Editor's Notes: Key Success Factors in Strengthening and Supporting Institutionwide Goals for Learning: Key Success Factor #2, Professional Development

A t the time of this writing (April 2020), many college and university leaders, faculty, staff, community partners, students, and others have been adversely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic throughout the United States and around the globe. Alongside our colleagues, we have worked tirelessly and quickly to address and meet the needs of stakeholders, including transitioning learning environments for online or remote access. Moreover, we have endeavored to assure, to the extent possible, quality instruction continues in light of rapidly changing, stressful, and challenging circumstances. In some cases, we have had to rethink our approaches to teaching and learning, including how we provide meaningful, authentic, and flexible ways for students to demonstrate competence and proficiency in achieving learning outcomes—all while continuing to provide holistic support for students. Thus, Assessment Update will devote its November/ December 2020 issue to a special edition focusing on “Adapting Assessment Methods to Rapidly Changing Circumstances.” To learn more about ways to contribute to this issue, please visit assessmentinstitute. iupui.edu/au/special-edition. In Assessment Update, Volume 32, Issue 1, I provided an overview of key success factors in strengthening and supporting institutionwide goals for learning: 1. Communication 2. Professional Development 3. Implementation 4. Assessment and Improvement 5. Documentation Key success factor #1 was addressed in Volume 32, Issue 2. In this Editor’s Notes, we examine key success factor #2: professional development. Institutionwide goals for learning describe what students should know and be able to do as graduates of any program across the college or university. As a result, significant professional development is needed to provide various stakeholders with the competence, confidence, and capabilities to introduce, reinforce, and assess institutionwide goals for learning in various contexts. The NILOA Perspectives column on page 8 further illuminates this point. Professional development for institutionwide learning goals may be vested in such venues as centers for teaching and learning, may be assigned to campuswide committees charged with curriculum and assessment matters, or may be organized by leaders helming certain campuslevel offices. Perhaps less ideally, given its isolated nature, it may be distributed through individual units or programs whose members assume responsibility for addressing their own needs. Regardless of where or how professional development is organized in a given context, a welldesigned approach requires the following components.

t the time of this writing (April 2020), many college and university leaders, faculty, staff, community partners, students, and others have been adversely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic throughout the United States and around the globe. Alongside our colleagues, we have worked tirelessly and quickly to address and meet the needs of stakeholders, including transitioning learning environments for online or remote access. Moreover, we have endeavored to assure, to the extent possible, quality instruction continues in light of rapidly changing, stressful, and challenging circumstances. In some cases, we have had to rethink our approaches to teaching and learning, including how we provide meaningful, authentic, and flexible ways for students to demonstrate competence and proficiency in achieving learning outcomes-all while continuing to provide holistic support for students. Thus, Assessment Update will devote its November/ December 2020 issue to a special edition focusing on "Adapting Assessment Methods to Rapidly Changing Circumstances." To learn more about ways to contribute to this issue, please visit assessmentinstitute. iupui.edu/au/special-edition.
In Assessment Update, Volume 32, Issue 1, I provided an overview of key success factors in strengthening and supporting institutionwide goals for learning: 1. Communication 2. Professional Development 3. Implementation 4. Assessment and Improvement

Documentation
Key success factor #1 was addressed in Volume 32, Issue 2. In this Editor's Notes, we examine key success factor #2: professional development. Institutionwide goals for learning describe what students should know and be able to do as graduates of any program across the college or university. As a result, significant professional development is needed to provide various stakeholders with the competence, confidence, and capabilities to introduce, reinforce, and assess institutionwide goals for learning in various contexts. The NILOA Perspectives column on page 8 further illuminates this point.
Professional development for institutionwide learning goals may be vested in such venues as centers for teaching and learning, may be assigned to campuswide committees charged with curriculum and assessment matters, or may be organized by leaders helming certain campuslevel offices. Perhaps less ideally, given its isolated nature, it may be distributed through individual units or programs whose members assume responsibility for addressing their own needs. Regardless of where or how professional development is organized in a given context, a welldesigned approach requires the following components.

Identify Participants for Professional Development
The pervasive nature of institutionwide goals for learning relies on numerous individuals involved in educating students through curricular and co-curricular programs and experiences at multiple touchpoints. Faculty members are a principal audience for professional development related to institutionwide learning goals. These include colleagues teaching in first-year experience and general education courses, who have the responsibility to introduce these broad learning goals to students through assignments that meet the course learning objectives and foster a connection to the campus as a whole. Similarly, faculty teaching capstone experiences have the responsibility of pulling together learning from the major and reinforcing what it means to be a well-rounded college graduate, including attention to institutionwide learning goals. Faculty teaching discipline-specific courses provide opportunities for students to demonstrate and scaffold the learning goals through disciplinary ways of knowing.
Others for whom professional development is needed include staff members, teaching assistants, and instructional partners. Staff members often include colleagues from the student affairs portfolio, as thoughtfully designed and implemented co-curricular learning experiences help to advance institutionwide learning goals. Colleagues involved in crafting learning experiences in experiential settings, such as in the community or in international contexts, represent additional staff audiences for professional development. Teaching assistants, often composed of graduate students or advanced undergraduates, need training (continued on page 13)

Assessing the Efficacy of an Institutional Effectiveness Unit
(continued from page 7) compliance reporting). • Review office budget and request more funding, as needed. • Create a formal priority system for tasks (e.g., critical, important, can wait). • Standardize processes and establish controls (i.e., create an office procedures manual). • Improve transparency and communication with constituents (e.g., office newsletter; "fast facts" about the office; updated webpage). Institutional effectiveness units should become more adept at assessing their own progress toward goals and set themselves as the example to follow. A growing scrutiny over the effectiveness of higher education institutions makes it more important than ever to monitor how well the institutional effectiveness role is being carried out at institutions. Goals and expectations for institutional effectiveness units should be set and appropriate tools identified that can be used to measure progress and, in turn, uncover the need for any changes. ■

Marlene Clapp is the director of institutional effectiveness at Massachusetts Maritime Academy in Buzzards Bay.
in how institutionwide learning goals are evidenced in the specific courses in which they provide support. Finally, instructional partners, including clinicians, preceptors, and internship supervisors, among others, need to be made aware of how their roles support broader learning goals that institutions have for students.

Prioritize Professional Development Needs and Topics
Several sources can help designers of professional development determine where to focus their efforts to meet particular participant needs. Campus strategic and academic plans provide an overarching framework in which several intersecting and mutually dependent initiatives are articulated, with the aim of advancing the campus commitment to student learning and success. Institutionwide learning goals should be represented in these plans and can signal how such goals are integrated with and supportive of other actions the institution is taking to meet its educational mission. Direction and input from individuals leading initiatives around institutionwide goals for learning also represent a source for professional development needs. These often include leaders of learning experiences that serve all students, including courses in the firstyear experience or general education, as noted earlier. Formal feedback or requests from individuals in units, programs, courses, or other learning settings can identify unique professional development needs. Finally, information in annual assessment reports may discuss institutionwide learning goals and the evidence used in determining how well such goals are being achieved by students. A periodic review of these reports with an eye toward identifying future professional development opportunities is recommended.
There are plentiful topics to address through professional development in support of institutionwide learning goals. Some of these include: • raising awareness of the purposes and aims of such goals for various stakeholders; • aligning program-level learning outcomes to broader learning goals; • scaffolding program curricula to introduce and reinforce institutionwide learning goals at multiple touchpoints of the student learning experience; • designing assignments and other

Forthcoming Special Issue of Assessment Update
The September/October 2020 issue of Assessment Update (Volume 32, Number 5) will feature a special emphasis on "Assessment in Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs)." Four articles will profile work underway on these campuses. This issue will also include a NILOA Perspectives Column and an Improvement Matters Column. Should you have ideas for future themes or topics to be featured in Assessment Update, please email the Executive Editor at aupdate@iupui.edu. learning experiences to support these learning goals; • fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion, including promoting student agency, in this work; • developing or adapting rubrics to assess student achievement of learning (such as the VALUE rubrics from the Association of American Colleges & Universities; access them at aacu.org/ value); and • making instructional improvements as a result of assessment findings.

Provide and Evaluate Professional Development Offerings
To address specific topics and needs of participants, there are various approaches for providing professional development offerings. Workshops are a common way to reach wide audiences interested in a similar topic related to institutionwide learning goals. Workshops are often helpful during times when such learning goals are initially introduced or revised, as they can provide a way of conveying important information in a reasonably consistent manner. They can also address specific topics of interest to stakeholders. Consultations with individual faculty and staff members, or to groups, including programs and campus-or unit-level curriculum and assessment committees, offer the ability to tailor professional development to the needs of a particular constituency or context. Communities of Practice offer participants the ability to connect with colleagues, often through prolonged engagement in a peer-learning format, in order to provide mutual support, share resources, and provide professional development on an ongoing basis.
Other professional development interventions include electronic resources, grants for pilot projects, and reflective practice. Electronic resources can permit individuals to access information to inform their own professional development on an as-needed or just-in-time basis. Such resources often include inventories of sample or exemplary assignments, rubrics that can be adapted for assessing student achievement of institutionwide learning goals, or job aids to address specific requirements (e.g., using the learning or assessment management system). Grants for pilot projects are a form of professional development that uses an infusion of resources to permit individuals or groups to propose how they will advance institutionwide learning goals in a given context. Such grants often carry with them a requirement to scale and sustain the positive outcomes of the work and to disseminate lessons learned from the project to stakeholders on campus and elsewhere. Reflective practice encourages individuals to think about their approaches to and experiences with implementing institutionwide learning goals in their course, program, or learning experience.
This can help improve one's own learning and help sustain ongoing understanding of, investment in, and commitment to institutionwide learning goals. It may also have the potential to inform conversations with colleagues, curriculum planning, annual performance evaluations, teaching philosophies, and course portfolios.
Finally, attention is needed to evaluate the results of professional development programs. This requires feedback from participants as to how satisfied they were with the interventions, along with how well these colleagues were able to transfer their learning into the contexts in which they will advance institutionwide goals for learning. Planners of professional development should determine how well each offering achieved its intended purpose, using this information to inform future endeavors. Ultimately, professional development should be evaluated based on how well it enhanced participant capabilities in contributing to student achievement of institutionwide learning goals. A broader outcome is continued integration of these learning goals through effective implementation in various campus settings, structures, and processes.
In the next issue of Assessment Update (Volume 32, Issue 4), we continue discussing key success factors in strengthening and supporting institutionwide goals for learning with key success factor #3, implementation. ■

Dialogue and Community-Building
These activities promote dialogue and community-building during assessments: • Assessments begin with a half day of norming and discussion. • Three-hour scoring sessions (with available snacks and beverages) are punctuated with opportunities for faculty pairs to discuss differing assessments of individual student artifacts (when present) followed by whole-group discussions to share observations, experiences, and insights. • Each day ends with a written reflection in which assessment scholars respond to a set of open-ended prompts based on Brookfield's critical incident questionnaire (Brookfield 1995). • Each day begins by discussing the prior day's reflections and, if needed, more norming. • Assessments end with a final reflection that provides faculty the opportunity to comment on the assessment process, the rubrics, and their own learning. Like others who use assessment in this way (e.g., Martin and Sisson 2018), we saw this assessment work lead to valuable discussions of assessment, the core competencies, and professional development opportunities for the entire faculty around assignment design, teaching analysis, and teaching each of the core competencies across disciplines.

Engaging Faculty in Assessment of Institutional Learning Outcomes
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