Accreditation: Trainings for Board, Admin, and Faculty

In the last few days we've trained the Board of Trustees, administration, and faculty on the new CAIS/WASC protocol that we'll be beta-testing this year.  I conducted the training for the admin at a team meeting on Tuesday. We began by reviewing the timeline of work for the remainder of this year, and then looked at the draft of chapter chair assignments the Accreditation Leadership Team had made. We're distributing the work of writing the 15 chapters for the protocol by having the relevant administrator who holds responsibility for a topic chair the chapter committee, whenever possible, and we're excited at how this involves all of our admin team in leadership work in the process.

Chapter/Topic	Chair
1. Mission	Mitch
2. Ed Program	Zaq
3. Student Learning Experience	Sima
4. Faculty and Pedagogy	Gretchen
5. Climate and Community	Laura
6. Residential Life	NA
7. Preschool	Kathy
8. Admissions and Enrollment	Paula
9. Finance	Mohammad
10. Advancement	Araxi
11. HR	Mohammad
12. Facilities	Mohammad
13. Health, Safety and Wellness	Jeanne & Cindy
14. Governance	Dobee
15. Administration	Mitch
16. Self- assessment and Decision- making	Zaq

That afternoon, Dobee Snowber and I conducted the training for the Board of Trustees at the November meeting. We structure our discussion to contained six parts: the benefits of accreditation (the rigorous self-study, the professional development, the faculty recruitment, and the marketing), the school's history of accreditation, a broad timeline for our process, a comparison of the old protocol with the new protocol we are using, some specifics about our approach, and the ways in which the Board is involved in the process:

Board member of the Accreditation Leadership Team: Dobee Snowber

Chapter 1: Mission - Executive Committee

Chapter 9: Finance - Finance Committee

Chapter 10: Advancement - Development Committee

Chapter 12: Facilities - Site Committee

Chapter 13: Governance - Executive and/or Trustee Committees

Chapter 16: Decision Making - Strategic Planning Committee

Sima Misra and I conducted the training for the teachers at an all-faculty meeting at the ECC yesterday. After reviewing the benefits of accreditation and the timeline of work, we split them into five groups and rotated each group through five stations with a few choice questions from each of the relevant program chapter. Teachers were given pens and asked to write their thoughts and comments in response to each question, and to the thoughts and comments of their peers who had rotated through that station before them. Each group ended up back at the station at which they had started, and had a chance to read what the other teachers had added to the chart paper. This highly generative activity lead to a strong sense of excitement about the ways in which the accreditation process will help us see and highlight our strengths, as well as identify meaningful areas of improvement in our program.

At the end of the meeting, we passed out forms for faculty to let us know their preferences for committee assignments. Our next step will be to gather this data, draft committee compositions, finalize those with chapter chairs, and then inform the faculty about their placements.