Sunday, March 2, 2014

League for Innovation - Day 1 - Afternoon Sessions

The afternoon sessions were not as good as the morning ones. I started out with Stackable Certificates: a win for students and colleges with a panel of people from around the country. They all talked about their stackable certificate programs. They didn't really give any detail about these programs, as they didn't want us to try to follow them exactly, as one size does not fit all. While I appreciate that sentiment, the lack of any specifics made the session essentially useless.

Next, I attended a session called It's alive! Creating a transparent, active guide to making decisions with two people from Orange Coast College.  Here, they introduced a really detailed college wide decision making process. I guess I was expecting something about individual decision making - I should have read the description more carefully. Anyway, it seemed a lot like the process we went through at Cascadia in reviewing the committee structure and insuring it was effective at doing what it was supposed to do. Again, not terribly useful to me, though an interesting session.

That was the last general session - we got an hour and a half off for a break before the evening session, again no food involved.  The highlight of the evening session was a presentation by Martha Kanter, former US Under Secretary of Education. While interesting, there were no big take aways from her talk. The thing that I remember at the moment was that she noted that 10 years ago, her college hosted a League conference. She looked back at the speech she gave then and quoted from it about the dire state of the economy, budget cuts, underinvestment in education, etc. It all applied perfectly to today. Her message was not to repeat the same mistakes as we had in the past, but I felt rather discouraged that there had been pretty much no progress in the situation of community colleges in the last 10 years.

The only to-dos that I took from the afternoon was to read A Crucible Moment: College Learning and Democracy's Future, recommended by Martha Kanter.

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