Focused Discussions (Asynchronous Session)
Investigating Teacher Leadership Capacity in Catholic National Blue Ribbon Schools: Strategies to Foster Teacher Leadership Capacity View Digital Media
Focused Discussion Annette Jones
The United States Department of Education recognizes outstanding non-public and public schools annually with the federal government's highest accolade, the National Blue Ribbon Award. For this national research study, over 100 Catholic schools awarded from 2015-2018 were vetted, then invited to participate in the research study on investigating teacher leadership capacity in their award-winning schools. This study, a quantitative survey for administrators and teachers with two open-ended questions for administrators, examined leadership qualities as well as the provided and valued professional development for building teacher leadership capacity in their schools. This research study generated 43 significant findings across the independent variables of gender, role in the school (administrator or teacher), setting (suburban, urban, or rural), student population in the school, seniority (in current school), total years of experience, and year of the National Blue Ribbon Award.
Distance Learning and the Family View Digital Media
Focused Discussion Glenn Dakin
Planning practical learning process is essential for successful distance learning. Online learners may be motivated by convenience to participate as well as the current pandemic. Comprehensive reading, scholarly writing, active listening, and time management are learning skills. This study considers guiding a distance learner to implement a learning family plan to promote awareness of learning skills, brain-based learning, boundaries, stress reduction, and effective time management.
Quality Matters and Student Success View Digital Media
Focused Discussion Stephanie Whitehead, Chera La Forge
Our campus has adopted Quality Matters (QM) as a way to ensure quality of online courses. Quality Matters assures quality of course design by requiring a course meet 42 specific review standards that measure specific design elements of a given course. Quality Matters certification is undoubtedly the “gold standard” and denotes a course has met standards indicating the highest quality in course design. Quality Matters is a research-based approach and multiple studies have demonstrated positive effects on student satisfaction with online courses. Less known, however, is the impact of Quality Matters certification on student success. This discussion focuses on the impact of QM Certification on student success in the online classroom. Examining data from four QM certified courses across the IU system, the presenters discuss how certification impacted student learning, ability to meet learning outcomes, satisfaction, and overall improvements to the student experience in online courses. We aim to share experiences to help others learn about the benefits of QM.
Developing a Student Success Plan View Digital Media
Focused Discussion Carrie Reisner, Tj Rivard, Stephanie Whitehead
Indiana University East is a small regional campus of Indiana University. Our enrollment is around 4,000 students. In 2018, IU East participated in a program that afforded us the opportunity to examine our efforts in the area of student success. The Higher Learning Commission’s Student Success Academy (SSA) was a three-year project which involved a systematic analysis of the current state of our campus’ student success initiatives and programming geared towards the improvement of retention and graduation rates. The SSA required the analysis of four inventories: 1) data; 2) student success initiatives; 3) infrastructure (policies, practices, and procedures); and 4) student and faculty engagement. Each area was analyzed in an effort to gain an understanding of existing efforts, areas of campus strengths and weaknesses, and planning for future strategies. Findings revealed that our campus was in a good position – we have ample programming in place to support our students, yet there were many functional and strategic gaps in the way we were implementing our efforts. This has allowed us to identify additional student needs and helped us better understand what is working and what is not. In this session, we present our approach to the SSA and our work in data analysis in planning. We share our experiences and success to help others as they work to identify their own needs and efforts in student success initiatives.
