BASIC SKILLS SELF ASSESSMENT TASKFORCE
Location: President’s Conference Room
Date: Wednesday, July 11, 2007, 12:00-2:00
NOTES
Members Present: Kathleen Beaufait, Ted Segal, Jeremy Villar, Joyce Moore, Naeemah Payne, Mary
Skousen-Radford, Patricia Schmolze, Merrill Eastcott, Tammy Robinson, Kalynda Webber, Rebecca
Tillberg
I.
Where we are. Rebecca highlighted progress to date on the Basic Skills Self Assessment
tool. For Section 1 (Organizational and Administrative Practices), 4 of 7 effective practices
have been addressed; for Section 2 (Program Components), all 4 effective practices have
been addressed; for Section 3 (Staff Development), all 5 effective practices have bee
addressed, though the group may want to do more; for Section 4 (Instructional Practices), 1
of 10 effective practices has been discussed. Joyce said that the Staff Development
Committee may want to use the BSSA tool at their retreat in August.
II.
Where we’re going. The next steps in using the BSSA tool include finishing the selfevaluation and reflection sections for Instructional Practices and for Administrative
Practices. Then we need to go back over the 4 sections and develop planning matrices of
projects for each section. The planning matrices will include budget information. Although
the revised deadline for completing the planning matrices has been pushed back to May,
2008, we want to finish by September so that the matrices can be used in the college budget
process for allocation of basic skills funding for 2007-08. Once a draft of the planning
matrices are done in September, they will be reviewed with the departments and other
relevant groups.
The Math and English departments already have projects identified that are consistent with
the literature review and research grounding of the BSSA tool. Math had identified several
things that need to be done as a result of work on the Diversity Scorecard. English has
identified the need to upgrade the Writing Center.
There was discussion about inter-departmental coordination related to basic skills. For
example, the Pi Shoppe could refer students to Tutoring.
III.
Work on the BSSA tool. The group completed discussion of effective Practice 4.1: ‘Sound
principles of learning theory are applied in the design and delivery of courses in the
developmental program.’ We read some of the literature review to assist the discussion.
We started on effective practice 4.2.
We noted that if we do only 1 practice in each meeting, it will take a long time to complete
the review. In order to facilitate completion of the BSSA tool by September, the group
decided to use Moodle to record their ideas before the next meeting. Rebecca will send out
a reminder about this soon, and specify the effective practices to focus on for the next
meeting.
IV.
Next Meeting. The next meeting will be Wednesday, July 25, 12:00-2:00.