise you that doing a self-study is suddenly going to give you an influx of budget dollars especially right now I think
• 27:30 - 28:00 some of us are are experiencing that and we've had these but what Cass can do and what a self-study can do is often identify areas for reallocation of resources where you can help move some things around where things aren't getting lost but it can also give you a good piece of evidence but support your team to make some changes that's where the value really comes out having a clear workload expectations detailed
• 28:00 - 28:30 timelines administrative support we've heard a lot that having an administrative support to really organize the evidence um collect in ratings help identify discrepancies keeping things organized in the background can really help alleviate some of the workload that comes into this again evidence and data is key that that's the strength here the more evidence you have the more informed you can be in giving your rating
• 28:30 - 29:00 informational interviews this is a really fun way to do this is for example you're you're reviewing a unit and you bring in the budget manager to talk about finances so you can better understand what information is in there I mentioned fraternity and sorority like maybe you have somebody come in to talk about what are the different governing bodies and what do they mean and what are different fraternities helping with some of that language that the community understands but maybe others and you can
• 29:00 - 29:30 imagine this happens with each functional area but you don't have to have that person on the committee you can bring people in to provide interviews to fill in gaps in their knowledge again being okay to be honest I can't recommend this enough and I was prevented presenting with a colleague and I made the example that if I'm standing in front of a group and I've
• 29:30 - 30:00 got a poppy seed in my teeth I would hope somebody would tell me before I did the entire presentation hopefully I don't Gavin you hopefully you would have told me but I think the the point is that being honest isn't a bad thing it helps somebody know so we can improve I remember when I was in Residence Life and I was thinking about roommate mediations often times it was about students just assigned intention
• 30:00 - 30:30 thinking that students weren't ever roommates for intentionally doing something but a lot of times they just didn't know it bothered the person so it was communication but I think all of this is just honesty to help us really see so that we can be the best that we can be and again I talked about allowing staff to implement changes in the power of that looking at the rating scale really defining what is needs versus does not need versus you know some way
• 30:30 - 31:00 so really pulling that out like one of the items says it does not apply and I say that's not your get-out-of-jail-free card rather that's okay this is really doesn't apply because that's part of another unit or you know that's just something we aren't doing because of resource allocations or sometimes two year versus a four-year institution although we really try to make the standards beyond institutional type and
• 31:00 - 31:30 having those rationales and duck justifications is really powerful it takes time but I can get an eight but in the end it does and one other piece that's not on here which I'll think about adding is when you have when you're doing a self-study especially within a division sometimes you can recruit people because then they get to see the inside of the process because they're gonna be going up maybe next year or you could say hey if you serve on my committee this year I can serve on your committee next year and then you
• 31:30 - 32:00 get to kind of relationship build that way and a lot of times faculty will want to engage it may be an area of interest with their research other pieces you could look at your accreditation liaisons they may take a particular interest because the evidence helps them with accreditation but leave yourself time at the end to really think about pieces maybe that you struggled or where there was a lot of discrepancy so that you really have those powerful discussions okay I'll also allow Gavin
• 32:00 - 32:30 to provide some more information about this but we're very excited because we are working really hard on providing more and more resources we did a market research a couple years ago and maybe some of you participated and so following our own advice we are using that information and so we are using
• 32:30 - 33:00 that to guide how we're making decisions and one of the big pieces that we had was that we needed this do-it-yourself guide a really hands-on approach with examples that can really help drive that so that is coming soon it's in its editing phase the developing and assessing outcomes it was formerly a Faldo's document if you got that I think it was like 2004 maybe 2008 one of those and so that really helps you
• 33:00 - 33:30 at how to assess outcomes and again this one is written in a way that will allow you to implement that in your own framework it looks at those areas and gives you a lot of examples on how you can do that that is also in its editing phase it's actually in design points we have cross-functional frameworks then Gavin mentioned those there are three and so we have healthy building healthy
• 33:30 - 34:00 campuses behavioral interventions and first-year experience and the cross functional are really areas where it doesn't belong in any one unit but you're looking at multiple people being part of a team and so we're getting a lot of really great feedback about this and we're looking at additional cross-functional framers the multifunctional review process is a document to help you if you are maybe a smaller unit with multiple functions or
• 34:00 - 34:30 you're really looking at one unit with multiple functions wanting to do a review at one time so it helps us guide you through taking maybe ten functional areas and doing one review we have faculty resources specifically we're coming out with a grad student kind of workbook document coming soon as well we've got a lot coming out this summer as I think about it because we've got a
• 34:30 - 35:00 lot on the docket but we have white papers and functional area resource papers and we've got three of each of those and I think a fourth functional area resource paper coming out and those are really helpful they're written by practitioners about their experiences they're very easy to read I've enjoyed editing them as they've really helped me think through the process - from their point of view and again the 10th edition which again even
• 35:00 - 35:30 though it's edition it is fully 100% updated and changed we really made a big change if you on the eighth edition you're very out of date it doesn't mean you have to go buy it today but I encourage you a self-study is very good but we really you may not find anything similar between the 8th of the 10th for example so as we ramp up we just want to let you know that we're available to
• 35:30 - 36:00 chat with you at all we probably should have included our email address on the slide but you can reach either one of us at our institution you can go to either New England College or Kennesaw State just search the directory and find us you don't go to cast that edu and send a message to our website through Twitter or through our Facebook and we'll answer any questions you have let us know if there's anything we can do to support you check out the cast website cast that edu that's where you can purchase many of these resources we also have a lot of free resources and also that's where
• 36:00 - 36:30 we'll be able to publish with what we have new coming out and let folks know what's happening and so check that often Jenni any final words as we wrap up I would echo what Gavin said I think we're always happy to help and even additional colleagues if you want us to connect you with someone in a similar functional area or someone at a similar place we can always do that we're excited when you reach out and we want your feedback we're using it as
• 36:30 - 37:00 well so continue to send that to us and we will continue to work hard to make cast user friendly and helpful for you thanks very much enjoy the rest of your day thank you