A Colorado Challenge
- TO: Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences
- FROM: Todd T. Gleeson
- SUBJECT: An Update to the Colorado Challenge
- DATE: 12 April 2005
The Colorado Challenge was distributed to the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences in September 2004. It was a call to the faculty to evaluate the curricular offerings and grading practices in each department and program with an eye towards elevating the intellectual challenge of earning an undergraduate degree from the College. The original Colorado Challenge document is available on the A&S website by navigating the headings Faculty & Staff > Administration > Colorado Challenge.
The associate deans and I have since visited nearly every department and program this fall or spring where this challenge was discussed in the context of the unit's own curriculum. The Colorado Challenge has also been the subject of articles in the Silver and Gold, an editorial in the Rocky Mountain News, and conversations with the Arts and Sciences Council membership where the pros and cons of such an initiative have been debated. Most departments have formed committees to review the Challenge, or assigned their Curriculum Committee the task of addressing the issues that have been raised. A key feature of this initiative is that although it was a topic raised by the College administration, the responses have been developed by faculty members themselves. No single change has been proposed or imposed, and the result in my opinion is that the solutions being implemented have been better tailored to fit the unique features and characteristics of each units' curricular offerings.
As I have visited units and discussed the topic, I have kept a list of ideas and suggestions that I thought had potential beyond the unit of origin. They are organized below in no particular order. I share them with you on the chance that you may see something of merit that you might adopt in your own course or courses. However, I readily acknowledge that a good idea in one department may be a disaster in another. As such I am not promoting any particular set of innovations, but I ask that you consider which ideas if any have utility in your circumstance.
Finally, I have the impression that many considered the Colorado Challenge a call for departments and programs to act. It is that, but it is equally a communication to individual instructors and tenure stream faculty to evaluate whether their own courses can be modified to elevate the challenges that students are presented with. I therefore urge individuals to think about the list below in the context of their own courses as well as in the context of the curriculum of their primary unit. I encourage you to adopt desired changes in time for next fall. I hope that our students beginning Fall term 2005 will benefit from your efforts this year. I look forward to working with each of you on this topic.
Colorado Challenge: Ideas of Potential Merit
General Recommendations
- In order to create students who are uniformly prepared for advanced coursework in their major, efforts should be made to ensure that introductory courses taught in multiple sections are uniform across instructors and over time. Departments should formulate guidelines for common content and grading practices for multiple-sectioned courses. This is actually College policy from the 1990's from which some units have strayed from over time. .Uniformity of Multiple-section Courses memo, 1991, C.R. Middleton.
- Departments should evaluate all the courses taught in their name. Departments should exercise more responsibility for their courses taught elsewhere (Student Affairs, Housing, RAPs, Cont Ed and other venues) by defining content and grading guidelines, interviewing and approving instructors, and listing acceptable texts that adjunct faculty teaching these courses are obligated to follow. Departments should expect successful candidates for lecturer and instructor positions to have advanced degrees in the subject matter they teach.
- Survey your AAU peer departments introductory course syllabi to compare content and expectations. Re-evaluate course prerequisites and then emphasize them.
- Meet with undergraduate majors to seek their input on how the educational experience might be improved.
- Revise and strengthen Internship requirements.
Pedagogy
- Improve or implement mandatory departmental GPTI, lecturer, and instructor training and familiarization with department teaching standards and expectations.
- Add a few tips for successful student performance to each syllabus.
- Judicious use of undergraduate teaching assistants (with proper supervision) in select courses in order to improve student engagement.
- Incorporate contemplative practices into the beginning and end of class sessions to elevate the classroom intellectual environment.
- Explore the use of clicker technologies or other techniques to engage more actively students in the lecture hall learning process.
- Call or email the struggling students early in the fall semester to encourage them to seek assistance.
Course Content & Assignments
- Issue a substantive exam early in each term (especially Fall), perhaps as early as week two, in freshman courses in order to give students a clear appreciation for your course expectations.
- Encourage colleagues to enforce "2 hr homework per hour classtime" guideline.
- Encourage students to develop a "Learning Portfolio" to encourage focus on learning rather than grading, and use the portfolio as an entry ticket for thesis and honors programs.
- Evaluate course content to reduce repetition/redundancy of courses generally taken in sequence.
- Consult with PWR's Writing Center Staff to explore meaningful writing assignments adaptable to larger courses.
- Recruit a few senior auditors into your classes. Their presence often elevates the level of discourse and student behavior/participation.
- Incorporate group project, independent study, or service learning components into select lecture courses.
- Offer fewer midterm exams in order to be able to offer more rigorous exams that often take longer to evaluate.
- Require a meaningful final exam. Departments and individual faculty should rigorously adhere to campus policy that requires instructional or assessment use of the entire final exam period.
- Natural Science Departments have developed a mathematics skills pre-test for incoming freshmen, which will advise them to take QRMS courses before science courses if the students math skills are low. Departments plan to couple this with re-emphasizing the use of QRMS skills in both major and non-major introductory courses. Some social science courses would also benefit from this pre-test.
Recommendations Related to Grading
- Develop department-wide grading guidelines for frosh and sophomore courses.
- Princeton has recently defined guideline of assigning 35% in UG courses, 55% in independent study courses. Some departments are discussing doing the same.
- Insist that adjuncts teaching your courses elsewhere adhere to your unit's grading guidelines.
Recommendations Related to FCQ Utilization
- Rather than using the instructor rating alone for annual merit evaluations, compute an Instructional Quality score from FCQ subscores judged to be of value by the department.
- Create supplemental FCQ questions that your department will employ instead of standard questions for annual merit evaluation.
- Consider FCQ workload ratings as a component in annual merit evaluations.
- Consider computing an instructional quality index that reflects FCQ Instructor rating indexed to the mean GPA assigned to the class.
I thank the following individuals, departments, and programs for contributing ideas to this memo.
- Department of Sociology
- Department of Communication
- Department of Geological Sciences
- Deborah Haynes, AAH
- Department of Physics
- Steve Mojzsis, GEOL
- Charles Scoggins, RNM Editorial
- Richard McCray, APS
- Program in Writing and Rhetoric
- Jill Heyt-Stevenson, ENGL, CLHM
- Peter Knox, CLAS
- Michael Shull, APS
- Lewis Harvey, PSYC
- Elizabeth Guertin, AAC
- Fran Bagenal, APS
- The Associate Deans
