Saint Mary's College General Education

Present: Chris Cobb, Janet Fore, Kitty Green, Joe Incandela, Nancy Nekvasil, Daniel Party, Charlie Peltier, Patti Sayre

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We discussed possible meeting times for the remainder of the semester – so far the best candidates seem to be Monday 2-3 or Friday 12-1.

Our next meeting will be Friday September 7 at 12 noon.

We discussed how best to use our notes from the discussions on Faculty Development Day, and concluded that the best use will be to pass them on to the design teams (via the members of the committee working on those teams). We will not attempt any other summary for publication – but will note on the blog that these notes are being kept and will be used by the teams.

We confirmed that the models will not be modified further before the faculty are asked for an expression of preference in September. It will be important to emphasize that they are still plastic – whichever is selected will serve as a working document, and the evidence we are seeing indicates the final result will probably incorporate important parts of both models.

We will encourage departments to meet and discuss the models and preferences for the models – and will offer to have committee members available to aid such discussions.

The question to be posed to the faculty will be set as a five-level preference, ranging from “strongly prefer B” to “strongly prefer C” with “somewhat prefer” and some sort of “either” choice. Exact phrasing and layout is not yet determined. Joe will work on the presentation of the survey instrument.

We expect the request for expression of preference will occur in the week of September 17 and will be conducted on-line.

In conversation with the Dean the idea of a speaker or resource person came up - the best use we might make of such a person would seem to be in working with the design teams, once they are constituted, to assist in focusing on the use of outcomes in creating the design. Since we expect the teams to begin working in late October, we would need to move quickly on contacting anyone.

We still need to decide how to learn the design-team interests of faculty who were not present at the Faculty Discussion Day.