The following questions will guide you through a process of reviewing the outcomes of your campus roundtable meetings, examining your current situation, and identifying a comprehensive change issue.
1. The PEW Roundtables
Each institution participating in this project has participated in, or will be participating in the Pew Higher Education Roundtables. Undertaking the roundtable process on a campus helps an institution to pose important questions and hold constructive dialogues among faculty, administrators, students and other campus constituencies enabling institutions to see their strengths and obstacles with greater clarity. The roundtable conversations serve as a forum both for voicing individual thoughts on the challenges facing an institution and for forming a collective understanding of those challenges within the campus community. Review the outcomes of your campus roundtable meetings, considering the following discussion questions.
Discussion questions:
* What are the major issues identified in the campus roundtables?
* If your roundtables took place more than a year ago, to what extent are these issues still important today?
* Are there new issues that have surfaced which are central to your
institution's future?
2. Taking stock: Where are we now?
As you begin the ACE Project, take stock of your current campus climate. Sometimes "hot issues" seem to appear from nowhere, while others never seem to be resolved, and different constituents on campus notice different issues or assign different priorities to
the same campus-wide issues. As you respond to the discussion questions below, consider the challenges confronting your institution, as well as the different priorities held by stakeholders on campus.
Discussion questions:
* What are the major issues in your institutions agenda for change!
* How much progress has already been made?
* What have been the affects on your institution of your work to date!
* How far along are you in your change process?
* What are the directions in which you would like to continue?
* Who considers these issues as important!
3. Selecting a Project Issue
The focus of the ACE Project is on comprehensive or large scale change. If you have not done so already, please refer to the discussion document, Food for Thought: The Comprehensive Change Process. This piece is designed to help you think further about comprehensive change and to raise questions which will help
to clarify a comprehensive change issue for this project.
As you reflect on the comprehensive change issues your institution is now working on or would like to work on, each person in the leadership group should identify three comprehensive issues that he or she thinks are most important. Compare among the group members' lists of issues and come to a consensus on the top three. As you come to a consensus, look for connections between team members'issues or issues which might be collapsed into one encompassing larger issue. Your task is to select one of those issues to serve as the focus of the ACE project. Remember that this project is focusing on comprehensive or large-scale change -- change which will have far-reaching institutional impact.
State your newly identified comprehensive change issue using an active verb, e.g., improving student leaning, internationalizing the campus, revitalizing the academic and intellectual climate of the campus, or becoming a more diverse campus. Make sure that what you have identified is an issue or concern rather than a solution to an issue. For example, developing a more appropriate model of the teacher-scholar for campus is an issue, changing the faculty reward structure to increase the weight of teaching is a potential solution. As you identify your comprehensive change issue, consider the following questions:
Discussion Questions
* Why is this change important?
* What criteria were used to select this issue?
* Who on campus think; this is an important issue?
* Who will be affected by change in this area?
* What will be different on campus as a result of change in this area?
* To what extent is the campus ready for this change?
* What can be done to best prepare the campus for the change?
4. Building Support
As you proceed with your discussions and the rest of the project, be aware of the values and assumptions-either implicit or explicit-that influenced the particular choice of issue and the ways in which you have framed the agenda for change. Remember that different stakeholders have different assumptions about change and the future of your institution. Because the project issue you are planning to work on as part of the ACE Project is comprehensive, it affects many facets of the institution and numerous stakeholders. Thus, the change issue should be one of real concern to the many campus constituencies. Consider the support that exists for tackling the issue selected for this project and the degree of potential campus ownership when responding to the following discussion questions.
Discussion questions
* What are the institutional values underlying your choice of a particular change issue?
* Are there different perceptions of institutional values?
* Where do you find competing or conflicting values around this issue on campus?