General Education Council

                          March 12, 2008@ 3:00 p.m.

                                      PDK Room

                                       Minutes

PRESENT:     Tony Ambrosio, Paul Bland, Barbara Bleeker, Gary Bleeker, Ryann Brooks, Alexis Downs,  David Edds, Jacob Hadley, Brett Henry (proxy for Kevin Johnson), Steve Neill, Jonathan Rivers, Dennis Schmitt, and Gary Wyatt.

Visitor: Margaret Rasmussen, reporter with the Bulletin

I.          Minutes of February 27, 2008 were approved.

II.         Announcements:

Ambrosio reported that a CAAP/VSA Webinar will be offered on four different dates in March.  The Council decided that the March 27 session from 9-10 would work best for them.

III.       Old Business:

a.         Wyatt reported on the March  4, 2008 Faculty Senate meeting at which the proposed General Education program was on the agenda for First Reading as FSB 07006.  The General Education program will be on the April 1, 2008 Faculty Senate agenda for an up or down vote.

b.         Ambrosio reviewed the three (External, Council-Centric, Faculty Driven) assessment plan approaches he first presented to the Council on 9/26/07, distributed a handout entitled “Examples of Goals/Outcomes at the Core, Program and Classroom Level,” highlighted several sections of B. Walvoord’s handout entitled “Practical, Feasible Steps for General Education/Core Assessment,” and discussed a document entitled “Creating Learning Outcomes and Aligning Assessments for Gen Ed.”

He also underscored the point that all good assessment programs require financial support and a plan to reward, both intrinsically and extrinsically, those who are involved in the process and implementation.

c.         After a lengthy discussion, Council members agreed to focus first on designing learning outcomes and determining assessment measures for proposed Goals 1 and 2—the core skills and critical thinking.  Rob Catlett and Cynthia Akers will be invited to the April 9 meeting to share what their working groups are doing respectively with “quantitative and mathematical reasoning” and with “information literacy.”

IV.       New Business - None

The meeting adjourned at 4:18 p.m.

                                                  Respectfully submitted,

                                                  Gerrit Bleeker

                                                  Director of General Education

            These minutes are only recommendations by the Council on General Education to the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and any actions taken are not official university policy. All changes in the General Education Program are announced by the Dean of the College.

 

Last Updated April 1, 2008