This is being posted on behalf of Vice President of Academic Affairs, Michael Vargo

Hello, everyone!   

Happy second week of Inservice!  To follow up on our Academic Affairs meeting last week, I wanted to send out the “Big Picture Goals” for the year that we discussed during our session on Tuesday.  As mentioned, some of these are already well along in development, and, for others, this year will be focused on getting those conversations started.  So, very briefly and from the presentation on Tuesday, here are the topics I’m hoping we can advance in the coming academic year:

1. Getting to know each other
We’ll be scheduling monthly opportunities for an informal chat, beginning in October.  We will also look for other informal opportunities to get in the same room together, like the Academic Affairs Open House that we held last Wednesday morning.

2. Meeting and evaluating the instructional needs of our students as we emerge from the pandemic
In addition to keeping courses in the different modalities available to our students in the new year, I would like us to also look at the success of students across the modalities, so we can use this research to help inform future course offerings and schedule development.

3. Continuing the rollout of the Chemeketa Pathways
The Chemeketa Pathways implementation team will be sharing “next steps” of this important work with us soon.

4. Continuing the development and implementation of co-requisite models for developmental education in both Math and English
This is already well-underway in Math, and I’d like us to continue advancing this initiative in English, as well.

5. Beginning to develop a standardized approach for soliciting and collecting Student Classroom Feedback for students at Chemeketa
I’ve asked the executive deans and deans, in close partnership with faculty, to start exploring approaches that will allow us to accomplish this goal.

6. Finally, I would like us to begin an intentional reaffirmation of Participatory Governance
Building on a great deal of existing work by President Howard and academic leadership, the focus of these efforts will be clarifying and communicating how the perspectives of various constituencies are connected to decision-making at Chemeketa.

We discussed these in quite a bit more detail in our meeting, of course, but I’m hopeful this reminder is useful to you.  Also, I wanted to send along the Zoom link to our session in case any of you weren’t able to attend or wanted to review it for additional detail.

Thanks again for the time together and lively discussion during our meetings last week.  I’m looking forward to more of the same in the coming academic year!

Best to you.
Mike