Monday, February 22, 2010

Standardized Faculty Professional Development = Monetary Savings?

I invited myself to an interesting 21st Century Maricopa Faculty Professional Development meeting on Friday morning last week. The meeting's focus was on the recommendations of the consulting firm that studied our community college district's business practices. In general their feedback was this: we need to streamline and standardize faculty professional development across the district. In doing so, we should be able to trim 207,000 dollars off our expenditures. This statement was extremely confusing to me for several reasons and I will list them below:

1. The consulting firm did not speak with any faculty professional developers from the meeting that I attended -- nor did they speak with any of the developers I know that weren't at the meeting. (do you see a major problem with that??)
2. In connection with the first concern, myself and several other colleagues (also faculty professional developers) pride ourselves in collaborating and sharing resources when delivering professional development events.
3. There is an assumption that standardizing and streamlining will save money without understanding some of the real barriers in place that make this impossible for our colleges.
4. Professional development (especially faculty professional development) is a unique area that cannot follow a cookie-cutter approach.

I will go into further detail on these concerns. My first concern is a "no-brainer". As an instructional designer, I understand the consulting model. You first need to interview ALL stakeholders in order to get a good picture of the problem and formulate an extensive needs assessment. Had they done that, they would have realized that a good majority of the Faculty Developers ARE collaborating in order to streamline FPD opportunities. Red flags raise when I hear people say "standardize," so I'm avoiding saying that we are trying to standardize any FPD opportunities. Each college and faculty member has unique needs. Standardizing an approach to FPD wouldn't be effective in meeting the needs. I also don't believe this would save us any money. Most of our FPD events are run on a shoestring budget. We have salaried employees that run events and we don't usually provide much of anything worth a monetary value. I'm confused how this consulting firm made the connection between monetary savings and streamlining and standardizing. Especially because we are already collaborating to share resources --speaker expenses and district-wide events. Is anyone else confused about what they mean in regard to streamlining and standardizing???

As for doing more streamlining and standardizing than we already do....it's important to understand that we can't completely wipe our slates clean of the various college cultures as well as the fact that our district spans about a 50 mile radius. There truly is no way to create vanilla events that will completely wipe out the need for "college-specific" professional development needs. I would argue that we've standardized our events as much as we can. With budget cuts, we have stretched our faculty and employees thin. We must provide learning opportunities in close proximity of their offices as well as specific to their particular job and college needs -- otherwise, we become irrelevant and unnecessary.

I'm probably taking this recommendation a bit too personally, perhaps it's not meant for me and what I do (???). I take my job very seriously and the colleagues that I work with do too. We have a 24/7 work ethic, we are constantly trying to meet the needs of faculty. We are extremely creative because we know it takes this creativity to come up with new ways to meet the ever-changing needs of classroom faculty. Our brains respond to innovation and creativity - if we trade that in for standardization, where will we be? My former k-12 mind shudders thinking about standardized tests -- what exactly do those tests measure? What is their value? I don't want any of my learning opportunities to be dismissed like many of these standardized tests. Let's not make incorrect assumptions. I do NOT believe that standardizing and streamlining faculty professional development opportunities will create monetary savings. I hope that we can find ways to save this money, but I'm not sure it's going to be in the way the consulting firm suggested. What do you think?

10 comments:

Unknown said...

Laura...

You bring up some excellent points and I can see why the recommendations hit a nerve.

Who was the audience (other than you) to receive these recommendations and do you know how seriously the recommendations were considered or are being considered?

Seems to me that recommendations are one thing (however ill-founded they may be) but actual implementation would have to involve the stakeholders delivering the professional development?

Am I naive to hope that implementation decisions would not be made without input and buy-in from all the folks in your position?

Melanie said...

I'm still puzzled in how the monetary savings was calculated and where the savings could come from? If we are strictly talking about Faculty Development, I don't think there is a lot of salary savings or event savings there and like you mention, any event that costs $$ typically comes through the district as a district-wide event so there aren't a lot of local events that have any cost associated with them. I'd love more details about this recommendation. I agree that the faculty developers are collaborating already. I'm not seeing big areas in which they can increase their collaboration...more collaboration and sharing of resources is always great but I don't see any savings.

Be Fit With Biray said...

What kinds of things were they referring to that they would consider standardizing and/or streamlining?

Jen, sous chef said...

Laura,
I love that you invited yourself, I wish I had known, I would have invited myself as well! That being said, I am surprised, like you, in the lack of information apparently given. $207K is a very specific amount of money...how can that be presented and not followed up with specifics? If they said something like "around $200K" then I can see being ambiguous, but $207 is quite specific so they got it from somewhere?

I do think there are a lot of ways we can be more efficient though. I agree with you, we strive to collaborate, and do, I think, an outstanding job doing so but the truth is, there is no process for us to collaborate - we do it on our own with some colleges not all, be truthful, you haven't taken your workshops to all the campuses - just those that are collaborating back - yes? I think there is some room for us to be a bit more "streamlined" in our collaboration, yes, save some money, and still honor our campus needs and culture. That cannot happen though, without talking to those of us doing! So the big question is, where is my invite to the conversation? ;o)

JAM said...

Laura - what do the consultants mean by 'faculty developers?' From experience I can tell you that what we do as instructional designers and instructional technologists is not seen as 'faculty development' by all campuses...meaning not all 'faculty developers' are created equal. I am interested in knowing the types of activities and people involved in the recommendation.

We do the best we can to collaborate, but what about those campuses that don't have an ID or IT person? There are probably others at those campuses recreating work. It would be great to revamp the "Technology Leaders Breakfast" group - but even that would cover only a small portion of faculty development (the instructional technology side).

Laura Ballard said...

Love the commentary this post created! I don't know the specifics about any of this since I invited myself to the meeting and haven't followed up with reading the specifics on the recommendation. This is all I could find in regard to the recommendation: http://www.maricopa.edu/employees/21stcentury/Alvarez_and_Marsal_Final_Report_12.09.09.pdf look at pages 88-92.

Shelley Rodrigo said...

I have to agree with the "show me where the money is supposed to be cut" line that is running through most of this. I'd even like to see what budgets they consider "faculty development."

And...did anything come up about staff development as well? Don't a lot of us double-dip there?

Shelley (who has now invited herself to attend the rest of the meetings...not that I need more meetings to attend).

Anonymous said...

Good post and this enter helped me alot in my college assignement. Thanks you on your information.

Anonymous said...

Sorry for my bad english. Thank you so much for your good post. Your post helped me in my college assignment, If you can provide me more details please email me.

Village Talkies said...

This post is really amazing
Village Talkies a top-quality professional corporate video production company in Bangalore and also best explainer video company in Bangalore & animation video makers in Bangalore, Chennai, India & Maryland, Baltimore, USA provides Corporate & Brand films, Promotional, Marketing videos & Training videos, Product demo videos, Employee videos, Product video explainers, eLearning videos, 2d Animation, 3d Animation, Motion Graphics, Whiteboard Explainer videos Client Testimonial Videos, Video Presentation and more for all start-ups, industries, and corporate companies. From scripting to corporate video production services, explainer & 3d, 2d animation video production , our solutions are customized to your budget, timeline, and to meet the company goals and objectives.
As a best video production company in Bangalore, we produce quality and creative videos to our clients.