Faculty Excellence and Student Success

October 10, 2023

Welcome to the Faculty Excellence and Student Success at Walden website!

As you’ll see, there is a lot here. So, I’d like to start with the bottom-line up front just in case you don’t make it through this entire message or manage to click on everything in our new site. Faculty are our greatest influencers of student success. No matter how many “student communications” teams we create, faculty communicate with students at far higher rates. Faculty spend more in-depth time with students and have more opportunities to guide them in ways that happen naturally in the classroom. At Walden, we have many, many faculty influencing the lives of our students every minute of every day, to great effect. The point of this site is to align our understanding of what makes those faculty successful, share effective practices, and celebrate our distinguished faculty based on a clear and shared understanding of our measures of success! We’ll also use this space as a way of collecting our shared outcomes, vision documents, recognition, and our progress on advancing tools and policies to support our faculty.

That is already a lot! I am also hopeful, though, that this site will serve to pull together what may have seemed to be disparate efforts to achieve this alignment – initiate the kinds of dialogues that have allowed for meaningful transformations of educational experiences throughout time.

Over the past few years, we have considered important, weighty topics within the academic community – and it seems the time has come to cohesively put those findings to action and to the test! To that end, I would point to some key inputs:

• At the behest of the former CAO, I was part of a team who authored a white paper on the Walden learning model in 2018. Dr. Will Schulz went on tour to get feedback on that paper and soon with faculty and leadership we refined the model based on that feedback.
  “Walden 2018-2019 Learning Model Review and Update Analysis: Graphical Summary with Annotations"

• In 2020, we were on the cusp of publishing work launched from the Office of Teaching and Learning Excellence to review our faculty KPIs, when our attention shifted to responding to the COVID pandemic. This work was finally published in 2022 as “Quality Assurance, Meet Quality Appreciation: Using Appreciative Inquiry to Define Faculty Quality Standards.”
• In 2022, we brought these documents together with the UCAP adoption of “Walden's Inclusive Teaching and Learning Model- Including Related Effective Practices”
• Following the UCAP approval, the question of how we would bring the learning model to life through our faculty was rightly raised. A model cannot be effective if there is little guidance on interpreting the model and measuring performance against the model. To help fill that gap, I asked that we define teaching excellence at Walden, starting with a thorough examination of the practices of our great faculty – and teams have been hard at work:
  • A cross-functional team of faculty, staff, and administrators across the university has presented findings and recommendations on capstone mentoring expectations, motivations and meaningful incentives. We have used these findings to help create portions of this site and will continue to advance their recommendations around tools and supports that will help faculty, including AI-powered resources.
  • A team of undergraduate faculty has made recommendations on effective policy and practices for our undergraduate student and faculty experience. We are working our way through the governance system with those recommendations and will share them here soon.
  • Our data teams have been hard at work parsing through the research and Walden data to examine the practices that most closely correlate to student success and developing tools which will allow every faculty member the opportunity to see how they are doing in performing to these key metrics. We’ll be sharing the findings, support tools, and professional development opportunities around those metrics through this site and continue to update those resources as the data evolves.

While we continue those efforts, there is no need to wait in celebrating our excellent faculty! So, we’ll start there and continue to advance our work to lift the voices of our faculty; support our faculty with meaningful tools, recognition, and incentives; and meaningfully demonstrate how much we value their contributions by celebrating their successes.

And finally, to our academic administrators and academic success teams, know that we are working to ensure that your efforts are recognized as well. As we continue to advance this work, we will highlight the many ways in which you support not just our students but also our faculty. I had hoped we would be ready for that as we launched and we didn’t quite get there. We will, though. So next time – we'll take a good opportunity to celebrate the many teams and people engaged in providing additional supports to help our students achieve their goals!

Most sincerely,