Mini Guide to Developing Practices
Background
- Specific: Describe meaningful details for action items about activities/services/operations/learning opportunities that you intend to do. Include enough detail for someone outside of your area to understand what is being done and why. Do not include pre-implementation tasks (i.e. schedule meetings, develop a plan, identify gaps).
- Measurable: Include targets that represent what you strive to achieve and assess.
- Attainable: Represent work that you have the resources and capacity to complete.
- Relevant: Identify practices that have strong, obvious connections to strategic pillar strategies. Include what is important to the goals. Do not everything your area does.
- Time-bound: Indicate when or how frequently the activity will occur.
- Indicate when or how frequently the activity will occur.
Examples
- Learning Outcomes Practice: Liberal arts students complete a demographics research project in capstone course 101, where they apply quantitative skills to analyze population trends in census data.
- Learning Outcomes Practice: Student participants in the March cultural awareness workshops create a photo collage that represents three different cultural influences on their lives.
- Activity and Learning Outcomes Practice: Coordinate 3 leadership workshops in January, February, and March where guest speakers introduce first-year students to time-management techniques and students apply their skills by creating a weekly calendar and reflecting on experiences in a journal.
- Service Practice: Manage daily requests for information by responding to helpdesk tickets within 5 business days in order to meet the data demands of college faculty and staff.
- Operations Practice: Host annual institutional effectiveness workshop for all unit leaders on how to prepare fiscal year budget requests, align expenses with strategic priorities, and correctly submit forms by April deadline.
- Operations Practice: Host one faculty and staff environmental professional development session a semester to enhance support for this year’s green initiative of recycling paper and plastic.
